Can Someone Give My Plusnet Speed Profile A Kick Please!?

[#1]

As per the title, BTW/OR have just reset my profile and they have download set @ 74.14 but Plusnet's is still @ 63.2 and it's cramping my style 
Can someone give it a kick please?

[#2]

Try that.

[#3]

Nice touch  
Thankyou!
dick:quote

[#4]

@Kelly - out of curiousity, how much influence can Plusnet have over our actual download speed vs the reported maximum connection speed on the BT Speed checker ?
For example, if I was connected at a theoretical maximum rate of 73Mb/s and you wanted to throttle me down to 15Mb/s - is that possible ? Would it show on the BT Wholesale test page that you'd done this ?
Does the FTTC work in a similar fashion to the old DLM where the modem tries to negotiate a stable rate and stays there occasionally trying a slightly faster one ?
I'm sure my connection has been up and down a few Mb/s on the maximum connection rate available.
Not a sinister question but curious as to how much control Plusnet have over the potential sync / download speeds etc.

[#5]

Sync speeds, very hard for us to do anything with, especially on Fibre. That speed is negotiated between your modem and the exchange.
Throughput is a different matter, we have loads of control over that (if we wanted to).

[#6]

There are 5 potential speed points on your line, applied in this order:
1 - Your theoretical speed.  This is the quality of your line.  You will never get higher than this without technology changes
2 - Your BT Speed Profile.  This is a profile set on your line which the exchange equipment has determined as your stable speed.  On a good, stable line this will set and shouldn't change too much.  If you have an unstable line, it will theoretically decrease until your line becomes stable.
3 - Your Plusnet speed profile.  This is set to a little below your BT speed profile.  We do this so that we can control the maximum amount of data we send down your line. This allow us to use our QoS to protect your experience.    
5 - Rate limits.  We are able to apply a rate limit across our traffic.   We do this on our Essential, Plus, Extra and legacy accounts at peak hours for protocols like P2P.  Our current Unlimited product does not have any.
6 - QoS level buffering/packet drops.  Because we've identified the types of traffic you are using, we can cause packets of those particular types to buffer, and eventually drop.  We use this to ensure that, along with your Plusnet speed profile, if you are maxing your bandwidth, we'll make sure you get your high priority packets first.  If our network is also under heavy load (i.e. we've cocked up our bandwidth forecasting) this will start to apply to ensure time sensitive traffic is protected at the expense of the less time sensitive traffic.
Unlimited has no 5, and 6 is applied on a per user level if you are maxing your line.   6 is always in affect, but our WBMC network is scaled so that no buffering is happening.  (There has been a little bit on IPSC over the past few weeks which I'm working with Dave T to fix)
We can set 3 at any time by hand, but is usually automatically adjusted a couple of times a day based on messages from BT about what 2 is set as.  (THere are some issues in the messages coming from BT on this.)  This manual adjustment is what I did for Finguz
We can't influence 1 at all, beyond advising you to fix dodgy cables and sending engineers.  

[#7]

Thanks Chris
So if we do a check on the BT Wholesale speed checker and find a line connection speed of say 74Mbs but the modem is only pumping through 50Mbs for a prolonged period then there is a *possibility* that this could be caused by something set by Plusnet ?
I'm in no way implying that you do this or that it is in your interest to do this but in the above case it would be worth advising the customer to post a ticket to double check ?
Just a bit of a nose question really rather than anything sinister. I noticed a customer on Hotukdeals was having a moan that you'd limited his line speed on FTTC (Post 236).
http://www.hotukdeals.com/deals/unlimited-76mb-fibre-broadband-half-price-for-6-month-9-99-with-plus...

[#8]

And thanks to Kelly again for one of his honest and informative answers
Have a good weekend guys

[#9]

Surely there *could* also be contention at the cabinet for FTTC.
Average line speed 40Mb at the cabinet (total guess) x 200 users = 8Gb
I would imagine cabinets would have 1 or 2Gb  fibre connections?
It's unlikely you would have all 200 end users maxing out their connections at the same time (same principle would apply for an ISP) - but say Apple put out a new iOS and 50 keen users with an average line speed of 65Mb try to concurrently download it at the same time. Does the same (or similar) QoS that PN uses kick in for the cabinets?

[#10]

There is shared kit in the exchanges which could be applying contention yes (SVLAN). I'm not sure how they handle their own congestion. 

[#11]

Quote from: picbits

...the modem is only pumping through 50Mbs for a prolonged period then there is a *possibility* that this could be caused by something set by Plusnet ?

Only under the circumstances Kelly described in excellent detail, or congestion in the cabinet/BTW backhaul as AndyH mentioned. Or equally likely, there is a problem at the user's end (eg testing over wifi, testing with a mis-configured PC, testing with a faulty AV or firewall that's limiting throughput, testing while the neighbour's offspring has hacked your wifi and is busy downloading the internet, etc, etc).

[#12]

Indeed - I must say that Kelly answered while I was typing my reply to Chris.
It would be interesting to see why that customer on HUKD is having the issues and if he's reported it to Plusnet or has just decided he's got what he's got and isn't going to do anything about it.

[#13]

Quote from: picbits

So if we do a check on the BT Wholesale speed checker and find a line connection speed of say 74Mbs but the modem is only pumping through 50Mbs for a prolonged period then there is a *possibility* that this could be caused by something set by Plusnet ?

If you mean the figure set a little below the BT Wholesale IP Profile, it is called the Current line speed and you can check what it is set at in your "Member Centre" (Most ISPs call it a Control Panel).