My fibre is not all it's bulled up to be

[#1]

Hi all

Fibre finally came to our village about 2 years ago and I was with Plusnet. I always have been. Having allegiance with the Yorkshire roots, I think.

The customer service has always been nothing short of exemplary.

However, the product is beginning to not be the 'saviour' that it was really bulled up to be.
On ADSL the connection was rock solid. I live 350 yds from my cabinet and, as the wires are underground, I followed the BT plans and measured.

When it was tested by Kellys, I was told that it tested at between 55 and 65Mb. This concurs with the VDSL2 graphs.
However .....
When I phone Plusnet, the maximum I can have is 44Mb. Seems to not figure.
A year later, dslchecker drops it to 39Mb
Now two years later the maximum I can achieve is 35Mb
There are only 500 homes in our village, so I don't think contention is the problem

3 days ago the whole things starts going up and down like a bride's nightie. Connection drops. Speeds loosen their grip. And like everyone else suggests, BT are always at exchanges (we have an exchange in our village with 3 vans per day there) and it looks like they have the occasional comedian that 'unplugs and replugs'.
Nothing wrong with the router. My Draytek Vigor is rock solid. The same was happening with my 'awesome' plusnet router on spare testing.

Now I love Plusnet, don't get me wrong, but the whole 'governors of the infrastructure' by BT is fast beginning to grate

 Adding insult to injury, we are a Market 1 area. Which is classed as a 'high cost area'
I have to pay 50% more than people who live in a town 3 miles away?
And no, we don't get the same offers than people in towns and cities
Now forgive me if I sound a bit daft, but if BT lays fibre to either a town or village, it's the same? There's no High Cost or Low Cost because they are all connected by fibre? The copper has been there since year dot. I never got charged higher rate for adsl.

My questions break down to these:
1. Why Market 1 and not all the same playing field? It all connects to the same infrastructure.
2. Drops in minimum available speed? Kellys initial test said 55Mb, down to 44Mb on connection and now to 35Mb. I could be back to adsl speeds in 5 years.

[Edit] I wrote this late last night (Wednesday) when the connection was dropping religiously. This morning ..... it's fine. Amazing!

[#2]

My questions break down to these:
1. Why Market 1 and not all the same playing field? It all connects to the same infrastructure.

I believe market 1 and 2 are ofcom definitions. Designed to stop bt wholesale selling underpriced broadband where there was no competition, otherwise it would stop others wanting to invest in llu. Reality however is there are lots of areas sky/talktalk dont want to invest as they cant make enough money, the the regulated price is higher. The reclassification time is long to encourage investment. This might be helpful article, not sure if much has changed since.

http://forums.thinkbroadband.com/regulation/4435826-ofcoms-market-a-and-market-b-classification-rati...

2. Drops in minimum available speed? Kellys initial test said 55Mb, down to 44Mb on connection and now to 35Mb. I could be back to adsl speeds in 5 years.  

Earlier you mentioned contention, contention would only apply to download throught you get not syncspeed, assuming you were talking about syncspeed at the dsl level 55 to 35 does seem quite a drop, although if the initilal connection was 44 that is plausible even if annoying and irritating. It could be down to joints getting wet, frozen, defrosted and weaker. Could be engineerg brishingnpast connections in cabs losening connections etc. All out of your control unfortunately, and until it drops below the minimum speed plusnet wont even be able to place a fault against it.

one of the staff might be bale to comfirm what your minimum speed for faults is though, or run the btw speedtest, i think test2 tells you what speed they see it as a fault..

[#3]

Hello @o1nk

I'm really sorry to hear your speed estimate keeps dropping. It's possible that something's impacting the line, but isn't cost effective for our suppliers to provide a fix for.

I understand the feeling, I'm pretty much in the same situation at my house; my speed estimate has dropped from 54 Mbps to 42 Mbps in the past 3 years, and my sync rate is always at the bottom of the estimates.

