Broadband was very good but is now very slow

[#1]

After a good spell (2 years +) of reliable service I seem to have hit a rough patch for no good reason. 

I'm not actually seeing complete drop outs but from a typical download speed of around 16 - 18 Mbps I am now reduced to 1 - 2Mbps which is painful; nothing has changed with my equipment. The poor performance has been consistent for about 6 days now.

I use a wired connection to a PC, and wireless connections to a Mac laptop and to an iPhone, the speed reduction (and frustration) is similar on each. I've rebooted each piece of equipment several times over, checked all cables and connections and replaced the adsl filter; all to no avail. By way of final proof that my equipment is working I have switched to my 4G mobile wi-fi dongle and all three devices show excellent speeds both down (average 30  Mbps) and up (average 25 Mbps) ... and this is all on wifi.

I have no way of testing the router itself which is the the original Technicolor unit supplied by Plusnet but all the led's appear ot work as they have always done.  

I've been on to support by phone and they assure me everything checks out from their end and I'm waiting to hear whether an engineer visit is required, but am very distrusting of the immediate mention of a £65 call out charge, is this just a money making scam? are there any guarantees that normal service will be resumed? 

I'm on an exchange only line (no cabinet connection) and less than 100 metres from the exchange itself, every inch of cable (to the echange) was replaced about 5-6 years ago, the phone works fine and there does not appear to be any sound of crackle of interference on the line. 

So where do I go next? 

[#2]

Sorry to hear you're having issues.

I've tested your line and it isn't showing any obvious causes.

With regards to the £65 charge this only applies if the engineer can't find a issue or the fault is found to be caused by your own equipment.

Have you been able to test another router at all?

[#3]

Assume you've tried plugging router into Openreach's Test Socket?
You could do with posting router stats too.

[#4]

Once again, thank you for your time on the phone @spc

Sorry to hear you're having problems with your speed. We've tried turning off Web Browsing Interception in your router settings as this can be the culprit sometimes of slow speeds, but seems not so in this case.

I've sent you a new router which you should receive within the next 3 to 5 working days.

Please feel free to let me know how you get on. Whilst the ticket on your account will expire after 14 days, this forum thread will stay open pretty much indefinitely.

Have a good weekend.

[#5]

Thanks for the replies everyone, after spending more time checking things on a call with with Anoush it appears the next step is to try a new router (I don't have access to an alternative to try) so will wait for that to arrive and see if that provides the cure!

Thanks all 

[#6]

No problems, let us know how you get on.

[#7]

Sight of full diagnostics would be illuminating...

Please post your router stats; for PN TG582n and 2704n routers use the buttons below, for other routers look at the Kitz link.

Also run a BT Wholesale speed test (ideally using an Ethernet wired PC with the WiFi turned off) then run the further diagnostics and post the results here. DO NOT REBOOT the router!

Also find your CURRENT SPEED (PlusNet line profile) from the PlusNet user portal - you will need to log in.

• TG582n Stats
• 2704n Stats
• Kitz list
• BTw Speedtest
• PN Profile

 Also have you checked the line for noise?

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.

[#8]

---

@Townman wrote:

Sight of full diagnostics would be illuminating...

---

Upstream DSL Link Information	Downstream DSL Link Information
Loop Loss:	0.8	6.5
SNR Margin:	6.5	2.8
Errored Seconds:	0	3
HEC Errors:	0
Cell Count:	84535	1647505
Speed:	1179	24295

It's worth mentioning, the OP continued to experienced problems with the SNR Target/Margin at 6db.

@spc - Let us know if you've had time to setup your new router and retest.

[#9]

@Gandalf - thanks Anoush had not expected that from yourselves.

Wow that is one super hot line!  However if it's still dropping out at 6dB I'd start to look for noise / interference.

The OP reported a history of much lower consistent speeds which might infer that the target SNRM might have been higher than 6dB.

Personally I'd suspect that a piece of electrical equipment had deteriorated ... and I'd want to monitor the SNRM using router stats or similar ... which is not going to be assisted by the use of one of the newer (BT hides useful stats) routers.

[#10]

No problems Townman.

There doesn't appear to be any drops in the connection. It looks like it's just the throughput that's poor.

Fingers crossed it's just a faulty router and the new one fixes things.

+Edit+

Yeah the sync speed is pretty nice, indicating that the OP doesn't live far from the exchange.

[#11]

Replacement modem arrived and installed, sadly no improvement

Have re-run the speedtest using BT WHolesale as previously advise, performance is exactly as before. 

I am obviously concerned that there is a fault, what surprises me is that historically performance has been good; there has been a sudden drop in performance but there has been no change at all in the equipment I use of the way that I use it. 

[#12]

Sorry that you're still having issues with the performance of your connection. I've just checked over the fault ticket and can see that one of my colleagues from the faults team has been looking in to this in the last 15 minutes so you should receive an update very shortly.

[#13]

I'm just following up on this for you @spc it looks like the engineer today has replaced your master socket and advised us your fault is fixed? Have your speeds improved?

Anoush.

[#14]

Yes, master socket replaced and low and behold everything appears to be working as it should, so I'm hoping this is a long term fix. Download speed back to 17-18 mbps.Upload speed never was good and still isn't so I use a 4G device for that.

[#15]

Fantastic, happy to hear that. Fingers crossed it holds.

As for your upstream, it looks like it's because interleaving is activated. Interleaving is a form of error correction that can help stabilise a connection and slow down the upstream as a result.

Now that you've a new master socket and hopefully the troubles will be fixed by this, I've placed an order to remove interleaving which should happen within 24 hours.

Let us know how you get on.