Signed up for 300mbps but keeps dropping to 70mbps

[#1]

Signed up to FTTP 300 which at the start was working great but after a couple of weeks it dropped back to 70mbps 

Read a few bits on here and turned off my router for 5 minutes and all was great - back up to 300.

2 days later and it has dropped back to 70.

Any ideas ? Have read that I should not keeping turning router on and off and have checked the lights on the open reach box on the wall and they are doing what they are meant to be doing. Tried filling in the form on the PlusNet website but that kept returning an error message.

Any ideas and thoughts welcome ….

[#2]

How are you connecting to the router? Wired or wirelessly? When using Wi-Fi, you're likely to be limited to the quality of the Wi-Fi connection e.g. if quite a distance away from the router and connected on the 2.4GHz channel you're not going to see headline speeds.

[#3]

Are your DATA speed tests being run over WiFi or an ethernet cable (with WiFi turned off)?

Where did the ethernet cable between the router and the ONT come from?

Line SYNC speed is what you buy and that is not the same as the DATA speed which an individual device can always consume.  It is deeply unfortunate that FTTP provides no means of the user determining the uplink SYNC speed.  The best that a user can do is measure the speed their device can ship DATA to the ONT by whatever version of wet string they use for that connection.

@bobpullen can type faster!

[#4]

Many thanks for your reply.  To answer your questions, I am connected to the routed wirelessly and running a Speedtest whilst sitting next to the router.

70mbps is the speed I got before upgrading to FTTP 300 so it seems odd that it has dropped back to that 

You mention the 2.4GHz channel - should I change that ? If so, how ?

[#5]

If 70mbps is the best that your WiFi / PC can do, it matters not how fast the internet connection is, that devices is not going to download any faster - particularly over WiFi.  You might however see better CONCURRENT downloading across several devices with FTTP.  Your query illustrates well a gross mismatch of expectations with reality.

Why do people think that speed is king?  Most individual devices are never going to need such speeds - if they do, then WiFi connectivity is not the answer.

How do you switch WiFi bands, well that depends on the capability of your PC - does it support 5GHz WiFi?  Then you need to think about the distance between the device and the router.  One characteristic of being faster, is that the coverage is shorter - think about the mobile "evolution" from 2G to 5G - the size of mobile cells (the area covered) has become progressively smaller.

If it does support 5GHz WiFi then to be sure that you are on the 5GHz WiFi SSID you need to be able to split the bands - which is not supported by the Plusnet Hub Two routers.

The real question here is why do you think your need (can use) more than 70mbps to your PC?

[#6]

Thanks for your reply.

It is a shame to see there is a gross mismatch in my expectations and reality.

I don’t understand why I have had 300mbps and now only getting 70mbps and when I restart my router it goes back to 300mbps

[#7]

@Sherlock1  You don't mention which router you are using but doing speed tests over Wi-Fi are meaningless. Are you able to do a test with a wired ethernet connection?  

If you still get low speeds take the router out of the equation. Set up an PPPoE ethernet connection from a PC direct to the Openreach ONT and test that.

Of course if you have no devices with ethernet it makes it very difficult to diagnose your problem.

[#8]

It can be a challenge to know the precise circumstances between two different test events if the test is conducted over WiFi and time separated.

• With a router which does not facilitate the splitting of the 2.4GHz and 5GHz SSIDs you cannot be certain that the two tests are comparable - if you want to do some comparable testing over WiFi the Plusnet Hub Two does facilitate turning off either of the two SSID bands
• When a router starts up, it will choose the least congested WiFi channels - at the time of a subsequent test, you cannot be assured that the WiFi channel remains optimal
• At the time of startup, your device might be the only one connected and transferring data - as more devices connect, performance deteriorates - see 2.4 and 5 GHz Wi-Fi: What’s the Difference? | Computer Cures
  
  "It’s tempting to connect every device to the 5 GHz network, but that isn’t always the best idea. Too many devices on the 5 GHz band can cause congestion, slowing down speeds and resulting in an unstable connection."
  
  

The only way that you can do a dependable DATA speed test is to connect the test device over Gbit quality ethernet cable to the router ... which is only of any use if the PC ethernet port can do better than the typical 100mbps.

As for an expectation gap, is there really one here?  The product speed is the ONT to the internet - that is unlikely to be the same as a user device to the ONT, for the variety of reasons mentioned herein.  Do you have an expectation that 70mbps will deliver a discernable difference to the one device than 300mbps?  The point of higher bandwidths over FTTP is that more devices can CONCURRENTLY connect at fairly high speeds.

If you had four devices connected (over ethernet) all concurrently delivering 70mbps, then I think you'd agree that would be within reasonable expectations - if they each ran at only 20mbps then there might be grounds for concern.

@bobpullen - would I be correct that for WiFi to sustain 300mbps+ it would need to function in wide-band mode?  I have seen routers "wakeup" in wide-band mode (monitoring with inSSIDer) only to then later fall back to standard band mode.  Might such behaviours explain the experience reported here?

[#9]

I am using a PlusNet Hub Two router 

[#10]

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@Townman wrote:

@bobpullen - would I be correct that for WiFi to sustain 300mbps+ it would need to function in wide-band mode?  I have seen routers "wakeup" in wide-band mode (monitoring with inSSIDer) only to then later fall back to standard band mode.  Might such behaviours explain the experience reported here?

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300mbps is achieveable under favourable conditions when connected to the Hub Two's 5GHz radio (80Mhz channel width). The hub does not support 160Mhz channel width/DFS channels.

What device is being used to run the speedtests? If it's a smartphone, then it's likely that we can establish what radio is being used and what the PHY rate is by looking somewhere in the Wi-Fi settings or downloading a third party app. That may shed some light on what's happening.

@Sherlock1 - am I safe to assume you do not have any other Wi-Fi extenders/access points on your network? 

[#11]

I do have two wifi extenders running. Should these be switched off ?

[#12]

Oh yes - they will at least halve the WiFi throughput.

The only meaningful data speed test is one run over Ethernet with everything else turned off.