How to improve iBurst performance?

[340fly]

I am not a computer boff, so please keep it simple. I have recently purchased Iburst, and can say that the speed of my internet has improver somewhat from the 56K (read 2K) telephone line I had. Problem is that sometimes it seems to be excessively slow, which is mostly during the day. The real problem I have though is that it seems to be very slow when sending my e-mails (if they are quite large files). It also seems to be slow to connect to recieve e-mails, however, once connected, it seems OK. I have disabled the antivirus scan for e-mail, which did have an effect, however I now don't know how safe my computer is. Will the add on external antenna make a difference.
To download 1 Meg it takes between 1 minute to 2.5 minutes. Perhaps this is not too bad and I am expecting too much.

 

[ic]

340fly, welcome to MyADSL .

Which iBurst modem do you have?
Is it the UTC for laptops, or the UTD which is primarily for desktop PCs?

Do you know what your iBurst modem's FER% [Frame Error Rate] is?
Assuming you are running Windoze, open up the iBurst icon in the System Tray - near the date & time...

What MTU do you have set?
There is info in the iBurst FAQ thread about MTU...

What anti-virus are you using, and do you have a firewall installed, and anti-malware software...?

 

[340fly]

I have the UTD for a desktop.
When I opened the Iburst icon, I presume that the FER% is where it referes to errors. That says 0.
Sorry to say that MTU lost me in total, however I will continue to read through the FAQ thread.
I am running Trend Micro PC-Cillin, and the firewall is enabled for both Iburst & Local Area Connection.

 

[ic]

As has been a topic of discussion in the main iBurst forum lately, WBS' iBurst is a thing that will require the acquisition of some geeky skills in order to get the customer side of the connection to work optimally, however there do remain some problems that depending on which base-station your iBurst modem talks to and how many other iBurst customers are using the same base-station at the same time, you are likely to experience intermittent problems over which you as a customer have no control whatsoever...

Steps to a reasonable iBurst experience:

• Ensure that you get the best signal quality possible for your location [measured by the lowest value for FER%];
• The highest signal strength % where you also get the lowest FER%;
• Set the MTU on your PC to 1432 or less;
• Ensure that your PC is protected/clean from/of malware;
• Has a firewall in place;
• Antivirus as well;
• Use a more secure browser like FireFox instead of IE;
• Use a more secure email application like ThunderBird instead of Outlook or Outlook Express which both rely on IE...

Any problems experienced after that with iBurst itself are fairly much in WBS' hands to control...

 

[340fly]

I appreciate the help, Thanks!

 

[slimothy]

I have the UTD for a desktop.
When I opened the Iburst icon, I presume that the FER% is where it referes to errors. That says 0.
Sorry to say that MTU lost me in total, however I will continue to read through the FAQ thread.
I am running Trend Micro PC-Cillin, and the firewall is enabled for both Iburst & Local Area Connection.

ok you will get alot of view points on MTU (max transmission unit) but listen when I say PRETEND LIKE YOU NEVER HEARD ABOUT IT, the mere fact you say your frame error rate is 0 means your packets arent fragmenting, so you have no use for setting this lower (as ic is telling you) infact you would benifit from setting it higher, but because you say you're not technically inclined and due to cluctuations with wireless I'd say leave it where it is.

You need to find your sweet spot obviously, 100% signal and 0% frame error rate would be ideal but just get to your areas peak, refer to the iBurst Terminal in the system tray and not the LEDs, once you have all that done you want to multithread.

Ok multithread incase you don't know means rather than having one connection to a server to download a file, your application creates multiple connections each getting a different piece which increases the speed somewhat, ideally you should use a download manager like download accelarator, flashget, getright, gozilla etc this will give you a huge speed performance even if you only have 80% signal but these are only for when you download medium to large files. Also you should use firefox for web browsing and tweak it to multithread and draw the window with no delay, again this offers a huge performance increase, you can find instructions here http://devnulled.com/archives/2004/12/how_to_make_firefox_faster.php

its easy I promise, you should be aiming for speeds of 120 - 128KB/s which will download a meg in 8 seconds or less or 100MB's in about 12 - 15 minutes.

