We recently upgraded to the Premium service with the idea that we'd see improved line speeds when switched over to an ADSL2+ line. After a battle with Plusnet to actually get us onto ADSL2+ we saw a nice increase in sync speed with an associated increase in the data transfer rate. We used to sync in between 1500-2000 with the ADSL1 connection, but now sync usually above 5000.
The trouble is the line speed. During the afternoon/evening/night it's horribly slow (I don't know about morning), we see speeds of about 1Mb, which creates issues.
Our IP profile according to BT has us at 4500k, which is about right, we occasionally sync in just below 5000, so there are no problems there. Plusnet also mirrors this estimate, listing 4500 as our current line speed.
My first thought was simply that we're being limited by Plusnet during peak hours, so I had a look at the table showing the speed we should see vs the time of day.
The first issue this creates is with streaming and playing on line games. My brother plays a lot of on line games(mainly World of Warcraft), whilst I and other members of the family, like to stream. According to the Plusnet Premium download speeds table, we're supposed to get line speed on both gaming and streaming at any time during the day. So apparently Plusnet aren't limiting us in anyway. This is also backed up by the fact that at midnight we're supposed to get line speed on everything, however in reality we don't. The trouble is that during the hours of the day when we actually want to use the internet, we cannot stream properly and any attempt at streaming always creates unplayable latency for anyone wanting to play on line games.
As you can appreciate, this is a problem.
All the problems with speed vanish as the night goes on, usually by around 2am we can actually get line speed. Last night speed testers gave download speeds of just over 4000, which is perfectly acceptable.
The second issue is we're paying for a service that we're not actually able to make much use of. What with the speeds only becoming available when everyone has gone to bed.
We do live close to the centre of Manchester and we use the Rusholme exchange, which is one of the main Manchester exchanges. This no doubt has a lot of data going through it, especially since there will be hundreds of students also connected to it. I could understand the bottleneck being the exchange, but what I don't get is why it takes until so late at night for the performance to start increasing.
Is there anything that can be done about this? As the current situation is a big problem.
Also the exchange is undergoing and upgrade, installing fibre optic cables under the FTTC scheme. We are very interested in being part of any trials that go along with this, if it's possible.
