NBN slow in the morning

[bojan]

So, what physical connection exactly do you have to connect to NBN at your house?
Is it coaxial cable, fibre or pair of wires?

BTW, apparently my problem was DNS conflict, as mentioned by Phil (and corroborated by my experiments - disbling and enabling LAN adapter from Control Panel does the trick - however I would still like to know why this is happening since switch to NBN ... maybe drivers are not loaded in right order upon power up?)

[acropolite (Phil)]

Bojan, address conflicts can be caused by several factors including cascaded data switches, poorly behaved smartphones and tablets, duplicated DHCP servers, and static assignments that conflict with the dynamically assigned IO addresses allocated by your router. I see them all too often in my day to day work.

Check to see if you have any devices with static assignments, if you need static assignments the best way is to put an entry in the DHCP table of your router and set the device to get that IP via DHCP.

One common problem I’ve seen is the use of old routers as Wireless Access points without turning off the DHCP in the second device.

I’ve lost count of the times I’ve resolved issues reported as cabling problems where sloppy IT contractors have introduces IP addressing problems.

As I said before, the best advice is to reserve all addresses in the DCHP table of your router. Unfortunately some routers supplied by the biggest ISP (Telstra) have a very limited range of reservation entries available.

[bojan]

Phil,

The router was supplied by iinet...

Interestingly, when I experienced those problems, another lap on the same router worked immediatelly (this is what gave me idea to look into LAN cabling etc.)
I think I tried old router in the beginning (with incorp[orated ADSL modem) and the observed behaviour was the same (desktop funny, laptop worked every time).

Anyway.. it doesn't matter, now I routinely toggle the LAN adapter (DNS server is set to 8.8.8.8, 8.8.4.4 and that helps every time.

[redbeard (Damien)]

Hi Bojan,

After reading this post, Phil's response is the best so far.

I'd like to add that Phil is talking about IP conflicts, NOT DNS issues.

On iiNet's website the information states that the DNS you should be using is 203.0.178.191 with an alternate of 203.215.29.191. This entry should be in the router for a start. If you have configured your PC AND all other devices to get their IP address via DHCP then that is all you should need to do as they will automatically get an IP address and the correct DNS address.

If any of your devices have been configured with a static IP address then this would have had to be entered in manually and also a DNS address will have been manually entered in those devices so it's worth checking. If that is the case, then you need to check all of your devices that use the router, wired or wireless, and see how they are configured. If you find that more than one of the devices have the same IP address, (you need to check the devices themselves), then there will be an IP conflict. If you have a mixture of DHCP and static IP addresses, then there is bound to be an issue.

The DNS entry stated above should be the same in the router as all of your devices.

So as mentioned by another in this thread, the best way to ensure that you do not have an IP conflict is to set all of your devices to get their IP address via DHCP. Also ensure that the router is setup correctly to dish out those IP addresses correctly.

An IP address conflict will only affect the devices with the same IP address, not any other device that is unique, that may explain why your laptop works all the time.

All the best,
Damien.

[bojan]

I tried the recommended DNS for iinet and result was the same (as automatic and as 8.8.8.8)....



When I tried to troubleshoot problems (in Control Panel, W'7) the it says "DNS problem".

[JimsShed (Jim)]

Originally Posted by bojan

So, what physical connection exactly do you have to connect to NBN at your house?
Is it coaxial cable, fibre or pair of wires?

BTW, apparently my problem was DNS conflict, as mentioned by Phil (and corroborated by my experiments - disbling and enabling LAN adapter from Control Panel does the trick - however I would still like to know why this is happening since switch to NBN ... maybe drivers are not loaded in right order upon power up?)

Ye olde copper phone wires from the street.

[bojan]

Originally Posted by JimsShed

Ye olde copper phone wires from the street.

OK, so it is ADSL - like.. that explains your problem from hardware point of view - if you use filter / diplexer, it should go away.

[GodsPetMonkey]

Originally Posted by JimsShed

I had very slow NBN initially. AussieBB suggested I physically disconnect unused phone points in the house. I did this and my speed doubled. Apparently NBN is very sensitive to signal “reflections“. Might be worth looking into.

There are several NBN ‘technologies’, thanks to political butchering of the whole thing, which makes it harder to suggest solutions.

Basically we have:
FTTH (fibre all the way) - best there is, period.
FTTN (still uses copper to deliver VDSL).
FTTC (like FTTN only much less copper).
HFC (using pay TV cables; aka. Cable internet).
Fixed Wireless.

For FTTN connection you need to remove all phone points but one. Actually, get a cabler or sparky to come out and rerun the phone line from the entry to your house to your chosen outlet point - makes a huge difference for FTTN connections, though sadly the copper running the rest of the way to the node is a pile of rotting crap.

Bojan suggests he has a HFC connection, so this won’t help him at all.

Bojan, the problem with HFC is that it is a shared medium, with everyone in your ‘local loop’ sharing a limited amount of bandwidth. This means if all your neighbours are furiously downloading, you will be throttled to death. ADSL (and VDSL, so FTTN and FTTH) don’t have the same design, so your ADSL bandwidth is from the exchange to your house was all yours. From the exchange, you shared the backhaul with everyone else, but that was in the order of gigabits/s, so you wouldn’t likely notice.

Then there is the way NBN sells capacity to ISPs (called CVC). So iinet would buy so much bandwidth to use in NBNs backhaul, and that is shared among all iinet users in your local area (which could be 100,000s of connections). Too little CVC for peak demand and you and your fellow customers end up shafted. It is common for ISPs to under-purchase CVC - the two ISPs known for over-purchasing CVC are AussieBB and Telstra.

Probably too late to change any of this mess, but the geniuses that came up with this digital train wreck did just call an election...

So, it could be your PC has issues. It could be all your neighbours decided that it was time to download the latest Game Of Thrones about the same time. Or it could have been everyone on iinet in East Melbourne wanted HBO and dragons with their breakfast. Or a combination of all of this.

Hard to troubleshoot without being able to look at your network and machines, but I’d suggest you reset your router to iinet factory settings, then change the DHCP settings in the router to the cloudflare DNS servers (or Google’s if your prefer them). Then on your PC set the network options to purely get everything from DHCP - basically testing to see if there is a setting someplace that is causing problems (ie. it’s your computer’s fault) by making the router tell it exactly what to do. Then see if that works. Feel free to unplug/replug your network cables, or replace them completely.

Worry about things like reserving IPs (or static IPs) when you have solved the problem or eliminated everything else. Going manual on your home network config is a possible source of problems unless you know exactly what’s what.


At least you are not on fixed wireless. That’s a service that is well and truly stuffed. Oh, and every time we get heavy dew and condensation getting into my rotting copper feed my FTTN turns into a yo-yo, so I have a hate-hate relationship with my FTTN service - so we all suffer in some way.