There was a bit of a problem with Tiscali's broadband a few weeks ago,
everything slowed down to poor dial up speeds, then it all sorted
itself out. Throughout the problem I would regularly reboot the router,
just in case.

This past week browsing has been terribly slow - ten minutes to load a
web page sometimes, but downloads, telnet, email, newsgroups etc. has
run at full speed. Click on a download, it would take ten minutes to
start - then download at full speed once started. It was so poor
browsing yesterday I decided to try remotely rebooting (via the routers
web page) my router (Netgear DG834G). The reboot instantly fixed
browsing problem and it came back on the same Tiscali IP.

The router is left powered up 24/7 and under normal conditions doesn't
get rebooted for months on end. Probably the longest period without
rebooting being over 12 months. So why should browsing be the only
problem and why should the reboot solve it with no change in IP?

I'm now thinking of plugging the router into a plug in time clock set
to turn it off once every 24 hours during the early hours, to force a
regular reboot.

--

Regards,
Harry (M1BYT) (L)
http://www.ukradioamateur.co.uk

"Harry Bloomfield" <harry.m1bytNOSPAM@tiscali.co.uk> wrote in message
news:mn.e26d7d7a6d4b6263.8412@tiscali.co.uk...
I see the same problem with a Zen account. Normally the router reports a
downstream SNR margin of 6.5 dB or above; but some evenings it drops to
about 4.0 dB. Usually that is not a problem, but on recent Saturday
evenings around 9pm I have seen the same performance drop that you describe.
It is immediately cured by rebooting the router (or even simply
disconnecting the phone cable and reconncting, which forces the ADSL to
re-negotiate), and the SNR margin returns to 6.5 dB or better.

--
Graham

Graham J formulated on Sunday :
Yes, but the problem only affected browsing - everything else still ran
full speed.

--

Regards,
Harry (M1BYT) (L)
http://www.ukradioamateur.co.uk

"Harry Bloomfield" <harry.m1bytNOSPAM@tiscali.co.uk> wrote in message
news:mn.e2a07d7a619fc236.8412@tiscali.co.uk...
then it isnt the router, since it should treat all packets more or less the
same.

maybe your ISP uses web caches and there is something affecting them?

or a DNS problem, so name lookup takes a long time?
Regards

stephen_hope@xyzworld.com - replace xyz with ntl

stephen brought next idea :
That is what I thought, which was why I was so puzzled by only the
browsing being affected.

Which a router reboot would not make any difference to?

I use two - one from my ISP and one from another (BT). I don't think it
was a DNS problem, it was finding the IP quick enough - just painfully
slow to load the actual page.

--

Regards,
Harry (M1BYT) (L)
http://www.ukradioamateur.co.uk