Exceptionally slow ping times, slow DNS lookup and slow download on router

A customer has a Netgear DG834 router (V1, no wireless access point
built-in) connected to a newly-installed ADSL line, activated about 18 hours
ago. The router is reporting that the line speed is 1120 down / 448 up.
Unfortunately this model of DG834 doesn't have the ability to report ADSL
attenuation and noise margin, but I presume that these must be acceptible if
the router has successfully synchronised at 1120/448 and has a steady
connection that doesn't drop out.

The customer has reported very slow browsing and POP3 email download times.

On investigation, a ping -t of an external address (eg news.bbc.co.uk) is
getting a time of about 40 msec if the LAN is idle, but as soon as any PC
(including the one running the ping) talks on the WAN (eg browse web, read
email) the ping times increase dramatically to around 1000-2000 msec and
sometimes exceed ping's threshold so "request timed out" is reported.. Once
the PC has finished transferring traffic, the ping times go back to normal.

This happens with only one PC plugged into the router (so there's no
PC-to-PC LAN traffic) and I've experienced it with my own known-good laptop.

Copying a large folder between PCs on the LAN does not result in long ping
times, so it's not the switch part of the router that's getting overloaded -
the problem is confined to WAN access.

Is it likely to be a router problem or a broadband problem?

Martin Underwood wrote in message
45b67408$0$8720$(E-Mail Removed):

> A customer has a Netgear DG834 router (V1, no wireless access point
> built-in) connected to a newly-installed ADSL line, activated about
> 18 hours ago. The router is reporting that the line speed is 1120
> down / 448 up. Unfortunately this model of DG834 doesn't have the
> ability to report ADSL attenuation and noise margin, but I presume
> that these must be acceptible if the router has successfully
> synchronised at 1120/448 and has a steady connection that doesn't
> drop out.
> The customer has reported very slow browsing and POP3 email download
> times.

Further information: after the customer's separate wireless adaptor failed
while I was setting things up this afternoon, the customer went out and
bought a Netgear DG834PN, partly to get the benefit of a speed upgrade from
Wireless B (11 Mbps) to Wireless G (54 Mbps).

This router shows the broadband stats, so I can now report that the speed,
attenuation and noise margin are:

Speed 1100-1700 / 448 (downstream speed varies from time to
time)

Attenuation 63.0 / 31.5

Margin 6.3 / 16.0

Downloading a new copy of Skype gave an average transfer speed of about 16
KBps (approx 160 Kbps), which is very slow even allowing for contention.


Given that the line has only recently been activated, could it be that the
exchange equipment and the router are still negotiating the best line speed
that the line will support, and that when things have stabilised the data
rate and ping times will improve (because of fewer retries even though the
line speed may reduce slightly). I've not yet tried
http://speedtester.bt.com/ because I didn't have the address of this site
with me when I was at the customer's site. Someone recently recommended
another site which checks the number of ADSL retries etc, but I can't find
the URL for this site - anyone help?