Question Thread

[#1]

OK. I got the impression that rebooting the modem didn't matter. Do I need to wait another three days now? If so, this seems to be a very silly system. I think I might be writing to OFCOM soon (about BT's policy, not the plusnet bit of it). I accept that this is a trial and that I should expect some weirdness, but these rules would have applied to any other disturbance of this kind, right?

[#2]

It's basically caused by the initial intermittency when you moved across.
A period of stability for 3 days should fix the problem.  I personally have "issues" with the use of banded profiles.

[#3]

Jameseh said:

Quote

It won't matter if you turn your router off in the evenings.

Just to be clear, how does rebooting the modem differ from switching it off? Or has there been some other kind of instability?

[#4]

(9th Oct) The modem has re-negotiated the connection at 448 / 2,139 but https://portal.plus.net/my.html?action=data_transfer_speed still reports a profile of 250. The latency seems a bit less (which does make browsing nicer), but the download rates are still low. I guess things will keep changing. I'm just keeping a record of what's happened when.
Update (13th Oct) Jumped up to 2400 or so last night, and I could stream at 1500kbps quite nicely, but it's back down to 250 again this morning. I noticed last night that there were some call minder messages from Saturday. I've always found the weird dial tone interferes with the broadband for some reason. Hopefully this is just temporary.

[#5]

Hiya,
Your profile has just changed at the BT end to 1750Kbps, so I've just mirrored this change at our end.
Your may need to reboot your router in order to see the difference.

[#6]

Hi,
I've just joined the FTTC trial but my download speed is exactly the same as it was before, despite the test done by the BT engineer who installed it showing a much higher line speed (40Mbps down, 15Mbps up).
Looking at the high speed broadband page shows my current line speed is unchanged and matches the result of the speed tests I've done, so I suspect this might be capping my downloads. Is there supposed to be a delay before the speed is increased? If not, could you check it for me please?
Also, how do I see the line info from the Thomson router or the BT modem that was supplied (if such a thing is relevant on FTTC)? My Belkin ADSL router used to show the sync speeds, noise, power, etc. on the main page but so far I haven't spotted anything similar on the Thomson. I suspect I won't see anything on the Thomson because it's just connected to the BT box via ethernet and it's the BT box that is the modem. I've got no info about the BT modem at all (not even an IP address) so I don't know where to start there.
Any help would be appreciated, thanks.

[#7]

Hiya,
I've just tried calling but unfortunately you weren't available.
I've upped your profile speed to the fastest that our systems currently allow (21Mbps).
We can't and (amusingly) BT can't see the speed that you're actually syncing at - just the profile that they have at their end, which is presumably 40Mbps.  We'll have a fair chunk of dev work to get our customers to see the faster speeds, but we'll do that once the trial is seeing greater volumes.  How's the stability?

[#8]

BT's put me back on a 250 line profile again, it seems 8-,
The modem is negotiating at 448 / 2,027. Is there any other reason it would be so slow? I'm using http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/diagnostics, since that's what I'd like to use high-speed broadband for.

[#9]

Hi,
Stability seems OK so far as the router is showing:
        Uptime: 1 day, 13:30:40
        Data Transferred (Sent/Received) [MB/GB]: 102.78 / 1.04
I presume these stats would reset if the line dropped but not being familiar with the Thomson, I'm not sure. Is there anything else I should be looking at?
I had a report of poor performance watching videos earlier but I wasn't around at the time and didn't see it for myself. Given that, it's difficult to attribute the problem to a particular cause. Could have been the site, could have been contention or general net activity (it's patch Tuesday!). I'm still seeing a max of about 6Mbps on downloads and speed tests. Should the change you made have had an effect automatically or do I need to restart the router? I try to avoid reboots if possible given everything I've heard about profiles being reduced if BT think your connection is dropping. Does this affect FTTC too or is fibre dealt with differently? Anyway, apart from the lack of speed I haven't noticed any problems so far.
By the way, I mentioned in my last post that the BT engineer used some test kit on the line and it showed it was capable of 40 Mbps down but he actually said it was capable of a lot more but was capped at 40. Just thought that might be of interest if you hadn't heard it already. Sounds to me like those living further from the cabinets might be able to get higher speeds too.

[#10]

@ Baudbrand
Are you noticing any connection drops at all?
It sounds like you've been moved back onto the banded profile, but this shouldn't happen if your connection doesn't drop.

[#11]

The uptime is 1 day, 11:47:06, so that's about 9pm on Monday. I think that is the last time I rebooted the modem (at your suggestion) and the connection was relatively fast for the rest of that evening. How would I tell if any had happened in the interim?

[#12]

Hmm.  Odd!
I'm not seeing any dropped connections for you and your connection is *not* banded.
Can you please reboot your router again please?

[#13]

OK... yep, looking a lot better. Will let you know if it happens again. Should I try rebooting the modem when it does, or does that risk making BT's evil robot think there's been a dropped connection?

[#14]

Hi Jameseh,
I waited until this evening to see if the speed change would take without restarting but nothing happened so I decided to restart the router (I've noticed you recommend that a few times  ). I wasn't sure if I just needed to restart the Thomson router or if I had to do the BT modem too so I did both just to be on the safe side.
I switched them both off then switched the BT on first, waited for the DSL light to go solid and then started the Thomson......
I was a bit worried for a while because it didn't connect.  It kept showing last error status as disconnected by user and clicking the connect button (yes on the internet section, not the DSL bit) didn't seem to make any difference. Eventually it reconnected - after about seven and a half minutes
Anyway, once it reconnected the speed was up


and hopefully I won't have to restart too often.
Any idea why it took so long? Is that normal for FTTC? Also, should I have restarted both or could I have just got away with restarting one of them (and if so, which one)?
One other thing I noticed with the speed tests, occasionally I'd get one that was very fast


but then it always dropped back to the line speed you've set  (like I managed to sneak in a fast one before your system noticed and slowed it down ;D) 

[#15]

To be honest, it looks like the speedtest.net doesn't particularly like reporting faster speeds.
I have to admit, I have no idea what should be normal for FTTC to connect, I wouldn't have expected it to take that long though.