It's about 6 weeks since I switched to the usual fibre broadband, FTTC, and while it's been a lot slower than the Minimum Guaranteed Speed, it's been reliable and hugely faster than the previous ADSL. Over this time there have been signs of the normal speed testing and resulting speed increases, until things started going bad over the last week.
From the email of 14th April confirming the change was to be made:
At peak times, we estimate that you'll get the following speeds on your line:
Download: 31 - 40Mb
Upload: 6 - 9Mb
Minimum Guaranteed Speed: 30.9Mb
I've done checks with various sites that give speed comparisons, different ISPs plotted on the map, and for my location, the above figures look optimistic, though I realise that these sites may be biased toward people checking on lower than expected speeds.
Speeds settled to about 75% of the MGS, one of the fastest speeds reported from around my location, and reliable, with the usual margin between the Data rate reported by the router and the actual throughput. I was a little disappointed, but put it down to the usual advertising hype.
For the past bit-more-than-a-week, may have started just before the end of May, the system has been trying to push the speed, getting up to this, about 83% of the MGS
Data Rate: 25.710 Mb/s / 5.943 Mb/s
Max. Attainable Data Rate (ATTNDR): 26.455 Mb/s / 5.946 Mb/s
And this is when the line drops started...
They seem to be happening after about 11pm, which sort of fits with a sensible trial and error timing, no obvious weather elements, though the forecast for the coming week suggests that if rain is a factor, it will be thoroughly tested.
Other info;
Modem/Router: BT Home Hub 5A running firmware OpenWrt 18.06.1 r7258-5eb055306f
Computer connected with Gigabit ethernet
Computer running Linux Mint, Kernel 4.15.0-51, all software up-to-date
There are, incidentally, known limits on the open-source drivers used by OpenWRT, not quite as fast as the stock BT firmware, but that only reduces the maximum throughput on the ethernet and Wi-Fi, not the ADSL/VDSL connection. Most of my LAN uses a separate Gigabit switch
I do have some settings under OpenWRT that might help reliability, but I don't want to confuse things.
If somebody has noticed I am not getting the MGS, and has started pushing things from your end, maybe they should stop trying so hard. There are two possible routes my connection to the cabinet could follow, one almost a straight line, and one about 150% longer, and the various surface physical signs, manhole covers and overhead cables, are consistent with both, so I can see how a mistake might have been made.
