Need some PING advice please?

[Bundu]

A friend of mine lives in Pierre van Rijneveld in Pretoria and he has Telkom as his ISP with of course a Telkom line. The service there is atrocious! Telkom however keeps telling him "all is fine"....

Now the questions are:
Can he use "PING www.telkom.co.za" and the resulting "Request timed out" messages he get's to lodge a complaint with Telkom, or would that not be a valid argument?

Should he use a specific "PING" command with certain options to make his point?

What "PING" result would be acceptable/unacceptable?



any help from you IT wizards would be appreciated, as we are both utter noooooobs

 

[Pada]

I'd suggest that your friend starts with posting his ADSL statistics: sync rates (eg. 4096kbps down, 512kbps up), line attenuation (loss on line - mostly due to the distance to the DSLAM) and the SNR (signal to noise) margins

Once those values are in order - then you can start doing trace routes and pinging certain sites like www.aardvark.co.za / www.telkom.co.za.

The windows ping command-line utility is pretty stupid. I love to use of 'mtr', which is a very nice Linux trace route utility.

A ping below 100ms is what you're looking for - preferably under 50ms.

 

[Bundu]

thanks Pada!
neither of us know where to get the ADSL statistics.... :-(

Would that be available by going to the 10.0.0.2 in the router/modem?
Did a quick Google and found a "SASA: ADSL Stats Analyser" - will try to see if that gives us the info....


Edit: will also take a look at the info in your signature "SNR & Line attenuation info"

 

[Pada]

Hey Bundy,

I forgot to say that you can find the ADSL statistics on your router's web page by going to http://10.0.0.2 - like you've initially thought.

The link in my signature will only explain what the ADSL statistics mean, but they won't tell you where to get it.

SASA is for monitoring your ISP cap usage, and this won't provide you with the information I needed

 

[Bundu]

thanks so much Pada - I went through the info from your signature here http://mybroadband.co.za/vb/showthread.php/186156-Understanding-SNR-and-Attenuation-Rates

Will check the data in the modem and compare to the above link and all should be fine - jeeepers, looks like the problem should be quantifiable quite soon!