Thieving Gets!

[sarah_orange]

Bloody PCWorld! I really hate the way they charge a *fortune* for something you could get very cheaply on the internet. A couple of years back I went into the one by my office for a usb printer cable - I'd seen them online for £3 but was feeling a bit impatient so I thought I'd check the pc world price and if it wasn't much more than the £3 and postage I'd get it. The only ones they had were £20 and they were trying to pass this off as good value! I bought the online one which had the extra added bonus of a funky glittery cover and a blue L.E.D.

After rigourous scientific testing involving taking my entire pc down to the living room and testing every permutation of set up (Geof would be proud) I ascertained that the cable from our living room to the spare room (where the router generally lives) is actually what's acting up (the internet connection had problems too but the nice man from virgin sorted those) so today I've been pricing up 15m network cables. You can get them for £4.58 plus postage online but I'm impatient yada yada so I went to pc world to see what they had. the cheapest 15m they sell is £35 and they go up to £55. Admittedly it's cat6 not cat5e but hey they're a couple of quid more online and cat5e should be perfectly adequate for most people. It's just another example of the big shops taking advantage of people's lack of knowledge. I suppose that's business but it just seems very cynical and mean.

Someone in the office gave me a nice long lead to try - it might only be 10 not 15m so I still may have to order one online but hells bells it's better than being suckered by pcworld. twats.

Hopefully this will be the end of 1500ms latency and disconnections on WoW and general internet shonkiness :)

Comments

[stsquad.livejournal.com]

Are you sure you just not over-coiled your existing cable?

[sarah-orange.livejournal.com]

it was 'fitted' into the house long before we got there so nothing should have changed about it's rate of coil - the socket at the living room end is rather loose (and not wall mounted) so may be the suspect - I figure replacing it with one the network guy here gave me might show some improvement and if it does we can look into fixing it in place asap :)

[mandalorean.livejournal.com]

Talking about getting ripped off......will you be buying the Celestial Steed? :oP

[sarah-orange.livejournal.com]

good lord no - no sparkle pony for me. didn't know you played wow or is this just something you've heard about and are gobsmacked by? ;)

[mandalorean.livejournal.com]

Noooooo, I don't play WOW. I work in the industry remember, so it's done the news round.

Now only if they allowed user created assets, that pony model would be about 2-3 days work. I'd make a fortune.....

[wibblefish.livejournal.com]

bugger if I'd seen this a couple of hours back could have sorted you out, may still be able to if I see you at Whitby?

[wibblefish.livejournal.com]

damn, nothing that long in car. Normally have a full range of CAT6 in the boot. To some extent you do get what you pay for but for domestic purposes you'd probably not notice the difference.

[glassrat.livejournal.com]

Ive been ordering long 15m cables from amazon - 2 day turn around. (builders broke the two in my house grurr)
I can find the sellers details if you want?

[glassrat.livejournal.com]

and they cos about £5 inc postage

[nigelmouse.livejournal.com]

For random things like USB printer cables I've found the pound shop to be a worryingly reliable source of these things.

They'll probably be USB 1 instead of USB 2, but unless you have an uberfast printer it won't make much difference.

[breadlord.livejournal.com]

Pffft. Cables.

Digital cables can't not work - the quality of the cable only increases the length you can have without needing a repeater.

It defo sounds like you're dropping frames all over the shop, which is a known issue with linksys crap:

BAM! http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r19791859-Linksys-router-dropping-web-request-packets

Or, more likely is that you need to fiddle the MTU size. Behold!
http://community.virginmedia.com/t5/Broadband-down-your-phone-line/Latency-Problems-Customer-Services-Will-Not-Escalate/m-p/8510;jsessionid=4ADA98D3022A7EEB775BC8FD104A8B07

Shazzam!

[sarah-orange.livejournal.com]

hmm interesting I've written that down and will have a poke when I get in.

I used the new cable last night and got a slight improvement but not much. so long wire between modem and router = bad maybe. we're planning on having 2 routers (they're those nice white netgear ones) as we can't get wireless all over the house otherwise so I wonder if moving the main one downstairs next to the modem and wiring it with a short patch cable might help. dunno - am thinking that maybe the modem signal is not strong enough for the 15m cable? so then we could plug the other router in upstairs and just use it as a hub instead (we have hardwired network points to the rooms from the spare room)

what do you reckon oh wise Brad?

