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I am being forced to leave Plusnet due to phantom traffic shaping .

Mrblue861
Hooked
Posts: 6
Registered: ‎24-01-2020

I am being forced to leave Plusnet due to phantom traffic shaping .

After  many months of slow down load speed with hours spent on the phone to plusnet residential tech support  , the people in the business side of plusnet have found that my line is being " throttled down" by 75% , with no explanation as to why ? This generally happens at weekends Friday evenings to late Sunday night , it can last all week end ,or just at random times .

has any one else been in this situation ? And if so was it sorted out  

 

11 REPLIES 11
Gandalf
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Re: I am being forced to leave Plusnet due to phantom traffic shaping .

Thanks for your post @Mrblue861 

I'm sorry to see you're experiencing speed problems. We haven't had traffic management on our network for almost 3 years now, at least for residential Unlimited packages so we're not throttling your speeds.

I've tested your line and the tests aren't showing any issues with your speeds as shown below:

GEA Test Detail
Circuit ID: N/A Service ID: [redacted]


Test Outcome Pass
Test Outcome Code GTC_FTTC_SERVICE_0000
Description GEA service test completed and no fault found .
Main Fault Location OK
Sync Status In Sync
Downstream Speed 79.3 Mbps
Upstream Speed 20.0 Mbps
Appointment Required N
Fault Target Fix Time  
Fault Report Advised N
Estimated Line Length In Metres 520.5
Upstream Rate Assessment Very Good
Downstream Rate Assessment Very Good
Interference Pattern Regular Interference Observed on Week Days
Service Impact Retrains Observed
Interference Duration Longest Occurrence From21:45to22:00
Interference Location Unknown
Interference Observed In Days 5
Home Wiring Problem Not Detected
Downstream Policing Discard Rate 0.0
Customer Traffic Level Upstream and Downstream Traffic Detected
Technology VDSL
DP Type External
Current 15Min Bin Retrains 0
Last 15Min Bin Retrains 0
NTE Power Status PowerOn
Voice Line Test Result Pass
Bridge Tap Not Detected
Radio Frequency Ingress Detected
Repetitive Electrical Impulse Noise Not Detected
Cross Talk Detected
Profile Name 0.128M-80M Downstream, Retransmission Low - 0.128M-20M Upstream, Error Protection Off
Time Stamp 2020-01-16T14:30:00
Parameters MIN MAX AVG
Down Stream Line Rate 23.9 Mbps 79.9 Mbps 75.1 Mbps
Up Stream Line Rate 17.0 Mbps 19.9 Mbps 19.7 Mbps
Up Time 0.0 Sec 900.0 Sec 881.6 Sec
Retrains 0.0 2.0 0.0
Current and Last 15 Minute Bin Performance
Parameters Last Traffic Count(Upto 15 mins) Current Traffic Count(Upto 15 mins)
Start Time Stamp 2020-01-25T16:13:33Z 2020-01-25T16:28:33Z
Ingress Code Violation 0 18
Egress Code Violation 0 1
Errored Seconds 0 1
Severely Errored Seconds 0 0
Unavailable Seconds 0 0

While your connection is dropping fairly frequently I understand from reading the notes on your account that you're rebooting your router to try to fix the problem you're experiencing. I'd actually recommend against rebooting your router too frequently because that's going to eventually have an adverse affect on your broadband connection.

image15799706213352

 

Notes also suggest that your devices are connecting over WiFi, so it may be that you're getting a lot of wireless interference at peaks times slowing down your throughput making it seem like you're being traffic shaped.

 

So I can get a better understanding and try to get to the bottom of this with you, I've got a few questions. Are all and/or the majority of the drops shown above a result of you rebooting the router? Do you experience slowdowns at peak times on a wired connection, i.e. a computer plugged directly into the router using an ethernet cable?

If your speeds are slow on a wired connection, to investigate further can you run the BT Speedtester at https://speedtest.btwholesale.com with no other programs running at the same time such as streaming, general browsing and the most common one is antivirus programs downloading updates in the background.

Once the initial result is completed please click Further Diagnostics then type your phone number in and click run diagnostic test. This will run a test and send the results to the BT server for investigation.

Let me know how you get on.

From 31st October 2022, I no longer have a regular presence here as I’ve moved on to a new role.
Anoush Mortazavi
Plusnet
Mrblue861
Hooked
Posts: 6
Registered: ‎24-01-2020

Re: I am being forced to leave Plusnet due to phantom traffic shaping .

