Monitoring Max

Can I ask a beginner's question?

Reading the many posts and comments on ADSLMax. people are able to cite
so many performance statistics, sync speed, download/upload speed and
how they change from minute to minute. Are they all just continually
checking in the router status pages, or is there some handy app that
monitors these?

--
Nightowl

On Fri, 12 May 2006, Nightowl wrote:

> Can I ask a beginner's question?

Like most beginner's questions, the answer is a bit complicated.

> Reading the many posts and comments on ADSLMax. people are able to
> cite so many performance statistics, sync speed, download/upload
> speed and how they change from minute to minute.

Sync speed and noise margin figures can be read off the ADSL router,
by any of the methods which it supports, at any time.

Real upload and download speeds aren't evident from the router: you
have to pass some traffic. Typically it's done by one of the
browser-invoked speed testers, e.g the one at ADSLguide, or the ISP
may have one of their own. Some folks run their favourite FTP
application, or a browser download, if they don't trust the speed
testers. You wouldn't do that continually - only now and again.

> Are they all just continually checking in the router status pages,
> or is there some handy app that monitors these?

Routers typically support several methods of reading out their
statistics. Mine has a web interface, telnet, or snmp. Your choice,
really.

There are applications that you can set up, which would read out the
values at appropriate intervals and plot them on pretty graphs.

Or one could write a little script that did wget to the appropriate
web page on a schedule, and append the answer to a log file.

Lots of different ways. Hope that's vaguely useful. What have you
actually got? Have you seen this page?
http://www.kitz.co.uk/adsl/frogstats.htm

Alan J. Flavell <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote on Fri, 12 May 2006:

[snipped lots of helpful info]

>Lots of different ways. Hope that's vaguely useful. What have you
>actually got? Have you seen this page?
>http://www.kitz.co.uk/adsl/frogstats.htm

Thanks very much for that, Alan.

At the moment I have a 2meg connection with Zen, just one computer with
a D-Link DSL-302T router. According to samknows I live 850 metres from
the exchange :-) and usually get pretty good speeds of about
1880-1890kbps down and 242kbps up according to ADSLguide speed test. It
can slow down quite drastically sometimes as my exchange (Faversham) has
been Red for a few months now, though it is Max-enabled.

I thought it might be better to wait until BT fix the problem before
applying for an upgrade. . . the date keeps getting pushed forward, but
the latest given is May 16, so I have my fingers crossed.

Thanks again for your help.

--
Nightowl