Broadband drops down load speed; router reset brings it back up

[#1]

The line is Unlimited Fibre Extra (FTTC). Router = Plusnet Hub One.

This usually gives ~ 67 download; ~ 17 upload (which is fine).

This is according to the BT Wholesale test (but others give similar results). The house is 0.3 miles from the cabinet.

For some reason, this will drop suddenly to ~ 24/ ~ 17. Resetting the router brings it back to 67/17.

It is not clear what causes this. There is a load of work VPN traffic through it and this does not seem to cause the issue at all.

It may be use of downloading to the Sky box (but this is not a clear problem).

It may be use of downloading using Goggle Podcast (certainly recent use of this had the speed at  ~24 / ~ 17 afterwards, but not conclusive).

Any ideas what this may be please.

Thanks.   

[#2]

Sounds like a wireless issue. Before we go down that path are your devices wireless or do you have anything wired to your router having issues?

[#3]

Thanks for the post ...

Having watched this for the last few days, then the following observations seem to apply (and this looks like it is a wireless issue).

When the drop was observed on a phone (wireless), the same same drop was seen on a laptop (wireless); and on a 2nd phone.

When the laptop was then wired, the speed increased. When the laptop was went back to wireless, the lower speed  was seen etc. This was repeated.

There have been occasions when 2 phones have seen the same drop (at the same time), but there is definitely a case where phones were recording a lower speed, but a wireless laptop was seeing higher speed (same location in the house).

Resetting the router always seems to restore the speed straightaway; sometimes (but certainly not always), restarting a phone restores the speed. On at least one occasion, going outside the proximity of the router, caused the speed to restore on return.

Generally, the higher speeds are ~ 67/~ 17; the lower speeds are ~ 24/~ 17, there is rarely anything in between.

And 2 different tests (e.g. BT Wholesale and uSwitch) give broadly the same results all the time.

[#4]

@shepherdsj  This is possibly one of the known problems the Hub 1 has which has not yet been fixed by an official release firmware update. It affects the 5Ghz wi-fi band. Have a look at this rather long thread which started around 6 months ago....

https://community.plus.net/t5/My-Router/Throughput-issues-5ghz/m-p/1735734#M18667 

I don't use a Hub 1  as it has a number of annoying faults, that Plusnet say will be fixed in a future firmware upgrade. How far into the future is not known.🙄

[#5]

RealAleMadrid,

Thanks very much for this.

I think this could be the reason, it looks like this is related to the 5Ghz band (I haven't found a way to manually switch my Samsung from 2.4 to 5 and vice versa but it does change automatically from time to time and seems to change speed doing this).

The router firmware is .263 (last updated 13/08/19 and so pretty old).

Sounds like several new versions are available (can a later one be pushed down?), although it doesn't look like there is a fix for this ... other than a different router.