*21CN ONLY* Do you think your PN profile is not updating as it should?

[#1]

Quote

So my conclusions are... Reasonable climb 1-2Mb - reported/detected in approx 24 hours Little climb - reported/detected in 48-72 hours Reasonable drop 1-2Mb - reported/detected instantly

So bang goes my little theory about big and little updates...
Saturday midday(ish) my sync increases, pushing the IP profile from 14.2Mb up to 15.8Mb.
4 days later, there's no increase in PN line speed. I suspect that an update hasn't been received by PN, as this is what seems to happen on my line.
As I never tire of saying, it's not causing me a problem, but thought folk should be aware that there is still a problem in the system at some point.

[#2]

Your profile updated on the 17th, so we should have received and processed the updated profile then.
I'm going to try clearing the line ID from your account and then re-adding it directly from the BTWholesale system just to ensure it's 100% right. I'll also manually nudge the profile now so it's aligned.

[#3]

Ooo, thanks Chris. Appreciate the continued interest in this thread.

[#4]

My Plusnet profile eventually increased to 3.8 after just under 5 days of staying connected with a DSL line rate of 4315k. The PPP session was disconnected probably due to BT maintenance from 02:16 to 02:24 this morning, so the PPP re-connect may not have been triggered when the Plusnet profile changed.

[#5]

@ejs,

Quote from: ejs

It does make somewhat of a mockery of the over-dramatic BS about the alleged problems caused by the PN profile being too high.

I rather thought that the problems had been proved by an authoritative and respected PlusNet source...

Quote from: dave

Pretty much what I expected. So here's what I think happens. ... 2. When the Plusnet profile is higher than the BT profile When you download at line speed and max your line out the first pinch point is the profile on the BT BRAS. The BT BRAS has no concept of what traffic you are doing and so you see the increase in latency on the ping when you're downloading at the same time as it will need to buffer/drop traffic when you get to the line rate but it's indiscriminate as to which it will buffer or drop.

...or do you suggest Dave's findings are "over-dramatic BS"?
I believe that where there has been a marked difference between the BT and PN profile (being higher) that the above scenario / explanation has been in play and thus reference to it is applicable.

[#6]

I was thinking more of

Quote from: Townman

If the profile is set higher, there could be (quite likely will be) elevated error rates, requiring more end to end retransmission of data thereby significantly degrading the effective data transfer rate.

I don't suppose it will make any difference if I can demonstrate that I do get increased throughput speeds when the Plusnet profile is too high.
By "been proved" you mean we've been given that explanation. Some of the other things dave said on that thread where you got that quote from were:

Quote from: dave

but the very buffering to the speed test makes the speed test result look lower because of the way it gets measured.

That post almost seemed to be trying to explain away the speed difference as being due to how the speedtester measures the speed. The difference in speed is not just the speed being measured incorrectly by a speedtester. I supposed that post by dave could be interpreted as true, but the way it's stated is misleading. The buffering to the speed test does make the speed test result look lower - because the buffering does make the speed lower! The lower speed makes the speed test result look lower, that does tend to happen, lower speeds causing speed testers to give lower results. And it kind of goes without saying that the result the speedtester gives will be due to the way it measures the speed.
The benefits of the Plusnet traffic management vs. the increased speed without the Plusnet profile - which of those outweighs the other depends on what you do with your connection.

[#7]

ejs,
Indeed it does - what is best for one is not going to be ideal for everyone.  At the margins on a good line, I am convinced (as you have demonstrated) some elevation of the PN profile will deliver more usable bandwidth.
However on less good lines or with a bigger elevation of the PN profile, as Dave explains packets will be dropped randomly across all connections and thereby general use (not specialised speed test which ought to be done in isolation) will see degraded performance due to the need to retransmit end to end the dropped packets.  I suggest that this is neither BS nor over dramatic, but quite factual.
Cheers,
Kevin

[#8]

As the person who started the original thread off - one side effect of a Plusnet profile is that I can lose 200kbps when combining the direct effect on the speed test and the Plusnet practice of rounding down from the IP profile
On my line this can have quite an effect on streaming from iPlayer

[#9]

