Hi there.
As in the title of this discussion, we’re experiencing a decrease in Internet speed on our network. This seems to be happening at random times.
Our network consists of a server running Windows server 2003 with up to 20 other wired nodes running Windows XP including three network printers. We also have a WLAN with a WPA2 encryption.
We have a BT 2wire router and two Ciso swithches.
I suspected the casue of this problem might be any of the following:
1) a General problem with our server
2) The downloading of torrents over the wireless
3) a Physical problem with the cabling on our network.
4) a Problem on our ISP’s side.
4) a Problem with our router
Our server acts as a DHCP, DNS and WINS server. a Few weeks ago, the DHCP stopped working on our server. When I open the DHCP console/window, the status says “Not Connected” on the right hand pane. When I click on the server located in the left pane, the status suddenly changes to *Active* and only then does our server lease IP addresses. I have disabled DHCP on our server as a result and enabled DHCP on our router for now. What could be the cause of this?
Our server does a daily back up to a tape drive and this takes 8hours. I initially thought this backup process might cause the problem but we still experience a slow Internet speed even if no backup is running.
The downloading of torrents really fills the pipe but when I disable the wireless, a slow Internet speed is realised once again. Is there a practical/cheap way of blocking torrent downloading without having to buy a Cisco switch(with packet inspection) for ?2000?
The third possibility is not likely as a physical cabling problem would just mean no connection to start with.
As for the ISP. Well, we have a 16MB broadband connection with PIPEX and have a contention ratio of 20-1. I have run a lot of broadband speed tests and found that our speed does fluctuate between 3 and 12MB/sec. Is this a direct indication of a problem on our IPS’s side or could these readings point to another problem? PIPEX remains confident that there’s nothing wrong on their side.
Our router is a very good one. ALL other routers we had (Thompson, Netgear and a Linksys one) had to be rebooted at least twice per week as they just froze. The BT never had to be rebooted even once, touch wood! So I can’t see that our router is faulty.
As I mentioned before, this happens randomly and the speeds are sometimes slower than dail-up! Some websites open lightning fast while others take forever and sometimes the Inernet browser just gives up saying it can’t find/open the address. This points to a DNS problem, or does it? How can I change our primary DNS server to another one? Our primary DNS server is our server running Windows server 2003 and the secondary one is pointed to our router. Can I simply change it in the Network properties > TCP/IP > properties page?
Any help/ideas would be greatly appreciated!