Problems with Telefonica internet today

I am having terrible Internet problems with Telefonica tody, both in the office and at home.

Is it just me or are others experiencing really slow connections today too?

Thanks

Justin

I seemed to have problems early this morning, but haven't since.  Seems ok with me. 

Edited to say: yep, just did speedtest.net and got 5.52Mbs download speed - not bad for Telefonica!!

How strange; I was just about to post the same query...so in a word...YES!

Here is a copy of a post I have just put up on my favourite computer help website..

quote....For a while we have persistent problems with our ISP, Telefonica Spain with very slow download speeds. Repeated calls to them have invariably come back with the response that there is no problem with the dsl line. We are in a small village with an automated switching centre.

For the last 24 hrs however we have a slightly different problem; actually establishing contact with websites outside of Spain...same problem exists whether using Firefox (default) or IE7. Trying to upload/download material to the servers that my wife utilises for her websites (all based in the USA; Hostgator, Hosthead and Certified) is virtually impossible because it seems we cannot break into the traffic stream across the pond.
Does this make sense?

Once contact is established, line speeds are pretty good. A European Speedtest site (speedtest.net) returns a download value of 1.5Mbs upload 300Kbs for a contracted 3Mbs service. (This is as good if not better than normal.

We have three computers hooked into a Wifi router, two are hard wired and one connected by Wifi, but although we are only using one at a time all are experiencing the same problem.
Two are running XP one is running Vista.

I can only presume this is due to very heavy traffic into and out of Spain but would welcome any other suggestions...unquote

In short its been pretty bad since around midnight last night; when we do manage to hook up with a site for a download the speed is pretty good, certainly as good as we have ever seen in our location...

So rest assured Justin; it's not just you!

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Jan; 5.52Mbs?

From Telefonica?

What is your contracted speed; just curious...

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Hi Foxbat

We contract for 6MB, so pretty impressive!!  Not always the way though!!  And upload speeds are rubbish!!

I've just checked a few co.uk sites and no problem and a few .ae sites with no problem.  In fact, any site I've checked hasn't been a problem.

As I said, earlier this morning seemed slow but not a problem at the moment.

Edited to say: Just fully read your post foxbat and I never, ever get an upload speed of more than 0.25Mbs!

Jan;

Thats pretty impressive!

Lucky you!

Just tried speedtest.net  again and the best rate I can get is 0.91 mbs to a server in Warwick UK

The default server for speedtest.net  in our area is Elche and the best rate to that server is 0.55Mbs.

Normally we record about 1.5Mbs to speedtest....

Using telefonica's speedtest site the best I can get is a paltry 200kbs...which is dismal even by their standard!

O.H. is not amused; she relies on the internet for her income and at the moment we cannot upload anything simply because the outbound IP request and traffic seems to stall.

Even trying to get into EOS took 4 attempts...

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Jan

I think upload speeds are subject to different rules.

Looking at a few forums where people are using Satellite Internet and 270kbs seems to be about par for the course...irrespective of whether its Satellite or wifi or adsl!

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Just looked again and the test from where I am goes to Elda in Spain.  Just tried a Maidenhead server test and got 5.08Mbs!!

I must be really lucky!!  I must admit I used Safari to do the test as Firefox seemed a bit slow loading the site!  I'm on wifi and my son's computer is hardwired through the router - but sometimes we have two laptops going as well, wifi, with no problem (no, we're not really geeks!!).

I am using a Mac though and NEVER get viruses, Justin!! 

foxbat, that's what's been happening to me.  I can access sites based in Spain OK but UK sites, such as EOS, are really slow to load.

It seems better now but we'll see.

Thanks

Justin

P.S:  Jan you are SOOOO lucky

Nothing to do with Telefonica but I'm with TalkTalk and my internet connection has been bad today. Some websites I could access, such as EOS others I couldn't.

Coincidence?

Sunrise...Interesting...are you using a mobile or landline for internet? and are you based in spain?

 Don't know if this is relevant, but I just go the email notification of a response on the thread, clicked the link to go straight to it and Firefox still loading!!  Opened the link in Safari and straight there in a second!!  Maybe it's my Firefox app though?

Jan;

Just wondering the same thing... 

I have just downloaded Opera as an alternate browser and whilst its too early say definitely, first impressions are that it is loading pages quicker than Firefox or IE.

My thoughts on Sunrises post; I have a sneaky feeling that she is using a landline. Although she gets her bills from Talk Talk, I think that ultimately they, like Jazztel and all the other providers in Spain, are actually using Telefonica's infrastructure since they own all of it!

So whether consumers like it or not ultimately T'Fonica have the last word!

If so it doesn't come as any great surprise that she too is having problems...!

