Really slow fibre speed

[#1]

Sorry you've had no feedback yet on this, I need to find out where it got to but the person I need to speak to isn't in until the morning.

[#2]

I've STILL heard nothing back from Plusnet about this, despite various promises on this forum and in the fault ticket.
Judging by the number of new posts each day concerning poor fibre performance, especially for new customers, it seems to me that Plusnet simply can't provide what they are advertising.
The fact they can't give me the same quality of service on the same line, using the same basic infrastructure, as Sky could, is making me think that I should cancel my contact as the service has never worked properly!
Doing speed test just now, I got an amazing 10Mbps down and 8Mbps up ... Surely no one in their right mind can think that's a good service when the modem is synching at 64.5Mbps?

[#3]

I'm so so sorry you haven't had an update. That's just not good enough.
I've been over and sat next to one of our faults guys discussing this. The VLAN you are connected to is no longer showing capacity issues, so that should not be causing any problems now.
We'd really need a PPPoE connection direct to the modem as the next step to rule out the router being a problem. This should help with the how to do it: http://community.plus.net/library/broadband/fibre-help-how-to-set-up-a-pppoe-dialler-in-vistawindows...
Also could you run the BT Speedtest, we need the 'further diagnostics' test to be performed and if this still shows a low speed then it should invite you to perform a further test by changing the connection details.

[#4]

A VLAN is experiencing capacity issues? Sorry to be awkward, but as a VLAN is essentially just a segment of network, and I am on a fixed IP address (presumably within that VLAN), the only way that there can be a "capacity issue" is if the total amount of bandwidth available to that VLAN is such that when divided by the number of available IP addresses within the VLAN, there is simply not enough bandwidth to go around - this then surely means that everyone in that VLAN will be experiencing speed issues.
I've just re-run the performance test and attached are the screenshots from that.
The fact I have received such poor responses to this issue is utterly unacceptable! It seems that PlusNet would rather I just stopped asking rather than actually fixing the issue. Certainly the fact that I have to complain on a public forum before I receive a reply to a fault ticket is pretty poor! The fact that I'm receiving one reply per week (if I'm lucky) is even worse - what sort of SLA does that fall under?

[#5]

Quote from: stuclark1975

this then surely means that everyone in that VLAN will be experiencing speed issues.

They may not notice them though. A lot of activities can be considered to be burst demand (web browsing and email for sure. iPlayer also these days on a fast connection) and they won't notice congestion until it gets really bad. Most users simply don't run their connection flat-out for very long and consequently It's amazing how much contention you can have before it becomes a problem for a significant number of numbers.

[#6]

WHY am I still getting no answers on this???
At great personal expense, I've now invested in a BT HomeHub 5 (type A) to see if changing the modem and router helps.
Interestingly, when using the HH as a modem and router, it connects at a great speed (about 60mbps), then gets considerably slower a day or so later, but when using it as just a router with the Openretch modem, it will only connect at about 40mbps, although it seems to be able to maintain this speed for longer.
Where the hell is PlusNet's customer service on this case?

[#7]

Quote from: stuclark1975

Interestingly, when using the HH as a modem and router, it connects at a great speed (about 60mbps), then gets considerably slower a day or so later, but when using it as just a router with the Openretch modem, it will only connect at about 40mbps, although it seems to be able to maintain this speed for longer.

I'm struggling to make sense of this.
When used in conjunction with a separate modem a router cannot have any affect on connection speed. In this configuration the router is not involved in the processing of the signal coming down the telephone line. All of that is being handled by the modem which then generates a completely new and unrelated Ethernet signal representing the data. VDSL is a well specified standard and the variations in performance between any two modems are going to be minimal.
There is an implication in your post that one modem connects faster than the other. That is difficult to understand. It is easy to conceive of a situation where swapping a modem causes a speed drop (which is why should do it only very occasionally) but almost impossible to imagine how swapping a modem could result in a significantly faster connection.
Now changing the router can sometimes make a difference but not in the way you might think. Most routers today include a wifi access point. Now wifi is a fickle beast and in this area at least some routers are better than others. From a quick re-scan of this thread you don't seem to have said whether you are running tests wired or wireless. If the latter then everything you have reported here makes sense.

[#8]

Were the speedtests you've attached above from the direct PPPoE connection to the modem, bypassing the router completely?

[#9]

Quote from: Andrue

I'm struggling to make sense of this. When used in conjunction with a separate modem a router cannot have any affect on connection speed. In this configuration the router is not involved in the processing of the signal coming down the telephone line. All of that is being handled by the modem which then generates a completely new and unrelated Ethernet signal representing the data. VDSL is a well specified standard and the variations in performance between any two modems are going to be minimal. There is an implication in your post that one modem connects faster than the other. That is difficult to understand. It is easy to conceive of a situation where swapping a modem causes a speed drop (which is why should do it only very occasionally) but almost impossible to imagine how swapping a modem could result in a significantly faster connection. Now changing the router can sometimes make a difference but not in the way you might think. Most routers today include a wifi access point. Now wifi is a fickle beast and in this area at least some routers are better than others. From a quick re-scan of this thread you don't seem to have said whether you are running tests wired or wireless. If the latter then everything you have reported here makes sense.

The router is involved when a seperate modem is being used as the modem doesn't know any user log in / password details for the ethernet data being presented by the modem.
As I'm sure I've stated above, I work in the IT industry and am aware of how WiFi works (one of my job functions is managing a WiFi network with over 200 APs in both mesh and WiFi 2.0 modes, using 20 VLANs and 20 SSIDs) - as a result, all my testing is done on machines linked by 1Gbps ethernet to my home network.
As requested, the last set of speedtest results were when directly connected to a PC using PPPoE.
............
It's now another 2 weeks down the line (no pun intended) and I finally heard back from PlusNet yesterday indicating that actually, maybe, BT (sorry Openretch) might have detected a line fault, so in standard BT practice I've had to accept a possible £50 charge to prove my equipment is not at fault (considering Openretch installed the phone wiring within my property it will be interesting to see how they can try blaming me for this, especially when their internal test result shows "No customer wiring faults detected").
I'm beginning to think no one at PlusNet either knows how to, or is willing to, fix this problem!

[#10]

Quote from: stuclark1975

The router is involved when a seperate modem is being used as the modem doesn't know any user log in / password details for the ethernet data being presented by the modem.

Yes, I know that. The rest of my post explains that I'm struggling to understand how a change of router can affect connection speed in the way you describe. It points to a router fault rather than a connection fault. It may be that was also confusing support. Chris asked for more information from you back on the 21st and you've only now responded (unless you responded by ticket), so that might have delayed things. Anyway like you I'd now be concerned about what an engineer is going to find. It doesn't sound like a connection issue to me.
I added the wifi description because I've worked with quite a few network engineers in my time and I find that a lot of them don't understand wireless. Most of them seem to just know how to connect boxes together and don't consider the physical characteristics of the media used. To be fair getting boxes to talk to each other is where the most difficulty usually lies so it's not unreasonable.