Dialup connection was slow - now slower?

[williamj]

I am in rural area with no DSL or cable.

My dialup connection has always been slow but steady (26.4 kbps) until about a month ago. My wife uses ebay and when it takes over 5 minutes to load the main page she gets upset.

My connection still says 26.4 but the speed has gotten painfully slow.
Here is what I have tried (without improving on my speed):
-Repaced old USR 56k modem with new USR 56k and reinstalled with current drivers.
-Discovered had a trojan, did fresh install of windows (reformated HD).
-Switched from AOL to SBC-Yahoo. (did another fresh install of windows)
-Had SBC check phone lines. They have told me some inconsistant information. When they do a line check (with phone and computer unplugged) I have been told there is a short. They have done some repairs, rechecked and found a short, repaired and found it OK. They ran a shielded wire from road to my house.
-checked hosts file, only one entry for localhost

-Not sure what this tells me, but when I "ping www.ebay.com", it says:
"Pinging hp-core.ebay.com (66.135.193.124)...
request timedout
4 packets lost

I can ping techspot.com with no lost packets and avg time 179ms.

-tracert www.ebay.com takes about 5 hops before it timesout.

I don't know if the phone lines.the isp or my computer are the problem. I plan to have SBC recheck lines, I am thinking of going to circuit city and buying a new computer just to see if I get a better connection with new machine.

Any suggestions are appreciated.
Bill

 

[gary_hendricks]

This kind of problem certainly indicates a phone line quality problem. I sometimes get 56kps on a modem but it can drop to 33kbps sometimes.

 

[DelJo63]

-Not sure what this tells me, but when I "ping www.ebay.com", it says:
"Pinging hp-core.ebay.com (66.135.193.124)...
request timedout
4 packets lost

I can ping techspot.com with no lost packets and avg time 179ms.

l

this is a ROUTING problem.
When using dial-up, I set the browser home-page to be that of the ISP I am dialing into.
If I have problems there, then the dial-up connection IS the issue,
otherwise, the problem is elsewhere.

Once you're dialed in, use ipconfig /all to get

your ip
the gateway ip
and the DNS address​

also get the results of NSLOOKUP $gateway-ip-address$ and it will
give you a domain name.

Now ping $gateway-ip-address$ to test the connection
and ping the NSLOOKUP name returned
(which tests the DNS ability to resolve a name)

===== btw =============
did you notice ping www.ebay.com mapped into hp-core....?
here's my results:
$ ping www.ebay.com
Pinging hp-core.ebay.com [66.135.208.89] with 32 bytes of data:

Request timed out.
Request timed out.
Request timed out.​

nslookup www.ebay.com

Server: nscache2.stmnca.adelphia.net
Address: 24.48.217.227

Non-authoritative answer:
Name: hp-core.ebay.com
Addresses: 66.135.208.90, 66.135.192.123, 66.135.192.124, 66.135.208.89
Aliases: www.ebay.com​

pinging ANY of these times out!

The browser access http://www.ebay.com/ works perfectly, telling me that
the request is being redirected by the EBAY firewall on port 80, and the
ping is being rejected (quite normal for an ISP).

 

[williamj]

Thanks for the replies,
I did not know the ping response could be turned off.

I bought a new computer: Compac XP, 64bit, from Circuit City (some good deals right now). First try, in opening a ebay screen took about 3 min. Then I tried a different dialup number and the speed was 1.1 min. The dialup number can make a difference.

Then I hooked both computers online. Each on a separate phone line, both dial the same number. The new computer beat the old computer by about 55 seconds. (1.5 min vs 2.4 min). I switched lines got the about the same result.

I compared the old computer (W2K) modem/dialup settings to the new (XP), and don't know where the settings make a big difference. There are some new features in the XP settings.

I don't know if my old machine can be tweaked to match the new or not.

Bill