ADSL broadband slowing to a crawl every night at the same time?!

[#1]

Dear community,

Our connection has slowed to an unusable level (web page picture appearing slowly section by section, Youtube videos not playing, BBC Sounds not playing, broadband speed checker not getting past "Connecting to the test server" etc.) each night for the last 3 nights at about 9.45, a position which lasts into the early hours. All seems OK when we rise the next morning.

Connecting via ethernet cable does not improve the speed.

Any ideas where to start here?

Thank you for reading!

Rhod

[#2]

@Rhod Hello

That sounds to me like local congestion. Any chance of posting your router stats both when you have a 'normal' speed and at the time of this disruption?

Bit early in the morning for me to have other thoughts, but if I do, I'll post them.

[#3]

Thanks, Jab1, and good to benefit from your wisdom again. Of course, being able to get stats when the connection is bad depends on it doing it again, and it’s been ok since I posted!!!! But here’s a thing, on the 4th night my son was trying some things. He turned off the Nintendo switch and a smart tv and the connection speed seemed to be restored. Is that consistent with local congestion? (Does local refer to the devices sharing my connection, or to the connections of the households in my street?). I’m not sure why those devices would affect the connection at a consistent time each day.

[#4]

@Rhod As a self-taught technocrat, I never claim to be an expert, but it could be a coincidence or maybe not - I don't have a lot of 'connected' technology, believing that putting all your eggs in one basket is bad policy - plus not trusting a lot of it to work properly..

The 'local connection' I referred to was your local exchange/green cabinet and not specifically your households connected devices, but it is just possible that the combination of having a large amount of equipment connected in the house, and congestion in the external network could lead to the situation you are/were experiencing.

I can't explain the consistent time, either, but again, maybe the locals all have consistent habits, and the load reaches the 'tipping point' at around the same time.

Think you'll just have to keep monitoring, and shout up when/if it happens again.

[#5]

Thank you - sadly it's happening again even as I type this. I had to wait a full 2 mins for this page to load.

I'm back on a BT Smarthub router that I got to see if I could improve the problem with uploading causing download speeds to plummet (it didn't really help very much at the time and started resetting whenever my son tried to access a particular website...) and I can get into the router technical log section. What stats will be useful to us? 

Today I've been trying to upload some short (3-4 min) videos that my wife, a primary school headteacher, recorded for her kids at home (and those in the various classrooms) can watch during the week. 5 short videos were going to take 8 1/2 hours to upload and stopped anyone using the internet for anything while that was happening! When we weren't uploading download speed was fine...until about 20 mins ago (shortly after 11) when everything has slowed to a crawl again...

Don't know whether these issues are related, of course.

If you could let me know what info to share, please, I'll do that tomorrow... Thanks!

[#6]

The 'interesting' information would be your router stats -when running normally and when you slow down, and speed test results from either the BT tester (including the Advanced detail) or Speedtest.net. These won't be cast iron evidence, but they may point us in the right direction.

[#7]

Hmm - getting diagnostics from the BT wholesale speed test page proved to be more difficult than I thought, in that when we were having difficulty it didn't tell us much (see below)! I did manag to get through to the PN help desk - they said they could see the slow down in the service at the times I said, and noticed some noise on the line. They changed two settings - one to improve stability (I think) and one to do with interleaving. We haven't had the regular evening slowdown, but we've had intermittent problems and one lengthy situation last Sunday (when I got the diagnostic below). Plusnet said to get back to them after a little while - haven't had the opportunity since then but will try and phone them again in the next couple of days...

Summary of Performance Test

Timestamp

Sunday 24 January 2021 | 9:59:0

Ping

0 Ms

Download

0 Mbps

Upload

0 Mbps

Summary Advanced Test

The Performance Tester is currently unable to run a speed test for your broadband connection. Please try again shortly, however if this problem persists, raise the issue with your service provider.

When all is well this is an example of the picture:

Summary of Performance Test

Timestamp

Wednesday 27 January 2021 | 17:38:49

Ping

26 Ms

Download

12.32 Mbps

Upload

0.90 Mbps

Advance Test

Download Test

Download speed achieved during the test was 12.32 Mbps

For your connection, the acceptable range of speeds is 4 - 21 Mbps

IP Profile for your line is 12.74 Mbps

12.32 Mbps

21 Mbps

Upload Test

Upload speed achieved during the test was 0.90 Mbps

IP Profile for your line is 0.83 Mbps

0.9 Mbps

0.83 Mpbs

Summary Advanced Test

We were unable to identify any performance problem with your service at this time.

It is possible that any problem you have experienced may have been caused by traffic congestion or by a server responding slowly.

Please visit the "SpeedTest Guidance" for more information.

[#8]

Interesting, @Rhod . That Sunday 'report' crops up occasionally  - I've seen it on my connection -usually means the system is down for maintenance or has got overloaded. The Wednesday one looks OK to me from the information supplied.😉

No rush, but just for my benefit, can you post a current DSL status report?

[#9]

@Rhod 

You need to grind this back down to the basics with objective data.  Data speed tests convey zero useful information, however, the router stats @jab1 requested will provide vital information to see how the plumbing is behaving.

The improvement when the connected devices were turned off, could well have been down to them burning precious useful bandwidth limited by poor line performance.

Broadband is not going to work well if the "phone" line is not working properly.

Please perform a quiet line test - dial 17070 select option 2 using a corded phone plugged into the test socket behind the face plate of the master socket. It should be silent. A noisy phone line (or no dial tone) will have a marked adverse impact on the performance of broadband.

If the line is noisy or there is no dial tone, then a PHONE LINE fault needs to be raised with your phone provider. If this is PlusNet, you can report a fault on line using the button below.  From the Q&A list, choose the one which matches the problem, 'open' the 'section' and click the trouble-shooter link.  NB: If you receive a failure message (rather than a log-in prompt) then log-in to the user portal in a different browser tab and attempt to use the trouble-shooter again.

• Phone Faults