New customer connection speed all over the place!

[#1]

---

@Rhod wrote:
Ok, feedback on the connection first - we’ll get on to the Smarthub in a moment.
Connection speed seems on average to be better than my old connection (good) but does seem to fluctuate significantly (not so good) and sometimes the connection and/or upload speed reduces to zero (really not so very good at all). Usually this is short-lived but not optimal. My wife says she hasn’t got through a whole exercise video without the buffering symbol interrupting since the new connection. Given that we’re pretty much at the 10 days settling down point I’d appreciate the views of this group (or John 😉) about how to address this. A quiet line test gives a faint high pitched noise but this is there even before you dial so not sure if this is relevant.

On to the router. Set it up with the excellent instructions from @Baldrick1 - all works fine and we now have a connection and choice of bands on all devices except for an old laptop (HP Pavilion g running Windows 10) which took a network card reset to connect to the internet and which does not show the 5Ghz connection. Is that normal for aged devices?

I was hoping that the new router would help with the issue that uploading anything moderately big significantly affects download speed : if some-one is uploading a pictures or video no-one can stream anything. The new router may have improved this slightly but YouTube still takes an age to load and runs at low res if a video is uploading...anything I can do to improve this - will e.g. uploading on 2.4Ghz and downloading on 5 make a difference? Thanks!

---

Morning @Rhod .

As my brain tends to work better in the morning, I thought I'd better try and post my thoughts earlier rather than later.

If you are still seeing fluctuations and 'drop-outs' it would be good to see the DSL stats - I think these are available somewhere on the 'trouble-shooting' page on the router, but not having one to look at, II can't be 100% sure.

I don't think we need to worry too much about the phone - presumably using it doesn't cause any drops?

I hope you have 'split' the 2.4 and 5Ghz bands?

How old is the Pavilion? It is possible that it doesn't have 5Ghz capabilities, as some older/cheaper machines are not so configured, but a look at the specs in the manual will soon tell you if it is single or dual band.

The upload/download conflict is a consequence of ADSL capabilities, and unfortunately I have found the only way to get round the problem is to avoid trying to do both at once. Using different bands will not have any effect.

That's it as far as I can see so far, but feel free to continue asking questions - I am available for the next week or so, but will be away for a fortnight or so from 08/09, and won't be spending much time on the computer during that period, although other community members may offer advice.

[#2]

---

@Baldrick1 wrote:

@Rhod 

Scanning through this thread a few thoughts:

When you are doing a speed test are you aware that you must be connected to the router via an Ethernet cable?

When you are doing a speed check you must make sure that no other devices are active at the same time.  You can only use your available bandwidth once.

If you are downloading the packets need to handshake with a small upload at regular intervals (and vice versa). If you are uploading at the same time then the handshakes have to wait and this can screw up download speed. This is called buffer bloat.

Have you considered upgrading to fibre?

---

@Baldrick1 I didn't think the HH6 suffered from 'buffer-bloat' to the extent of the 2704N?

[#3]

@jab1 

I haven't claimed that it does but the facts are that the maximum upload speed of ADSL is normally sub 1Mbps so there's not much headroom if you have users trying to upload and download at the same time and that's without remembering that you can only use the availabile bandwidth once. Hence my recommendation to consider fibre if it's available.

[#4]

Sorry, @Baldrick1 - I must have mixed posts up when I was composing that reply - you didn't. I agree entirely with the rest of your comments.

[#5]

Thanks, @Baldrick1, good points all.

Yes, I'm aware of the implications of measuring speed over wireless v ethernet and when others are using the connection. The speeds that I referred to earlier were over ethernet and after declaring a moratorium on internet use amongst the rest of the family (not something that goes down particularly well on a regular basis!). As I've periodically tested since, yes, I have just checked this over wireless and without checking others' usage, but my observations are based on user experience rather than on the numbers.

I have considered upgrading to fibre, but I can't really justify the extra expense at the moment. The truth is, I think a standard connection like this one should be fine for our needs. Our previous connection was mostly OK, and we changed because:

1. I was doing the comparison on all our utilities and insurance policies and recognised that we'd had the previous contract for 8 years or so, and were overpaying for what we were getting.

