Forum

I’ve realised that this is too long and probably nobody is gonna read it

OK, so I’m stuck. My internet has been seriously slow since like the 21st of Feb, and been trying so many different things since then. I have two a few theories; my ISP is capping me, my router is crap, someone in my house is downloading and not telling me, or someone from outside the house is using it. But I can’t decide which it is, so I’m hoping someone here might be able to help. So I’m gonna tell you everything I found out. Sorry for the wall of text :D

Since it started, the internet has been fine about 2 or 3 days of it. But the rest of the time it is awful. I mean on a normal day I get 28ms when I ping Google, but on these bad days it’s closer to 400ms.

We are using Sky Unlimited, and according to my router I’ve got “DownStream Connection Speed: 14330 kbps” and “UpStream Connection Speed: 838 kbps” I know that the upload is meant to be a lot lower than the download but I’m pretty sure not that low. I mean, I got this yesterday: http://www.speedtest.net/result/736117252.png , when I usually get 12 mb/s download and 1.5 mb/s upload (I’m not sure about the upload but I think it was that).

I have called Sky 3 times. I now know why people hate them. They didn’t listen to anything I tried to tell them. One time I thought I got somewhere, because the bloke put me through to “2nd tier support”, and that guy said “I’m going to reconfigure your line, call back if it still isn’t working” It worked for that night and the next, then went awful again. I called again, but some foreign woman answered and didn’t understand what I was asking. I asked them about their usage policy http://www.sky.com/portal/site/skycom/skyproducts/broadband/terms/usagepolicies (read about the SKY BROADBAND CONNECT TRAFFIC MANAGEMENT POLICY) and whether I was being affected, but they didn’t answer very clearly at all. (I also emailed them last night, and am still awaiting a reply D:)

I have a feeling that they are doing it, because when I called they had said 160GB had been downloaded on my network just in December, and I know for definite I only downloaded 50 AT THE MOST, probably a lot less than that. So hence why I think someone in my house is downloading and not telling me, or someone from outside the house is using it. But every device that is attached that I can see from my router or net view in cmd (even though that doesn’t show Macs or games consoles) or from an external program (ZNetWatch) I can account for being one of the ones in my house, so unless some guy is hiding himself, I don’t think it is that.

I’m 15 and the only serious user of the internet in my household, and so I can’t convince my parents to change the ISP either.

I have run virus checks on every computer, and have turned each one off in succession to see if it was that, but that didn’t make any difference. My brother was hardwired into the router on the 20th, but as soon as I was lagging, we removed it again but that didn’t make a difference either.

I also downloaded this network probe called ZNetWatch, which tells you Packets Sent, Packages sent per second, ARPs, and ICMPs of every computer connected to the network. If either the ARPs or ICMPs go over a 1000, it flags it as something wrong with it, like a virus. The problem is that my router did that every time within like an hour or two. I don’t think routers can get viruses, and if they do I haven’t a clue how to get rid of them. It was also sending more packets than any of any of the computers sending information through our network put together (We have 2 computers, 3 laptops, an Xbox and a Mac Book in our house, but only my computer, and either the Mac or the Xbox are actually doing anything. I’ve had every computer off in the house except my laptop but that doesn’t help either.) So could this mean that the router is broken? I don’t particularly want to get a new router, only because Sky won’t offer any support at all if you don’t use the one supplied by them.
The other weird thing is that on most nights, it seems to only happen between 6pm and 10pm, but on the rest it is all day.

Thanks to anyone who read all of this :D. I know its a lot but i always read forum posts where people post a problem but never give much detail and i didn’t want to do that. Any help or opinions at all are extremely helpful to me, because i haven’t been able to play many matches for a long time now and my team are angry D: