I signed my relative up for a shiny new Plusnet Fibre Unlimited broadband connection that was installed by the BT engineer two weeks ago today on 11th February.
After the initial combined Plusnet/BT Openreach screw up that has affected many others who ordered Fibre Unlimited of a 40/10 Fibre Essentials Profile being set on the line this was rapidly rectified by Plusnet telephone support staff within 24 hours of calling them and we soon had the full 80/20 Unlimited Profile and the Downstream IP Profile finally topped out around 61Mbps before then dropping slowly to the current 52Mbps - actual speedtests have been as high as 59Mbps outside the peak evening hours of 7pm to 10pm where they were more like 20Mbps to 25Mbps. The Upstream Profile has remained consistently at 20Mbps and never seems to drop in line with the actual speed but real upload speeds were consistently between 12Mbps and 13Mbps (even at peak times) until today.
However today is the day on which the phone service has also transferred to Plusnet from BT (Plusnet called this morning to say this had happened) and whilst it is probably a coincidence something horrible has happened to broadband speeds today. All through this evening (Monday 25th Feb) between 7pm and 11pm the best Download speed I have been able to achive is 8Mbps even on a wired connection to the Technicolor 582n router while Upload speeds at 7Mbps or so have actually been higher than the Downstream speed but lower than usual.
I can only hope that the huge fall in speeds tonight is coincidental with the fact that the phone line moved to Plusnet today as obviously the phone line and the broadband provision should be independent but I also noticed tonight that when trying to do tests at
www.speedtester.bt.com the second stage test to give the IP Profile was repeatedly being refused and I was instead being told to change the login details on the router to speedtest_speedtest_domain. I ignored this and now two hours later the second stage of the test at
www.speedtester.bt.com has run but the Download speed is a meagre 6.6Mbps out of an IP Profile of 52.96Mbps and the Upload Speed is 7.92Mbps out of a possible 20Mbps IP Profile.
I should add that the original BT forecast for this line was 37.2Mbps Downstream and 6.2Mbps Upstream but actual speeds until today have been much higher than this presumably because this is a fairly rural road so there are only about 20 houses over the 400 metres or so between here and the cabinet compared to may be 100 or more in an area with denser housing.
Either way it looks like either something drastic is wrong with the underlying Plusnet Backbone connection tonight or something strange is happening with just this exchange area. I tried
www.speedtest.net with numerous different servers tonight including the nearest one to here at Maidenhead, several in London and then also Sheffield (where Plusnet is) and they all reported the same very slow Downstream speeds in relation to both the current IP Profile of 52Mbps and previous speedtests of well over 50Mbps Off Peak and 25Mbps at peak times.
Is anyone able to shed any light on this? The exchange involved is BT exchange code THFC. The phone number ends in 548
