How long to wait for a fault ticket response?

[#1]

Raised a speed fault ticket on Monday 12th at 9.48am and have had no response or follow up since. The last thing on the ticket is "The Question 193038883 has been released from hold and sent back to BOT - FTTC Logged Faults - Speed" at 9.51am. This seems an excessive wait without any sort of response.

The background to the fault is- I've been a fibre customer since February 2013 and have had no problems apart from a drop in sync speed from 77mbps to 67mbps way back around October 2013. Since then the connection has been rock solid with download speeds between 64-65mbps and upload speeds of 17-17.5mbps. Since October 2013 I've had no reason to contact support and I can't actually remember any time that I've noticed my connection has been down. I'm still using the original Openreach modem that was supplied at the start but have only ever used my own router, currently this is Google WiFi which had been running very well since January this year. So, in summary, I've been a very happy customer with decent download speeds and a rock solid connection.

This all changed on Friday 9th in the evening when I suddenly lost connection to the internet. The DSL light on the modem was still green but I couldn't reach any web sites. I tried turning off the modem and router but this didn't change anything. I tried rebooting everything several times after this and eventually I could connect to the internet again. But when I checked my download speed using www.speedtest.net my download speed was 7mbps, upload was still 17mbps. Over the weekend I ran speed checks many times and the results varied wildly from as low as 760kbps to as high as 46mbps for downloads but was always a fairly steady 17mbps for uploads, but never anywhere close to a download speed I was getting very consistently for the past 6 years.

On Monday I raised the fault ticket and ran the tests at www.speedtest.btwholesale.com, this showed 8.88mbps down and 14.34mbps up on an IP profile of 68.17mbps. Since then, while waiting for a response from support, I've continued checking with the different speed checkers as well as the btwholesale one with wildly differing results like before e.g. I've seen 1.2mbps download and immediately re-run and seen 29mbps, upload speeds have not really varied.

[#2]

Hi @dhrae,

I'm sorry the fault ticket hasn't been picked up in a timely manner. We can take over the fault process for you in the community and manage it from there. I've popped your GEA test below so you can see what your router looks like from an Openreach test perspective. TBH everything looks fine, the profile at the exchange is 74Mbps.

I think in the first instance it might be best to remove the OR modem from the equation for testing. I've sent one out from here, if that makes a difference you can look to purchase your own should you wish. If it doesn't then we'll look to move down an engineer route for you. 

[#3]

Thanks for the investigation. I'm still getting strange fluctuating download speeds, tried again just now (all run one immediately after the other) -

http://www.speedtest.btwholesale.com/ gives me 45.64Mbps down and 21.5Mbps up, IP Profile is 68.17Mbps

https://www.speedtest.net/result/8503595524 gives me 4.37Mbps download and 14.76Mbps upload

https://www.speedtest.net/result/8503606364 gives me 17.95Mbps download and 15.03Mbps upload

I'll await the replacement modem and report back whether that sorts it out or not.

[#4]

Hi again,

I received the new modem/router today and it has connected. The DSL Line Status section in Plusnet Hub Manager says downstream is 73.91 Mbps and upstream is 20 Mbps. But, I'm still not getting anywhere near that download speed.

To clarify, my PC is connected via ethernet to the Hub One; Wifi is disabled on the PC; there are no other devices connected to the Hub One via Wifi or ethernet. The PC is running Win10 Pro completely up to date.

I've run speed tests using https://www.speedtest.net/ using both Chrome and Edge; Chrome has several extensions installed, Edge has none.

With Chrome I ran 3 speed tests,one after the other - 22.27, 21.20, 22.00 Mbps download and 18.49, 18.52, 18.51 Mbps upload

With Edge I also ran 3 tests one after the other - 26.30, 30.02, 31.67 Mbps download and 18.45, 18.51, 18.51 Mbps upload.

I also tried http://www.speedtest.btwholesale.com/ using Edge and got the attached screenshot. I'm not sure how trustworthy the BT speed test is, seeing as it reports an upload speed of 31.74 against a max achievable of 20

I subsequently tried a couple of real world examples. Downloading the latest Nvidia drivers from their web site had a max download speed of 1.3 MB/sec using Edge. For as long as I can remember, Nvidia downloads have always downloaded at the maximum speed possible. Downloading using the Netflix app on Win10 gave a max download of 14.4 Mbps.

Strangely though, using JDownloader2 gives the option to choose downloading a file using multiple connections. Using the test files at http://xcal1.vodafone.co.uk/ showed an interesting result. If I set maximum download chunks to 1, then it only downloads at around 450 KB/s but if I change maximum download chunks to 20, then it downloads at full available speed of 7.66 MB/s.

Almost as if each individual connection on my line is being throttled.

[#5]

Hi @dhrae

Sorry to hear that the new router hasn't resolved this.

At this stage, I think getting an engineer to take a look at this for you would be beneficial.

If you could provide your availability via your fault ticket here we'll get that booked in for you.

Best wishes

Dave

[#6]

Thanks for the quick response. I've updated the ticket.

[#7]

@dhrae

Ticket also updated

Thanks for your patience whilst I got this booked in for you.

Best wishes

Dave

[#8 · Accepted solution]

Engineer came this morning and tested the line and everything was OK, he also changed the master socket faceplate as he said the existing one was obsolete. Even though everything was OK on his test equipment, I could still show him that the download speeds I was getting was nowhere near what it was supposed to be, he suggested that it must be something at the Plusnet end as the line was showing green all the way to the exchange.

5 minutes after he left, the download speeds started rising and are now back to what they were before, I can only think that one of the tests he ran managed to resolve some issue somewhere. Everything looks fine now

[#9]

Hi @dhrae,

I'm glad to hear the engineer visit went ahead as planned and that everything appears to have improved. Please keep an eye on how it goes over the coming days and if any further problems occur please let us know so that we can pick this back up for further review.

[#10]

Could this be a hot vlan ?