New Tower Messing With My Speed?

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ppsking

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According to utTracestar I am connected to the Wonderboom tower in Pretoria. My connection speed is 100% from day one (even now), but where I started on speeds of 750 - 900kb/s, I am all of a sudden down to 200-300kb/s. My speed slowed down almost the same time as the new tower was erected. :mad:

utTracestar gave me a reading the other night (to the Wonderboom tower) about 75. I have to mention that I had to format my hard drive some time ago. Can it be that there are some settings I should lool at (there are so many of them). I believe my Dr TCP settings are correct (as per a previous discussion). But what about other settings on my pc?

I also sit with the problem that, even though my speed is 300kb/s, my outlook only downloads at 50-70kb/s (according to the dashboard....and the fact that I have to wait minutes for a 1Mb email to download.:mad:

All I have left to say is HELP!!!!!!!!!!!!!!:eek:
 
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Which new tower? And what is its signal strength in uTraceStar? Are you connecting to it at all, ie is there any BS hopping? What is the cost/load number for the tower(s) that you are connecting to?
 
Gatecrasher said:
Which new tower? And what is its signal strength in uTraceStar? Are you connecting to it at all, ie is there any BS hopping? What is the cost/load number for the tower(s) that you are connecting to?
Click to expand...

Slow down! Slow down! You are now talking to someone who need something called iBurst For Total Idiots! :D

I am not too familiar with all the abbreviations and terminology. Apparently there is a new tower in the CBD, but it does not come up on my utTracestar. How will I know if there is any BS hopping? :confused: And how will I find out the cost/load for the tower I am connecting to?

Sory for being such an idiot, but I guess I have to start learning somewhere. :o
 
The load is displayed in UTTacestar, rioght at the top in the middle sort of.

You can also check for basestatiuon hopping with UTTracestar, just see if it ever conencts to a tower other than your best signal one.

Basicaly, if the new tower has a good enough singal strength then Iburst might switch to that one in order to balance the load between the towers in teh area, pretty clever really, but can mean that some people get slower speeds.. not toally shure how that all works my self.
 
OKay, well it doesn't look like the new BS has anything to do with your problem. One thing to check is that you are not confusing kilobits/second (kbps) and kilobytes/second (KB/s).

But the most likely problem is congestion on your basestation. That's why the load number is important. A 0 or 1 and you can fly. 2 and you can notice a distinct slow down. 3 or more and speeds will be painful.

With major advertising and promotions on the go, coupled with the Sentech MyWirelesses near demise, there's no doubt that Iburst are attracting a large number of new clients right. So we are going to see increasing basestation contention and network congestion.

I think I'm going to change my sleep pattern. Go to bed at 7pm and wake up at 1am when the network has emptied out!
 
lol, but did you see all of the new baststation tody Gatecrasher.

An alot of them are improving coverage for areas where old towers need help I guess.
 
my tower hates me :/ i firmly believe it simply ignores me. serves everyone but me... yup i think my tower has conspired to make me angry or depressed or both...

i wish i had another tower to play with :/
 
I haven't been able to get utTraceStar to work since I renumbered my internal LAN to a 192.168 subnet (Smoothwall f/w - think this has more to do with Smoothwall than utTraceStar). However, ever since news started circulating of a new Cape Town CBD tower, my speeds have improved. I'm in Woodstock, so I assume my "home" tower is Holiday Inn, just up the road from me.

If I've got the facts right, the new tower is in the Gardens / CBD area. Since the new tower, my average download speeds went from 10-30KB/s back up to the 50-80KB/s I had when I first signed up, with fairly frequent bursts over 100KB/s. Perhaps what has happened is that the bulk of the load has moved from one stable tower to another which is still being fine-tuned? Pure speculation, of course.
 
RatX said:
I haven't been able to get utTraceStar to work since I renumbered my internal LAN to a 192.168 subnet (Smoothwall f/w - think this has more to do with Smoothwall than utTraceStar).
Click to expand...

I had a look at smoothwall recently it seems to be a less extensive version of ipcop, did you try this Ipcop Config for utTraceStar

Alternatively I recommend you get Ipcop, install operation and running is almost identical but I remember thinking ipcop is better but I have forgotten why.

:eek: Post number 911 I promise I am not a Terrorist :eek:
 
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I have had a similar problem and it is P**** me off.

My iBurst modem has a patch antenna pointing at the Auckland Park tower. The contention there is not great but I get a solid -65dB (9/10 and 10/10 :D ) on utTraceStar which I can't turn my nose at.

I noticed though that there was a new Braamfontein tower that was waaaaay closer. Pulled out my patch antenna connection and the modem was getting a decent -65dB on Braamfontein - with out the external antenna.... schweeet. But the connection is so k@k that most of the time my modem won't connect, frame error of up to 100% - and that on such great signal.

Not much BS hopping so the only thing I can think of is a completely ballsed tower.

I gave up and plugged the patch back in and now its working off Auckland Park again - which is stupid when i'm so close to Braamfontein.
 
I had SWE2 at first, then changed to IPCop. I cannot remember how I changed the IP of the red interface (eth1 ?) to 192.168.250.1, but it wasn't too difficult.
 
But the connection is so k@k that most of the time my modem won't connect, frame error of up to 100% - and that on such great signal.
Click to expand...

this happens in Roodekrans aswell. I am now running a directional antenna to make the modem not see the other two nearby. It works quite well, my disconnection rate has gone from every 30 mins to once every 3-4 days.

I am in the process of buying a directional antenna from GRES but right now, I am getting almost 1MBit/sec speed with the slightly modded iburst patch antenna.
 
JTech, is your firmware up to date? Mine isn't. (Too lazy to bring it down from the roof and connect via usb) I also solved my problem with a directional antenna. I'm just wondering whether up-to-date firmware would have solved the problem. But if you are on the latest firmware then not.

And, in that case, Iburst will need to look at their firmware to prevent BS hopping when two or more basestations are of similar strength. The technology is supposed to cope with this, but unnecessary BS hopping has very ugly side effects like increasing framerate errors, dropping the connection, and willynilly connecting to distant or ghost BS's with terrible signals.

Something in the firmware logic needs to be tweaked. I hope they are on the case.
 
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