Strange problem...or is it?

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kingstonza

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This is driving me nuts - if any of you have a suggestion as to what the problem might be I'd be grateful.
I'm in Wynberg, Cape Town. have a 4MB Telkom line, Netgear modem and have accounts at both Web Africa and Axxess. During the daytime I get reasonable speeds for everything. But come the evening on some nights and everything grinds to a halt and I can't do anything - surf, download, even email takes forever. This is the case whichever of the two accounts I am using, so it seems to indicate a Telkom problem. I phoned them one night when it was crawling and they tested it for me, saying that everything seemed fine on their side.
I thought it might be a neighbour hacking into my wireless in the evenings, and so disabled that - still no luck. Tried rebooting the modem, rebooting the PC, powering the modem off then starting it up again. Tried different PCs on the network, all experience the same thing. Everything I can think of.

Any ideas? It's not the case EVERY night (right now its a bit slow, but nowhere near as bad where it was last night (Saturday))

Slowly going mad down here........
 
I had the same problem. It irritated me so much I eventually downgraded to 1mb, then 512k... Now it seems to have disappeared. How useless is Telkom support?
 
I'm having the EXACT same problem, but in Durban. I know of three other ppl who are in the same boat.
 
only experience it on my IS imaginet semi-shaped account

my telkom account works perfect at any time of the day if weather stays alright
 
This is strange. Reminds me of a story I heard about a guy whose keyboard was only broken when he typed standing up. Turns out someone had swapped some of his keys around and he touch-typed while sitting down but point-and-pressed while standing :D.

Anecdotes aside: please let us know if you (anyone) find a solution. I'd really like to go back to 4meg!
 
On the plus side...having no internet in the evenings has made me discover this other really cool thing. In my lounge there's this big screen with live streaming video - I get a couple of dozen things called "channels" on it. It's amazing - no buffer speeds, no ADSL line, great picture quality. It's a bit like YouTube, only longer clips (I think they're called "programmes")
Anyone else have this? My wife assures me we've had it for years, but I don't believe her. I would have known.
 
there was a thread about this a while back. Turned out that the street lights coming on at night were degrading the ADSL signal. Let me see if I can find it...
 
maybe the dslam is oversubscribed and its peaking at night and cant cope with the traffic?
 
OK now this is freaking me out....spent some time this evening playing around, flicking light switches, going back to my PC, testing speeds. Nothing seemed to make much difference until I came across one outside light, on a dimmer switch, where the lightbulb has blown (and has been for a couple of days). Switch on = zero internet; switch off = speedtest.net reporting 4MB/s (the speedtest page wouldn't even load when the light switch was on...)

The switch is about 15m from my Telkom jack, the actual light about 6m further. But maybe the phone line runs close to the switch? Heck I dunno....

So this is either deeply weird or there's something in that previous thread. May just be dumb luck and I've convinced myself that I've solved the problem, but so far so good...
 
kingstonza said:
On the plus side...having no internet in the evenings has made me discover this other really cool thing. In my lounge there's this big screen with live streaming video - I get a couple of dozen things called "channels" on it. It's amazing - no buffer speeds, no ADSL line, great picture quality. It's a bit like YouTube, only longer clips (I think they're called "programmes")
Anyone else have this? My wife assures me we've had it for years, but I don't believe her. I would have known.
Click to expand...

LMFAO! internet FTW!

Im saving this!
 
Wait til I tell you about the OTHER things my wife showed me that people sometimes do when there's no internet. Woooohoooo. :) Who knew?
 
kingstonza said:
Wait til I tell you about the OTHER things my wife showed me that people sometimes do when there's no internet. Woooohoooo. :) Who knew?
Click to expand...

lol enyclopedias? they like wikipedia expert you have to look for yourself, LOL
 
kingstonza said:
OK now this is freaking me out....spent some time this evening playing around, flicking light switches, going back to my PC, testing speeds. Nothing seemed to make much difference until I came across one outside light, on a dimmer switch, where the lightbulb has blown (and has been for a couple of days). Switch on = zero internet; switch off = speedtest.net reporting 4MB/s (the speedtest page wouldn't even load when the light switch was on...)

The switch is about 15m from my Telkom jack, the actual light about 6m further. But maybe the phone line runs close to the switch? Heck I dunno....

So this is either deeply weird or there's something in that previous thread. May just be dumb luck and I've convinced myself that I've solved the problem, but so far so good...
Click to expand...

is it still working now?
 
waiting for the sun to go down to see if the light sensor kicks in and kicks my adsl into touch....will let you know...
 
Yip pretty sure that was the problem. ADSL was flying - was d/loading off SAIX News server and getting 250kb/s for a couple of hours. Flicked the lightswitch on and it dropped to 0kb/s straight away. Stayed there until I turned the switch off, now its back to normal.
Freaky.
It was one of those fancy Osram day/night sensor bulbs which had blown. While the blown bulb was in and if the lightswitch was on, the ADSL disappeared everytime the sun went down. The moment I turned the switch off, ADSL returned.
Must have been "leaking" (to use a technical term) noise onto my phone line somewhere which I guess is in close proximity to the light itself.
I don't have a replacement Osram so have stuck a regular lightbulb in there, have turned it on and all seems fine.
Learn something new every day.....
 
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