80/20 FTTC Trial Open

[#1]

Hi All
I've been on the trial for a few weeks.  In the first week or so, the BT speed tester was indicating a profile of 77.43mb and I was getting some speed test results in the 70s.  Since then, the profile has been around 65 mb, with speed tests up to around 60mb.  Is this a normal part of the line training process, or should I report a fault?  It seemed fairly stable when it was at the higher speeds.

[#2]

BT beta speed test now showing 58.28Mbps. Dropping rapidly.

[#3]

Morning all,
You may have seen a few of my previous posts, started well on standard FTTC @ 38/2 full speed. After one day moved to the 80/20 trial, with an IP profile of 77 from day one.
These speeds were never achieved, with variations from 1MB to 56MB (once). The speeds were 20-40 in the morning and 1-12 in the evening. The upload was always nearly a full 15-16 though.
PN staff were always on top of it, phone-calls, testing, updating via my ticket and the forums. Cannot fault them.
The last update on my ticket asked me to run the BT speed tester with the BT domain login and the BT/plusnet domain login. This I could not manage, I kept getting redirected to the BT Wholesale fault page, despite following the instructions.
I gave up last night in frustration, and ran another few speed-tests this morning, expecting the usual variations. However, every test was 70+ down and 15+ up.

I didn't do anything, I'm wondering has anyone else noticed improvements? Curious if someone in BT "flipped a switch" or do PN have any info on this type of jump?
Very happy, hope it stays like this!

[#4]

Beardy,

Interesting to read your note. My 80/20 trial speeds are still all over the place and nowhere near as stable as those I got on the 40/2 service.
I'm rapidly loosing interest in the pilot and if things don't improve over the next week or so I'll surrender my place.
Come on PN...........what's going on here as it's not an isolated issue ?
3g

[#5]

I have been looking at the different download and upload speeds that people are reporting (and I'm obtaining), one possibly interesting thing I've observed is that it seems quite possible to obtain around 93% of profile speed for download but I've yet to see anyone reporting significantly more than 85-89% for upload (many are seeing 75-80%).
The reason I find this odd is that most people will have a lot more SNR margin on the upstream so I'd expect minimal loss through errors and yet upstream throughput is a lower proportion of sync/profile in the majority of cases.
For myself, I was seeing about 1.77Mb/s upload at best on the old 40/2 and now generally get  17.7Mb/s at best on 80/20 (88.5% of the 'available' 20Mb/s), my modem reports an upstream margin of 15dB and an attainable speed of 31712kb/s, my download is generally hitting about 92% of sync (nearly 95% of BRAS profile).
Does anyone know of a technical reason for this?
I'm not complaining at all, it just seems a little odd.

[#6]

Interesting point walker23. I have always seen 15-16, hit 17 a few times.
I wonder what the highest experienced upload is?

[#7]

Subject: Broadband network outage - Faraday (70911) - NEW
At approximately 11:10am a significant number of our broadband customers lost connection to the internet. We suspect this was caused by an outage on our supplier's network.
I've been one of those without broadband for the last 1.5hrs.  I was going to say all's back to normal, but just check my latest output from the BT beta speedtester...

[#8]

Quote from: paulkdavies

Hi All I've been on the trial for a few weeks.  In the first week or so, the BT speed tester was indicating a profile of 77.43mb and I was getting some speed test results in the 70s.  Since then, the profile has been around 65 mb, with speed tests up to around 60mb.  Is this a normal part of the line training process, or should I report a fault?  It seemed fairly stable when it was at the higher speeds.

Hi, that is exactly what happened to me as well. It was stable at the higher speeds, it is fairly stable at the lower speed, but it appears that the DLM kicked in after 2-3 days and lobbed 8-9Mb off the download. I logged a fault (53010087) to get it checked out and have asked Adam a couple of times to take a look to see whether he thinks the comments on it are reasonable and whether my speeds are ever likely to go back up to where they started, but he hasn't apparently picked up on it, probably because he's too busy trying to sort out people with far worse problems!

[#9]

Disappointingly I've just had this update to my ticket #53237078

Quote

Line throughput will still fluctuate at times depending on a number of factors, some which can't be controlled, the Pro Bolt on assigns a higher priority to most traffic types however some traffic will still be managed. It's the numerous variables that will cause the fluctuations such as load on the network and usage patterns.

It is this bit that worries me: Pro Bolt on assigns a higher priority to "mos"t traffic types however "some traffic will still be managed" if they are trying to explain why I am constantly seeing 25Mbps sustained throughput at times like 03:00 and 13:00 (weekdays) when my IP profile is 75.35Mbps AND I have the Pro Add-On! According to the info available the Pro Add-On gives line-speed 24 hours per day for the following services:
Browsing
Email
VoIP
Peer to peer/Usenet
PlusnetFTP
ExternalFTP
VPN
Gaming
YouTube
Download sites
Download servers
Streaming
Other
As the slow throughput has been observed during these activities what else would reduce the throughput by up to 75% under normal conditions? This has been going on for around 3 weeks now. Great the first week then blam!

[#10]

There's a word for that response and it rhymes with rollocks!

[#11]

Nollocks?

[#12]

I think traffic in the gold queue has to be classed as "managed" because (though it's unlikely this would happen) packets could be dropped if capacity is all taken up by priority (titanium queue) traffic.

[#13]

But still, the difference would be minimal surely.

[#14]

Absolutely correct.

[#15]

Quote from: Bazza

Disappointingly I've just had this update to my ticket #53237078 Quote Line throughput will still fluctuate at times depending on a number of factors, some which can't be controlled, the Pro Bolt on assigns a higher priority to most traffic types however some traffic will still be managed. It's the numerous variables that will cause the fluctuations such as load on the network and usage patterns.

That is an extremely disappointing response from support and it is a shame that this sort of nonsense still happens despite the generally high quality of support we get. It clearly doesn't begin to address your problem. This is one of the reasons I keep asking Adam to do a reasonableness check on the response to my ticket!