I have been there and done all the tests as you suggest , I have been in contact with Tom who works on the Business side of 

plusnet and he has confirmed the download speed is being " throttled "  traffic managed or what ever by openreach , it took him

a few seconds to change the line profile , and after resetting the router this set the line speed to normal , Tom is not sure if openreach will be able to fix the problem , however same evening while watching Amazon prime , the tv picture suddenly degraded , sure enough a quick speed test confirmed that the line speed had dropped from 

65 to 69 down to 20 mps , finished watching the program, reboot router , like I said before this normally happens weekends , or in the evenings sometimes rebooting the router works sometimes it does not , same fault occurs using plusnet hub one , bt hub 6 and TPlink 2800 , wired or wireless  same fault , .. 

Mrblue861
Hooked
Posts: 6
Registered: ‎24-01-2020

Re: I am being forced to leave Plusnet due to phantom traffic shaping .

Screen shots not opening on here  ... will try another 

Gandalf
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Re: I am being forced to leave Plusnet due to phantom traffic shaping .

Thanks for getting back to us @Mrblue861 

Sorry for any confusion, I can confirm that you are not traffic shaped because there is no traffic management for the package you're on. What previous advisers may be referring to is the 'connection profile' on your account which will restrict your throughput if it's set below the bRAS profile of your line. 

The only reason this profile may change is if your connection drops which will force your router to physically re-sync to the equipment at the cabinet at a new speed, that's something we've got no control over.

If you completed that speed test on a direct ethernet connection with no switches or powerline adapters in place and there wasn't anything using your broadband at the same time we'd need to arrange another engineer to investigate further. Let me know if you're happy with this and I'll be happy to get the ball rolling on this.

[edit]

Actually could you also leave your router on for 72 hours without rebooting it? I'd like to then check back and retest your line and we'll go from there as this should hopefully give us an accurate reading of what's happening with your line.

From 31st October 2022, I no longer have a regular presence here as I’ve moved on to a new role.
Anoush Mortazavi
Plusnet
Marksfish
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Re: I am being forced to leave Plusnet due to phantom traffic shaping .

What about a few Thinbroadband speed tests to see if there is a difference in multi thread and single? Could indicate a congested exchange?

Mrblue861
Hooked
Posts: 6
Registered: ‎24-01-2020

Re: I am being forced to leave Plusnet due to phantom traffic shaping .

So I have had two engineer visits already ..so what is a third visit going to look at ? If you can walk me through how to upload a photo on here I will show you BT's line test result ...

Gandalf
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Re: I am being forced to leave Plusnet due to phantom traffic shaping .

Looking at the S-VLAN utilisation data there's no congestion seen at the exchange, but from looking at the reactive repair tool(RRT) data we can see the line is erroring and it's detecting a potential line issue.

My recommendation is to leave your router switched on for the next 3 days without rebooting it. We should then be able to get a more accurate picture as the forced drops caused by the reboots may be causing the errors we're seeing.

After the 3 days I'll re-run the tests and we'll see where we are. It's always possible that the line issue and errors we've detected isn't caused by the reboots of the router but at this stage I'd like to start ruling things out.

I believe you've already uploaded an image on to your post, if you want to upload anymore images or photos you'd do that in pretty much the same way using the Insert Photos button when making your post.

From 31st October 2022, I no longer have a regular presence here as I’ve moved on to a new role.
Anoush Mortazavi
Plusnet
Mrblue861
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Posts: 6
Registered: ‎24-01-2020

Re: I am being forced to leave Plusnet due to phantom traffic shaping .

Gandalf
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Re: I am being forced to leave Plusnet due to phantom traffic shaping .

Thanks, this just shows you're getting a slow throughput. While it's good to see it doesn't really tell us where the issue lies. 

Could you just confirm if all and/or the majority of the drops pictured above are when you're rebooting the router or if they're happening by themselves? Conscious about which path we go down to try to resolve this. 

From 31st October 2022, I no longer have a regular presence here as I’ve moved on to a new role.
Anoush Mortazavi
Plusnet
Mrblue861
Hooked
Posts: 6
Registered: ‎24-01-2020

Re: I am being forced to leave Plusnet due to phantom traffic shaping .

Slow speeds can be at peek time or just occur at totally random times,  sometimes rebooting will reset speed sometimes not .

when I went on line for the first time today ( 12:00 ish) download speed was in the 19 - 26 range , router reboot fixed it , but this slow speed default can last 2-3 days regardless of any amount of reboots .

Gandalf
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Re: I am being forced to leave Plusnet due to phantom traffic shaping .

Thanks for the detail,

Seems to rule out congestion if you're having issues at non-peak times as well.

I'd like to see what our data looks like without frequent reboots of the router although the odd occasional reboot should be OK.

The data is always about 24 hours behind so to get a couple of days worth of it I'll check back on Wednesday at the latest. 

From 31st October 2022, I no longer have a regular presence here as I’ve moved on to a new role.
Anoush Mortazavi
Plusnet