Why on earth did less good lines get dragged into the discussion about Plusnet profiles - apart from lines that are less good are more likely to experience the profile changing slightly occasionally. My own line typically has plenty of CRC errors and generally runs with a downstream MTBE of around 60 to 100, and often will disconnect when the phone gets answered (30 year old star wired sockets). The phone stopped working completely on Monday (this seems to happen about once a year or so), broadband speed dropped to about 1/3 of what is was before, but this time, something got fixed external to the property on Thursday. Do you think my line is good? Or the bigger elevation of the profile - in the older of my threads, the too high profile was 7.15 (of course the Plusnet system has to round 21CN profiles down to the nearest 0.1 yet can hold 7.15).
Even in RichardP's thread, the probably not applied due to the lack of a PPP drop wasn't causing worse speeds! I hope people didn't think the too high profile was causing the "line errors" (for some reason, a few dropped packets from a too high profile was described as the "error rate", which could be confused with ADSL CRC errors etc.).
You do realise that TCP automatically adjusts the transfer rate right? So whatever server on the Internet that the data is coming from won't be endlessly sending it faster that your line can handle?

Quote from: dave

When you download at line speed and max your line out the first pinch point is the profile on the BT BRAS. The BT BRAS has no concept of what traffic you are doing and so you see the increase in latency on the ping when you're downloading at the same time as it will need to buffer/drop traffic when you get to the line rate but it's indiscriminate as to which it will buffer or drop.

That's the part of dave's explanation I would highlight. ping is prioritised titanium (or at least the second and subsequent replies are, the first reply might be gold), above general downloads and web traffic.
I think the supposed problems a few randomly dropped packets will cause is somewhat exaggerated. What do you think happens when you use all your bandwidth on web traffic and the buffer in plusnet's traffic management promptly becomes full? The packets that can't join the full queue get dropped, and since the queue is also being drained, whether packets can join the queue or not would be pretty random.

[#10]

Hi guys
maybe you can help (56 pages is a lot of reading)
My router has been connected for 32 days at 17.5 mbps, this should give me 15.4 download, if I understand things correctly.
However I only get around 13.5 on speedtests.
When I look in my plusnet member centre it says my current line speed is 15.5, and I understand that this is my line speed, and 15.5 is around 88% of 17.5
For me the system as a whole has never seemed to update my line speed reliably. My line is very stable but does occasionally  drop lower, for example prior to this 32 days worth I believe it was lower. I've just rebooted my router to no effect.

[#11]

Hi herojan,
Please ignore the previous 5 off-topic posts, however you are correct in that the system has not been reliably updating the Current Line Speed. This seems to be a combination of delayed "delta" reports from BT's servers that notify Plusnet's system of IP Profile changes and some further issues at the Plusnet end. At least your Current Line speed is correct now.
If you run the BTw Performance test (DON'T REBOOT, ignore the red preamble except make sure no other programs are using the Internet) and at the end of the first run, click the Further Diagnostics button, enter just your Phone number and Run the Further Diagnostics Test, this will give you the current IP Profile (assuming the tester is actually working correctly).
On 21CN the IP Profile should be 88.2% of the sync speed (connection rate to the exchange). The Plusnet Current Line Speed should then update to match the IP Profile (rounded down to the nearest 0.1).
You need to run the speedtests using an ethernet (wired) connection to ensure that any wireless issues are not affecting the results and also run some at off-peak times. If you continue to get results noticeably below the Current Line speed, best to start your own thread providing some details so the issue can be looked at. HTH.
You could also run this TBB Speedtest for comparison.

[#12]

thanks for your reply.
I ran the BT tester and it says my IP Profile is 15.3, it looks like BT hasn't picked up the increased sync speed from over 30 days ago.
I run a TBB speedtest every few weeks. My connection is via wi-fi, not so easy to access my router via a wired connection.  The latest was yesterday:


I'll keep an eye on things, to be honest the speed I have is sufficient for what I do, I just like to get my moneys worth, and I am thinking of changing over to fibre.

[#13]

Thanks for the info, understand what you are saying about your money's worth   but it's more relevant that the system isn't working as it should be, clearly something hasn't updated as it should. I have seen a few reports where the BT Speedtester is actually reporting an incorrect profile as well.
Hopefully one of the CRT guys will do a consistency check and look into this one a bit more.

[#14]

I've run a couple of checks. Your profile is 15304 at BT side and isn't failing in the consistency checks. I've notched our side up a nudge for you, but I'm not sure that will make much difference. You'll need to drop the connection and reconnect to see it.
I'd still be temped by fibre though!

[#15]

@herojan
Presumably your router is currently syncing at 17351 or thereabouts.
The burst x6 speed shown by the TBB test looks good for your IP Profile.