Latency spikes and sudden slow-downs

[#1]

Hi all!

Hopefully you can help - it's easier to put everything down here than via chat/phone.

Our connection has been pretty unreliable for a few months now, both as a BT ADSL customer and now a Plusnet one.

I can't pin what the cause is but the connection fluctuates in speed from around 9Mbps to barely able to load a web page several times an hour. It's getting to a depressing point where we are preferring to use 4G.

I've had the same issues even when wired into the router running off the BT test socket which hopefully rules out the majority of issues on our side.

Running a ping test, I was seeing a lot of 30ms, with the occassional 90-300ms. Here's a sample from just now:

Ping statistics for 8.8.8.8:
Packets: Sent = 334, Received = 334, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 28ms, Maximum = 561ms, Average = 97ms

I was wondering if there is a line fault but I'm not sure what is an acceptable level of noise. This is a recording of the silent line (calling a recording voicemail box with a muted phone) - there's a buzz but it's pretty faint:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1xFq4FLX-uDmwY1yd42Cmn4CGCK2kCcr-/view

There aren't any on the recording, but I've heard the occasional pop/crackle when trying a quiet line test but not sure if that is just our old phone handset.

Any advice on how what the best next step should be?

[#2]

Hi there.

First of all welcome to our community forums.

I'm sorry to hear you're experiencing connection problems.

While line tests aren't finding a definitive cause for this, tests are showing that your line has very recently become banded/restricted to a 2mbps to 4mbps profile by the software at the exchange. Likely come about by the drops in your connection, in an effort to provide stability:

Assuming the biggest drop last night is when you moved your router to the test socket, your line seems to be a bit more stable now and as your connection is still within its 10 day stabilisation period I'd recommend monitoring this over the next couple of days and if you still experience problems please raise a fault to us at http://faults.plus.net

If you can drop us a reply back here once you've completed the fault reporting process to raise a fault ticket we'll be happy to pick it up.

In the meantime I've released the banding which means that your router should connect at a higher speed within the next 5-10 minutes though this may cause the drops to start again especially if the slow banding was put in place to try to prevent the drops.

Let us know how it goes.

[#3]

That's awesome - thanks Anoush!  Hopefully it is just teething / stabilisation - will get back in touch if we're still having trouble.

I always wonder - what is actually happening during that 10 day period that causes fluctuation?

[#4]

No problems @AliA

It's a essentially a period of time where the automated dynamic line management (DLM) software at the exchange adjusts the settings on your line to find a balance between speed and stability, but in cases such as yours it's sometimes difficult to distinguish between DLM doing its work (Some may call it magic) within the 10 days or an actual fault affecting your service.