2. The upload preventing download thing was becoming tricky because of increased uploading during the pandemic. I thought that a newer router might improve things - this was suggested by tech support approx 4 years previously, but not followed up on by them or me at that point. I was unaware that the Plusnet router would be of similar vintage to our previous one! ...hence the Smarthub installation.

3. We did hope that a new connection and new router might result in a more consistent download connection so that the whole family can watch a programme on iPlayer (i.e. only one thing downloading and nothing uploading) without it stalling.

In short, I don't think that the speed is the main issue, rather the inconsistency.

Thanks!

[#6]

---

@jab1 wrote:

---

If you are still seeing fluctuations and 'drop-outs' it would be good to see the DSL stats - I think these are available somewhere on the 'trouble-shooting' page on the router, but not having one to look at, II can't be 100% sure.

I don't think we need to worry too much about the phone - presumably using it doesn't cause any drops?

I hope you have 'split' the 2.4 and 5Ghz bands?

How old is the Pavilion? It is possible that it doesn't have 5Ghz capabilities, as some older/cheaper machines are not so configured, but a look at the specs in the manual will soon tell you if it is single or dual band.

The upload/download conflict is a consequence of ADSL capabilities, and unfortunately I have found the only way to get round the problem is to avoid trying to do both at once. Using different bands will not have any effect.

That's it as far as I can see so far, but feel free to continue asking questions - I am available for the next week or so, but will be away for a fortnight or so from 08/09, and won't be spending much time on the computer during that period, although other community members may offer advice.

---

Thanks, John - hope you're not neglecting your guests 😉

The only reference to a troubleshooting page on the router is a link to a BT web page which requires an account, which I think I need to be a BT customer for. What stats am I looking for? Is it the same things that you requested back in your first reply?

When you say cause any drops do you mean in phone calls? Not, not experienced that, although the landline doesn't get much use for phone calls!

Yes, have split the bands. Both available to all devices (elderly laptops excepted)

The Pavilion is a bit ancient. Can't find a specific model number, but a bit of research suggests that's it's likely it's only single band capable. Not a problem - it connects OK to the 2.4 Ghz band (after a bit of fettling as noted) and it's not used for streaming.

Understood, from your comments and Baldrick1's about uploading. I think the Smarthub has given us a small improvement, and big uploads can always happen in the morning before half the household are up!

Many thanks!

[#7]

@Rhod 

Sorry if I keep butting in and interrupting @jab1's assistance but sometimes two heads can help. It's possible that you have random noise on your line meaning that you have a lot of retransmission errors at random times and that it might help if your SNR was increased. This is something that Plusnet can do on ADSL lines if necessary. The available stats on a Smarthub are limited but it might give a bit of an insight if you log into the Smarthub advanced\technical log page and take note of the up and down noise margin. This should remain fairly constant and if it drops during a slow down could give an indication that this is a factor.

When you are all watching Iplayer is that over a wired connection?

[#8]

OK, Rhod. I'm sure there is a way of accessing the stats on the HH6 - as I said, I've no experience of it at all, but @Baldrick1  will no doubt help out here.

The 'interesting' page would be one that looks something like the one I'll attach to this post - not exactly the same, but with equivalent data. NOTE: this is from my TG582N router.

Yes, my reference to drops was when using the phone.

I thought the Pavillion would only be single band, you need fairly recent gear for dual.

Don't worry about my guests, I finally threw them out about 10.30 last night.😁

Cross posted with @Baldrick1 

[#9]

@jab1 

Our posts obviously crossed.

@Rhod 

You will find the data rate on the same page as I referenced above.

[#10]

Apologies for the radio silence...

Noise margin: 5.9 dB / 6.9 dB at the moment - will keep an eye when we're having problems. I should have logged in and watched last night when we were streaming Line of Duty on iPlayer - the stream was interrupted 6-7 times in the hour long episode, at a time when no-one else was using the internet. Next time....

