1Mb ADSL - finally!
I knew it was going to happen sometime, but if only I'd known before the event. Rather than, say, get back late (last-train-ish late) one evening last week (Thursday) and turn my desktop+firewall boxes on only to find they're not connecting. I wonder what's up - it never has any problems connecting on a clean boot. I mean never. Has my ISP got connection problems? BT ADSL problems? So I give their status-phoneline a call. Nothing reported.
I'd been doing stuff around the back of my TV what with my tube going and running a 'small' 21inch non-widescreen (you're supposed to feel pity if you hadn't realised :-) as temporary replacement; so I pondered if I'd disconnected it accidentally. But no, after stretching other cables round to plug it directly into my ADSL filter, it still wouldn't sync up. By this time it was way too late (er... yes..... mutters 4am under breath) so I went to bed and decided to worry about it later.
Going away at the weekend for the wedding meant I didn't really get to try it again til late Sunday, but I got back and it just booted up and worked. To be honest I'd wondered if they had been doing the upgrade, so was watching the system logs and was happy to see it connect at 1100kbps downstream (still only 288kbps upload bandwidth - pah!) and finally to have an explanation for the lack of connectivity (and so not being able to transfer any podcasts for listening to on the 5hr car journey on Friday afternoon/evening), but I do wish they'd let me know somehow before the event. What if I was doing something important requiring a connection, like working?
Tags: adsl
It would also have helped if I'd have remembered to update the traffic-shaping configuration on my firewall box (IPCop). I had told it my bandwidth so it knew how to split it up - mainly so things like Skype and anything bandwidth-critical can get the throughput it needs to work well and I can still browse the web (usually less critical) without losing quality on anything else. Once I'd told it I was connecting at 1100kpbs my transfers started running a lot quicker! :-)
ReplyDeleteIf you start seeing CRC AAL5 errors in your logs, don't forget to think whether you've limited your bandwidth anywhere in software setups!