[sarah-orange.livejournal.com]

actually I'm wondering if the slight improvement was down to the fact the wire I used was 10m and hardly reached whereas the wired in one was much longer...? fits my observations but could be bollox

[sarah-orange.livejournal.com]

the more we talk about it in the office the more we think that's the problem. you're expected to feed the modem directly into a router next to it. the engineer should really have suggested that

[breadlord.livejournal.com]

Right... Just got around to reading this...

Cat5 cable is rated for use up to ~100m. If you're using lengths less than that and aren't getting "media disconnected" problems then it's not an issue.

I'm going to assume that the modem is connected to the router by ethernet cable. It should be fine, frankly. There shouldn't be any significant attenuation on 15m of cat5 and the signals propogate at near as dammmit the speed of light, so it ain't that. You've got fi-op broadband, so it won't be a phone line problem.

Hmmm. You need to work out if the latency issue is happening on all traffic inside your network, or only on outbound traffic.

You need to try measuring packet loss against your gateway's IP address (netgear routers are normally 192.168.0.1) and something else, like www.bbc.co.uk. You should get less than 10ms for the internal network. Any more and the problem's internal.

You shouldn't have any "hubs", you should only have switches. If there is anything behaving like a hub (hubs broadcast input to all all output, switches output to only delivery address) you'll be getting packet collisions which will be causing the problems.

Hardwired network points rings an alarm bell too, since you don't know what's behind them. They could be filling the wires with shite...

[sarah-orange.livejournal.com]

they're just cables with sockets on the end that go round the house which the previous occupants did.

thing is the previous set up was fine apart from the bt homehub going down all the time cos the line was shit (you could see it losing internet)

truely though test I did the other day went like this.

plug my pc into the modem directly so only I get internet. re-ip. test. spanky. marvellous service.

plug the router into the modem with a short wire and plug my pc into the router. spanky. marvellous service.

I tried a variety of connecting wires between myself and the router to make sure none of them were acting up.

I then took the router upstairs and plugged it back in to the wall socket using wires I'd tested and plugged the modem into the downstairs end of the wall socket (you can see the bright orange wire travelling up from one location to the other - it's basically a network lead with a socket on each end) and suddently it wasn't spanky. latency on wow was back to 1500ms.
admittedly I plugged the other 2 pcs back on to the router at the same time so they might have been doing something but then again in the past I've tested it with just me plugged in incase al or fuzzy's pcs were hogging stuff which made no difference.

last night I replaced the wire and got red latency on wow but it felt a lot better than with the other wire.

the only other thing I can think of to note is that either al or fuzzy's pc causes a damn lot of flashing on the router and internet line compared to mine that goes blink blink blink. this is why I took my pc downstairs to test it - to see if my pc itself had a problem. could one of the other pcs be broadcasting and causing a little storm? dunno - my networks knowledge is less good than it used to be. all I have to go on is the above observations.

[breadlord.livejournal.com]

Yeah - I'd try using that socket without Al or Fuzzy's machines on the network. One of them may be hogging all the bandwidth. Customer grade routers don't normally have any per-connection QOS stuff, so if someone's running Bittorrent stuff (for example) without capping their down / upload speeds it can nuke the network for everyone else.

If you're running a shared network then it's only fair to set your maxes to bandwidth / number of people. Half the time people will set their down speeds but not their ups, which are just as important.

If this turns out to be the problem tell everyone to reduce their torrent download speeds and threaten to just plain block the traffic if they don't.

[sarah-orange.livejournal.com]

will do the pinging when I get in btw :)

[thatmakesmemad.livejournal.com]

Cable ?
Oh the thing between the router and NAS drive :D
Maplins do 15m cable for £16 and they have a superstore in town !!
Though I'd just pick up a cheap router (mebbe this http://www.ebuyer.com/product/200552 ) and use it as a bridge.

[sarah-orange.livejournal.com]

we have 2 netgear ones - our old one and the one virgin just gave us so we should be ok for a router and switch set-up

[thatmakesmemad.livejournal.com]

Stop procnasticating. You need your World of Wombat fix without sluggishness