Trying to understand reasons for slow FTTC speed

[#1]

Recently received PN FTTC service, upgrading from PN ADSL (I moved from BT infinity to PN ADSL to save money, but couldn't deal with the speed drop and upgraded to PN FTTC almost immediately).

My speed was around 7mb on the day PN FTTC went live and I reported this as a speed fault.

According to the dslchecker website I could get up to 22.4mb and indeed, when I was a BT infinity customer (at the same house) I was getting 21mb.

Since reporting the fault I've had an Open Reach engineer round and he told me that 8.5mb was the best I could get for my line.

So I'm wondering how I was receiving 21mb before with BT, but not now with PN. Am I stuck with this speed?

I can see that there are two bands on the dslchecker website, one clean and one impacted. I'm guessing that I've somehow now been given an impacted line?

It's all a bit confusing and I'm hoping the PN can sort it out, but not feeling terribly confident about it getting resolved swiftly (took a week to book the engineer).

Any thoughts, info or suggestions would be much appreciated. Thanks.

[#2]

Hello,

Doesn't seem too good 

Please can you go to your router's configuration pages at http://192.168.1.254 and navigate to troubleshooting and then to help desk. Enter admin password (found on plastic card behind router) and could you copy and paste lines 6 to 10 please. 

NE

[#3]

Sure thing,

6. Data rate:	575 / 8666
7. Maximum data rate:	615 / 9253
8. Noise margin:	7.2 / 5.4
9. Line attenuation:	9.7 / 35.5
10. Signal attenuation:	9.8 / 28.1

Cheers

[#4]

Okay well the noise margin seems like what it should be. 

The max data rate for the line is at 9mb like you said in your original post. 

Please could you go to here and see what the estimated and current line speed is?

Many thanks. 

[#5]

Estimated line speed:14Mb (This may vary between 9.3Mb and 14.9Mb) - Checked on 2016-03-09 16:33:52

Current line speed:8.3 Mb

Thanks

[#6]

It seems as if your profile on the account it set at those speeds which isn't good if you were achieving 21mb on your BT connection. 

Could you also see what speeds you are getting on http://speedtest.btwholesale.com/ and once the tests have complete, click further diagnostics, enter phone number and run test. You should get 2 results one for download and one for upstream. A screenshot would be good. Please do remove any reference to telephone numbers. 

You mentioned DSL checker. What speeds was showing on there?

Thanks,

NE  

[#7]

BTW Performance testBT DSL Checker

[#8]

Hi Thanks for that.

It seems strange, and unfortunately I can't help any more on that. Maybe @MatthewWheeler may be able to help on this?

Thanks
NE

[#9]

Unfortunately it's not a easy situation I'm afraid.

The only thing that may have changed is the port in the fibre cabinet but even then I wouldn't expect such a drop in speed.

[#10]

Thanks NE and Matthew for the replies.

Confirmed a short while ago by customer services, my line can't deliver above what I'm getting based on the Open Reach engineers report following a visit last week. I'm pretty disappointed that nothing further can be done, especially considering that I was getting acceptable and useable speeds with BT previously.

Clearly something has happened somewhere, but PlusNet aren't in a position to investigate further and have accepted the report from Open Reach. On this basis I'm going to be leaving PlusNet and hope my speeds return with another ISP, or that the new ISP is less reluctant to accept the engineers report.

Cheers.

[#11]

Hi @iemslie, I'm sorry to hear that you are thinking of leaving Plusnet over this. 

However an ISP change is not likely to restore that speed that you were getting with BT.  Out of all the ISPs Plusnet is probably the best choice in getting faults fixed.  You may try Zen or AAISP as they have a high recognition of getting faults fixed and know what they're doing compared to the likes of Sky, TalkTalk and BT. 

It may be something to do with BT software change which I encountered when leaving Plusnet and got a slower speed by 2-3mb slower than usual, but likely not. 

Hope this clarifies some information

NE