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o1nk wrote:

 Adding insult to injury, we are a Market 1 area. Which is classed as a 'high cost area' 

Just to add to MrSilver's explanation, a Market 1 area is where BT wholesale is the sole supplier of the exchange. I believe their prices are fixed by Ofcom. 

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if BT lays fibre to either a town or village, it's the same? There's no High Cost or Low Cost because they are all connected by fibre? The copper has been there since year dot. I never got charged higher rate for adsl.

Market 1 prices affect both Fibre and ADSL I'm afraid. I think the market areas started around 2005, however I'm unsure when it was that Plusnet passed on the higher cost its customers.

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o1nk wrote:

2. Drops in minimum available speed? Kellys initial test said 55Mb, down to 44Mb on connection and now to 35Mb. I could be back to adsl speeds in 5 years.

[Edit] I wrote this late last night (Wednesday) when the connection was dropping religiously. This morning ..... it's fine. Amazing!

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Happy to hear that your connection has stabilised. I'll be happy to run a few tests down your line for you tomorrow once I'm back in the office to see if I can detect anything not quite right.

[#4]

Just looking at your connection, @o1nk It's been pretty unstable at the start of the week, but seems to have cleared itself over the past few days.

Testing your broadband isn't identifying the cause of the issue.

Sync Status	In Sync
Downstream Speed	34.8 Mbps
Upstream Speed	8.4 Mbps

Voice Line Test Result

Pass

The sync speed is however below your speed estimate,

Featured Products	Downstream Line Rate(Mbps)		Upstream Line Rate(Mbps)		Downstream Range(Mbps)	WBC FTTC Availability Date	WBC SOGEA Availability Date	WBC FTTC 18x2 Provide Availability	WBC FTTC 18x2 Sim Availability	Left in Jumper
	High	Low	High	Low
VDSL Range A (Clean)	49.4	35.7	9.2	6.8	--	Available	--	--	--	--

I'd advise to try connecting your router into your test socket, as explained here: https://community.plus.net/t5/Library/Testing-From-The-Master-Socket/ba-p/1322242

If the speed doesn't improve/the connection problems return, then the next step would be to raise a fault to us at http://faults.plus.net so that we can progress this to an engineer.

[#5]

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@Anoush wrote:
Market 1 prices affect both Fibre and ADSL I'm afraid. I think the market areas started around 2005, however I'm unsure when it was that Plusnet passed on the higher cost its customers.

Just to nit-pick: If I remember correctly it was more a case that they started charging lower prices for the low cost areas than raising the price in the Market 1 areas.

[#6]

We've had this discussion before, but the different wholesale prices in Markets A and B only applies to ADSL1 (IPstream Connect). Anyone can look at the Openreach and BTWholesale price lists for themselves. You won't find any different prices for FTTC that vary between Markets A and B.

Edit: I forgot - there is one difference - there's no cease charge in Market A.

[#7]

@ejs

So are you telling me that the extra £90 a year I pay because I live in what is still called a Market 1 area where-ever I look is a total rip off as it doesn't cost PN a penny more than areas with LLU?

[#8]

Yes. It's amazing that Plusnet continue to get away with it by saying it's due to Ofcom or whatever. You are, of course, free to go to any other ISP who don't tend to have area-dependent FTTC prices.

I don't know where you looked, but Ofcom changed to Market A and Market B back in 2014.

[#9]

Don't forget the phone line price, I thought that was different prices?

[#10]

Where did that idea come from? When has anyone ever been given a different line rental price depending on their Market A/B area?

You can also look at the line rental prices from Openreach. There aren't different prices for Market A/B. There's only the one price.

In case anyone is thinking along the lines of "but there must be some reason why Plusnet charge the higher prices in Market A": Yes, there is a reason for the higher prices, the reason is for Plusnet to get more money. It's clearly a very effective strategy considering they've been getting away with it for so long.

[#11]

I've started another thread under feedback to see if PN will take any notice. Hopefully it will gain some legs!