Odd speed issues: iBurst and WLAN

[Claymore]

Hi guys

I have a customer with some odd issues with her internet connectivity. I've tried a bunch of things to resolve it, with no luck.

She has iBurst, connected via PPPoE to a Gigabyte BR01 broadband router, which has WLAN. A desktop PC is connected to the router by cable, and she and her somes have MacBooks they use to connect with wireless.

The problem is that internet connectivity is really, really slow via wireless; it can take a couple of minutes to load the front page for a website, local or international. I tested it with my own laptop, and had similar issues. The desktop PC is a fair bit quicker, but my customer tells me that access there can be slow at times too.

I have reset and reconfigured the router multiple times. I've played with every conceivable combination of open access and WPA. I put in an access point with WLAN, one that worked perfectly elsewhere, and got the same slow results. This leads me to believe that the issue is not the wireless on the router.

Apparently the issue only started 3 or 4 months ago.

Any ideas?

 

[PsyWulf]

Ping router

Ping www.co.za

Ping www.google.co.za

 

[who.is.michael]

Assumption: (however an avenue that might be worthwhile to explore) Most iBurst users that have been using the service for a while complain about this, since as a tower becomes over utilised the connectivity to the tower without an external directional antenna becomes rather poor as access speeds plummet. I assume your client is in a CBD environment?

 

[Claymore]

Assumption: (however an avenue that might be worthwhile to explore) Most iBurst users that have been using the service for a while complain about this, since as a tower becomes over utilised the connectivity to the tower without an external directional antenna becomes rather poor as access speeds plummet. I assume your client is in a CBD environment?

She's near Sandton.

Ping router

Ping www.co.za

Ping www.google.co.za

Works fine, as I remember. Definitely no issues pinging router.

 

[who.is.michael]

...about 6 months ago a client of mine (cnr. Jan Smuts Ave & Summit Road, Hyde Park) was forced to install a directional antenna from Radiant.
Explore: http://www.radiant-antennas.com/commercial.php contact Graham, friendly, cost effective and efficient chap.

Confirm by reviewing signal strength and tower load first: tower load of 3 is oversubscribed.

http://mybroadband.co.za/vb/showthread.php?t=27078
http://mybroadband.co.za/vb/showthread.php?t=48889

Ensure that router has latest firmware updates as not all routers are 100 % compatible with iBurst.

Regards

Michael

 

[Claymore]

The weird thing is that the issues started only a few months ago. Prior to that, there weren't any issues.

Could there be an issue with MTU? Router MTU is set to 1352.

 

[tian]

The MTU has changed to 1392

 

[who.is.michael]

The weird thing is that the issues started only a few months ago. Prior to that, there weren't any issues.

Could there be an issue with MTU? Router MTU is set to 1352.

I’ve experienced a degradation is signal when the tower's antenna array has been reconfigured to provide a stronger signal to a specific region in the coverage area.

Contrary to the information supplied by iBurst, I would only suggest you change the default value of 1492 if you are experiencing browsing issues, i.e. some images on pages does not load or some pages does not load at all or your IM clients do not function as expected.

Unfortunately there is no consistency amongst the settings of the towers and most in the Western Cape function best with the default internet MTU value of 1492.

Best to ping the default gateway to confirm the highest value accepted by the relevant tower, i.e. ping 41.208.224.1 -l 1492, with 41.208.224.1 being the default gateway in this instance.

See “How to” on this link to obtain default gateway address and then use ping command to establish highest value of MTU accepted.

Before you do anything else, I strongly suggest you do a signal test and update the router and iBurst modem’s firmware. This process of elimination could save you quite a bit of frustration.

Sometimes, (happening not as frequently as before) the iBurst servers provide “dead IP’s” where the connection is really slow – I assume it is due to older incompatible or badly configured equipment (possibly the proxy settings) and this causes relaying issues to the backhaul ISP. Reboot the iBurst modem until the default gateway changes.

Also, confirm that the specific router is capable of being used with iBurst by Googling "*router* compatible iBurst” or “*router* issues iBurst”.

The only other possible issue could be interference on the 2.4 MHz frequency spectrum, try changing the default channel on the router from 6 to 1 or 13 (select Europe as region) and confirm that no other wireless devices are powered on, i.e. wireless telephones, neighbouring wireless access points, etc. Note that the configuration of the wireless devices of older notebooks might require you to change the region settings as well. (Use wired LAN connection to eliminate this issue, before going through this process.)

Regards


M