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"Although she gets her bills from Talk Talk, I think that ultimately they, like Jazztel and all the other providers in Spain, are actually using Telefonica's infrastructure since they own all of it! "

Hi, Foxbat, No they don't.Telefoníca only own and control the exchanges and the lines to the customer. The main fibre optics and infrastructure covering the whole of Spain was installed about 20+ years ago and is owned and rented to Telefoníca by British Telecom!!!!!!!! lol.

Thank God! At last, I can stop worrying that it's something wrong with me or my set-up. It's been driving me nuts!

I'm contracted for 6mbp/s with Telefónica, but seems to me download speed is not the problem. (see result below) EOS loads no problem for me, but some sites (ironically, Speedtest.net is one) are really slow, and sevenforums.com simply will not load for me. I've tried with IE8 and Firefox, and even downloaded Google Chrome to try that. I've been experimenting with FoxyProxy to get BBC iPlayer, and have managed to get it tonight, but last night, I couldn't even load the BBC home page! Nor ITV. Really frustrating.

http://www.speedtest.net/result/706141330.png

This message was last edited by Roberto on 05/02/2010.

I've had the same problem yesterday and today with telefonica connection, slow connection and the browser freeze (tried to troubleshoot, and it's both firefox, chrome, opera and explorer). The computer is slow on some sites and gets normal on others. Seems like there's some problems with cables in europe somewhere... hard to figure out. Telefonica is not very informative sometimes... anyway hope it will be fixed soon.

Gus; Irrespective of who owns it, it's the same crappy infrastructure and with 3rd party suppliers such as Jazztel and others muscling in the whole thing is saturated.

Both Telefonica and Jazztel happily advertise a 10 or 20MBS service which for 99.9% of the population is wholly unavailable.

Jazztel claim to be able to supply my location with a 7mbs service; given that the switching centre in the village is limited to 3Mbs its difficult to see just how they could do it. As for fibre-optics, I have a sneaky feeling that such advanced technology doesn't exist in this neck of the woods! I strongly suspect that the switching centre is hard wired to a transmitter/receiver at the top of the village, from where it is wireless linked to another switching centre about 15kms away. Certainly when the rest of the village goes online such as in the evening when the kids get busy with online games and chatrooms the system almost grinds to a standstill. Needless to say landline phones go through the same switching centre and from what I recall from my 40 odd years as a radio engineer, voice utilises a hell of a lot more bandwidth than data!

The problem seems to be quite complicated...if we call up a site which needs some input from Google like google adsense or google analytics, the site just will not load correctly; rather the page stalls and has to be reloaded. Since the google input to the selected page has to be imported from yet another site, outside of Spain, the whole process comes to a halt if it cannot contact the site carrying the advertising.

At the moment, we can load some sites in the States but not others; similarly one of our web hosts is in Germany and we cannot access this server at all. Not to put too fine a point on it its totally screwed up tonight and has been for nigh on 24hrs.

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Just had a response from my friends on the forum to whom I asked the original question as posted in an earlier post; interesting reading...the writer of the post is based in France in a rural location and knows all about about dodgy internet...

Here is his response...

Out of interest, this forum is based in the USA, so do you have any problems loading it or any other US website? Try a high content site like NBC to see if that loads OK.

Have you tried taking advantage of the time difference? Excluding Alaska, there's a difference of 3 hours from east to west coast which means between 8 and 5 hours behind Spanish time at any time of the day. So, from around 8am your time until around 2pm, there should be less traffic. Admittedly, there'll be non-US traffic accessing the servers, but much less than at other times. We use that window regularly to do large data transfers to the USA, as things slow down quite markedly after that time.

It's also possible that one or more major servers are down and traffic is being re-routed through others that have less capacity. Try downloading TraceRoute to check where it's going.

If you do have a continuing problem, even at those low-traffic times, it possible that your ISP is at fault...again.

Please note 'NBC' and 'TraceRoute' are clickable links in the above text...

The saga continues...

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This message was last edited by foxbat on 05/02/2010.

I don't want to speak too soon but my connection at home seems OK today....now let's see what it's like when I get to the office

Justin

Yes, I agree with you entirely Foxbat. The line connections are the problem , we experienced loads of problems with the cables because a lot of them are joined solely by twisting together and not connection boxes. I used to have adsl from ya.com as telefoníca said that i was too far out from the exchange but his was routed through telefoníca systems and wwhen their was a problem you still had to wait as telefoníca would put them to the bottom of the pile. After 2years and more problems last year , being cut off in excess of 200x a day , making it unusable I gave up and went to micro. So far it's been excellent and it works out far cheaper  than before. Personally, due to many other problems as well,  I would never use telefoníca again, even if they were the last left in the world , i'd go without.