A smaller slice of the cake

[#1]

Over the past year or so I've notice that my download speed has reduced from around 70mb down to around 50mb.

I raised a ticket in response and the answer was that BT had set the line speed and this was beyond Plusnet to change.

Cynically I'm thinking after all this time that this is how BT manage their capacity vs delaying hardware/infrastructure upgrades.

It seems to me what they are doing is reducing the available bandwidth available to existing customers so they can squeeze more on before outlaying any expenditure on upgrades in capacity.

Has anybody else experienced this scenario where your bandwidth has been reduced due to change by BT?

It's frustrating because I'm paying the same amount for a reduced bandwidth and there doesn't seem to be anything a mere mortal like me can do anything about it.

[#2]

Hi @TWA
BT do not manage capacity issues by slowing connection speeds down.

Most so called fibre broadband is Fibre To The Cabinet (FTTC) and VDSL over copper telephone wires to the house.
Telephone copper cables were designed to carry voice signals and not designed to carry VDSL.
DSL over telephone cables has some issues, one being crosstalk.
Crosstalk is the term for the signals in all the copper cables intereferring with each other.
Some telephone cable bundles can have hundreds of copper wires in them.
The more FTTC is adopted from each cabinet, the more crosstalk occurs.

To maintain the connection between the cabinet and customer modems, VDSL has to slow the connection speed.
If it did not slow down, it would not connect at all.
Such slow downs are the achilees heel of VDSL etc

The solution is to abandon copper telephone cables and use Fibre To The Premise (FTTP) or full fibre.
This does not suffer from the crosstalk problem.
Openreach have started the process of replacing copper with full fibre but it will take many years to fully deploy.
Plusnet have yet to start selling FTTP packages.
Regards
Richard

[#3]

Hi Richard,

Thank you for an excellent explanation as what is clearly occurring under my circumstances.

Once FTTP become a viable proposition in terms of affordability I'll probably make the jump.

Cheers

Terry 

[#4]

This is an interesting one. I had this issue with Vodafone VDSL.  It was happily skipping along at 78mb for 7 months. Never even a hiccup. Really solid service. Then, mysteriously, overnight it refused to connect above 55mb. Tried different hardware and all the usual stuff.  They told me that this was "faster than the minimum guaranteed speed" so just suck it up basically.  So I went to Plusnet and low and behold I'm back up at 78mb.  Same cabinet and installation.