Snappier

I live in a village at the end of an ADSL line. When I first got broadband the line would go down every evening. Things gradually improved but my download speeds never got much higher than 100kb/s. Then last year our parish council announced that most of us would be the beneficiaries of a new government scheme (the phrase rolling out lurks somewhere in my cliche detector) to provide fast broadband, and it was to arrive before the end of March 2015. It did not. But the wireless on my ancient router stopped functioning in April so I bought another, slightly newer model. After that I noticed that download speeds had dropped to 40kb/s and that often when I sent emails Messenger Pro’s transmission-progress bar would not complete and thereafter it would get in a muddle. Eventually I complained to my ISP, Plusnet. They looked at my connection-logs and noticed that connection seemed to break off at five minute intervals. They advised me to check my router’s WAN settings. Sure enough, I had overlooked a factory default-setting that disconnected the router from the ADSL line after five minutes idle time. This meant, they explained, that my line never had time to get up to speed. Apparently the period in which the line-speed gets set can last up to ten days. So I have disabled the idle-timeout, and they have reset the line at their end. It may be my imagination but already communication seems snappier.

So thank you Plusnet. I tell this story in case anybody else has been suffering similar symptoms, or difficulties with Messenger Pro sending emails. Check your router’s settings.

I had something similar with Orange. The Livebox doesn’t time out and disconnect like your router – and this seems to me to be a strange behaviour given that ADSL is supposed to be “always on”. Anyway, Orange have line monitoring that adjusts the line speed to thee user’s conditions by detecting failures and such. Unfortunately if you tend to unplug your Livebox because of thunderstorms, the line monitoring often sees this as a fault. My 2mbit became one, then half… I complained to Orange and got a somewhat shirty reply “we will switch off our clever monitoring but if this makes it all go to hell, it is on your head”. So they did. And I’ve had a solid 2mbit ever since then (about 2 years).
The ADSL should not need time to get itself up to speed. It should start off fast and downgrade if necessary, as my experience is that broadband routers will adjust down but rarely adjust up without rebooting – even orange tells you to reboot if you are expecting the speed to increase.

Still, at least you have something sorted out. ;-)

Anyway, Orange have line monitoring that adjusts the line speed to thee user’s conditions by detecting failures and such.

Standard stuff, but something of a pain when BT have upgraded the local network and are pushing “BT Infinity”.
Essentially this means that as each new Tifnity customer is connected the BT line engineer gets a chance to riffle through the local cabinet wiring and bo-lux up the punch down of the cabling on all other connections. This of course causes disruptions and a re-learn sequence as does any noise from newly worsened connections. You need a quiet line¹ for good results
I’m sure there is something that could be done about this, but apparently sticking a cattle prod up the engineers jacksie isn’t considered to be a reasonable action.

¹ 17070 option 2. Hear crackle – you have a fault.

and doesn’t always improve line speed.

and doesn’t always improve line speed.

Ah, but the customer satisfaction rating might improve. :)

Ahh yes, Dynamic Line Management, great fun there (fortunately I’ve never had it at my place but I’ve heard horror stories).

A 5-minute idle timeout is about as bizarre as Bigpond in Australia, whose default router firmware has a 60-minute DHCP lease (which can’t be changed without assigning each PC its own static IP address). I have a friend over there and it took quite a bit of tinkering to figure out why he was disconnecting from Skype, Warcraft, etc every 60 minutes like clockwork!