Also performance is very location and time specific with iburst these days, so you should probably test your speed at night and tell us where you're connection from, if its a bad area you may need to get an external antenna.

 

[ic]

ok you will get alot of view points on MTU (max transmission unit) but listen when I say PRETEND LIKE YOU NEVER HEARD ABOUT IT, the mere fact you say your frame error rate is 0 means your packets arent fragmenting, so you have no use for setting this lower (as ic is telling you) infact you would benifit from setting it higher, but because you say you're not technically inclined and due to cluctuations with wireless I'd say leave it where it is.
...

340fly, WBS' answer to any problem that you might call their helpdesk with is set your MTU to 1352, however that is due to a lack of skilled/trained personnel or WBS' management not willing to listen to customers and smokescreen over the problems which only WBS can sort out on their end of the "connection".

That said, the default MTU value that e.g. Windoze 2000 uses is too high for iBurst, and will give you problems with some websites, as well as email - with one exception: if your UTD is connected to the Kempton Park base-station then you will never experience any MTU problems at all...

My advice is therefore still the same as my previous post in this thread .

 

[slimothy]

too high in his opinion and experience on a crap tower, and all help personal are given a MTU manual, I know because sihen gave me a copy.
anyways ic 1352 would be low enough considering your reasons for changing it is because the default is too high (which it isnt)

fact is unless you have packet fragmentation and in this case he doesnt with a 0% frame error rate, mtu WONT DO JACK

 

[ic]

too high in his opinion and experience on a crap tower, and all help personal are given a MTU manual, I know because sihen gave me a copy.
anyways ic 1352 would be low enough considering your reasons for changing it is because the default is too high (which it isnt)

fact is unless you have packet fragmentation and in this case he doesnt with a 0% frame error rate, mtu WONT DO JACK

Whatever Slimothy dude, I will leave it to 340fly to decide whether someone who has never experienced problems with iBurst is the most qualified person to be giving advice...

 

[wls]

stupid question how do you set your MTU? or see where it is for that matter?

 

[slimothy]

its stored in diff areas depending on the winodows version but you can just download drtcp and set it with that, dont forget to reboot after you change the settings

 

[jmn]

My Smoothwall detected an MTU of 1432 for ppp. Previously directly from Windoze before setting the MTU everything was fine except downloading large mails (couple of MB) or getting more than about 15 headers from an IMAP server. Even now with Smoothwall I have to set the MTU on the Windoze ethernet i/f to prevent probs. I found that 1424 is slightly more reliable than 1432 (maybe the 8 bytes pppoe info?).

 

[340fly]

Ok, so this is the what Telkom speed test has to say. I stay in Sharonlea, close to Northgate, and when I phoned Iburst yesterday to find out what tower I am presently squatting on, they could not tell me, as their "something technical" was down.
As I said earlier, I am getting a much faster connection than I was with my 56K slowdem. If I managed to get a good connection, what should I be looking at for this speed test?

Download time: 26.516 seconds
Size of file: 500 KiloBytes
Estimated line speed: 153.9 (kilobits/second)
Estimated line speed: 18.9 (kiloBytes/second)

 

[slimothy]

signal information would be good too, I am going to assume you have a good signal and low frame error rate, scroll up and read that multithread information, just try it trust me.

You see your speed test is about 20KB/s, thats 1/6th of what you should be getting and its also off peak now so you really arent fighting over bandwith at this time which makes me think you are one of the users that gets a limit of about 20 - 25KB/s per thread most of the time (I am one of those users too so I know).

I'm telling you try that firefox suggestion and restart firefox and run the test again, I guarantee you see better results, and then you need to go get a multithread download manager and use it. I'll even give you a money back guarantee if it does nothing for you (well the advise was free, meh).

 

[jmn]

scroll up and read that multithread information, just try it

I agree, it does make a difference

 

[340fly]

Right, did the above. There was an improvement, but not much. I then purchased the ext antenna, and I can't believe the difference. 1 Meg downloads in about 20 secs during peak, and sometimes 10 secs off peak. Thanks for all the help.