In answer to your very pertinent question, @Baldrick1 , we're watching iPlayer over wi-fi. Sadly our LG TV ceased to be "Smart" when they no longer updated the software for iPlayer and other streaming services, so we are reduced to using a Chromecast with no ethernet connectivity. We could try a laptop and HDMI...if I've got cables long enough....

But you could be onto something - it may not be our connection into the house that's the issue....

[#11]

This is a copy of the page of data - the uptime, 19 hours, is interesting as nobody's turned off the router in that time (and the last time we tripped the mains was a couple of weeks ago!).

Many thanks!

Product name:
BT Hub 6A

Firmware version:
SG4B1000E020

Firmware updated:
24-Mar-2020

Board version:
1.0

Gui version:
1.115.0

DSL uptime:
0 Days, 19 Hours 4 Minutes 1 Seconds

Data rate:
1.07 Mbps / 12.89 Mbps

Maximum data rate:
1300 / 13448

Noise margin:
5.8 dB / 6.9 dB

Line attenuation:
34.5 dB

Signal attenuation:
18.2 dB / 34.5 dB

VPI / VCI:
0/38

Modulation:
G_992_5_ANNEX_A

Latency type:
Fast Path

Data sent / received:
2 GB Uploaded / 79 GB Downloaded

[#12]

Thanks for that data @Rhod .

The figures that don't quite seem to be correct (to me) are the correlation between your data rates (max) and your line attenuation - my attenuation is very similar to yours, and the last time I had BT out the SFI involved told me that at that level the best I could expect would be somewhere in the region of 8/8.5Mbps download on a very clean line.

My current data rate as reported by my monitoring program is 7.85 and speed tests (hourly) around 6.8.

Strangely enough, every so often the BT DLM equipment decides to up the data rate to around 12.5Mb/s, but, as I expect, this lasts for a max of 24 hours, and then I get 3 or 4 interruptions while it realises the impossibility of this speed and winds me back down to 8.0Mb/s or so.

Maybe this could be an area worthy of further investigation?

Is there anywhere on that router which is called anything like an 'event log'? That is another useful chunk of information, and may explain your apparent low DSL uptime - that figure suggests that the connection was dropped, most likely due to DLM intervention 19 hours earlier.

Sorry for asking all these awkward questions, but in the absence of any intervention by PN staff, they are the only ways for us to investigate.

[#13]

@jab1 

Sorry to disagree but this web site suggests that the download speed to attenuation ratio is abour right.  https://www.increasebroadbandspeed.co.uk/2012/graph-ADSL-speed-versus-distance

@Rhod 

To be honest when measuring download speed you must use a wired connection.

Have you separated the 2.4 and 5GHz wireless bands? If not it's worth trying it.   See step 12 here.  It's the first 12, I screwed up with my numbering on the original post.  https://community.plus.net/t5/My-Router/Using-the-BT-Smarthub-6-on-a-Plusnet-Account/m-p/1587673#M85...

[#14]

OK @Baldrick1 I'll take your word for what that article says - I'm a bit brain-tired at the moment but will have a look tomorrow if the weather prevents me doing what I have planned, but the SFI I am talking about was the senior one for the whole of the Sheffield region and certainly knew his job - he sorted a problem I had been chasing for 6+ months and numerous engineer visits in about three hours.

[#15]

---

@Baldrick1 wrote:

@jab1 

Sorry to disagree but this web site suggests that the download speed to attenuation ratio is abour right.  https://www.increasebroadbandspeed.co.uk/2012/graph-ADSL-speed-versus-distance

@Rhod 

To be honest when measuring download speed you must use a wired connection.

Have you separated the 2.4 and 5GHz wireless bands? If not it's worth trying it.   See step 12 here.  It's the first 12, I screwed up with my numbering on the original post.  https://community.plus.net/t5/My-Router/Using-the-BT-Smarthub-6-on-a-Plusnet-Account/m-p/1587673#M85...

---

Understood, @Baldrick1 , thank you - currently attached with ethernet cable.

I can confirm that I have separated the bands.