random speeds...

[#1]

i'm fine with the fact that we may not get peak speeds all the time
but what i'm not fine with is that my speeds go down to adsl levels, i've had 2mbits rather than the 13mbits i was getting on adsl2+ which makes no sense at all
and also why would this be happening in non peak hours?
in peak hours it's mostly been fine...
there has to be something going on? maybe lots running torrents over night?
anyway i think we need to investigate

[#2]

Quote from: bluewhale

bit odd how this is only happening on fttc though as i hadn't seen this on adsl2+

I think that's the key thing, from the exchange back to the Internet everything is exactly the same as ADSL2+, from our network's point of view it can't actually tell the difference between FTTC and ADSL2+ (except it might be a bit faster). Maybe there's lots of people in your area downloading overnight, there's only a certain amount of bandwidth available. BT don't cap the bandwidth but there are limits on how much can get through if you see the difference. The fibre from the cab to the exchange has a finite amount of capacity and same with the backhaul links so in theory it could all get full and slow things down. A drop in speed of a third is within the acceptable amounts for BT's tolerance.
I am feeding things back though and will let you know what I find out.

[#3]

Quote from: dave

A drop in speed of a third is within the acceptable amounts for BT's tolerance.

i've been dropping from 26mbits down to 1 or 2mbits which is way more than a third
personally i don't think a drop of a third is acceptable on the pro plan either, otherwise what am i paying for..

[#4]

Pro doesn't offer any advantage on a speedtest, nor does it make any difference to the BT side of the network. Pro puts all traffic in the titanium (VoIP and gaming) or gold queue (everything else), and doesn't have any rate limits so the lower priority traffic on Extra or Value like P2P or Usenet or Rapidshare gets a high priority on our network but you're still subject to contention on the BT side of the network. The threshold on BT's side for a sync speed fault on FTTC is less than 15Mbps for throughput speed then it should be above 8Mbps for 90% of the busiest 3 hours of the day. FTTC like ADSL is delivered across a shared network and that means that sometimes contention will kick in somewhere.

[#5]

sorry that way too complicated an answer...
are you saying that between the hours of 11pm to 6am i can expect to get 1mbits as i have had regularly happen?
are you also sying that on pro i may well end up with the same service/throughput as on a cheaper package depending on who's on my exchange?

[#6]

I'm saying that if the speed problem you're saying is down to the BT side of the network then Pro doesn't offer any advantage on a speed test. Pro doesn't make any difference BT side. If you are still seeing 1Mbps speeds though then that would be considered a fault. The speed shouldn't drop below 8Mbps more than 10% of the time (i.e. for 90% of the time it should be more than 8Mbps).

[#7]

i understand what you are saying but you must be able to see my irritation on paying for and not then getting a service
doesn't matter to me where along the pipe the issue is, i would have thought that's for plusnet to sort out
also so is that 10% of a day? an hour?

[#8]

We are very much considering it to be a trial, and as such things may go wrong, things may be out of our control and may take longer to fix as such we can't guarantee service. It is our responsibility to fix yes absolutely regardless of where the problem us, but to be considered a problem it has to meet certain criteria. A 30% reduction in speed for example at peak is perfectly acceptable, while 1Mbps permanently overnight isn't.
The 10% is the busiest 3 hours of the day, averaged across a week. So if in your area the busiest time was 7pm - 10pm (which is generally the case unless it's a business area) and you ran 20 speedtests across the week in that time (1 per hour across each day), to be considered a fault you would need to see 3 or more of the speedtests below 8Mbps.

[#9]

I had a bit of a revelation today when I visited a friend who is lucky enough to have Virgin Cable, download speed solid 50Mb/s and upload 1.5. Pretty Impressive. Makes FTTC look like dial up. Even more impressive is that there is no monthly download limit.
Will BT ever be able to support that kind of broadband?  _ I would have hoped now that the FTTC and FTTP were here, that we would get close, but it looks like BT have their own bottlenecks. Why does cable not suffer from that? Do they have their own backbone round the country that is fatter than BT?

[#10]

Is there anything up with the network?  For the past couple of days I have been seeing slow speed (say 5Mb or slower) and pings on speedtest.net > 100 ms during evening peak hours.  Albeit pings to bbc.co.uk are as normal.  Looks like a contention issue to me.
Yesterday it was going on for midnight before things sped up again.

James

[#11]

Seems bad tonight here

Perhaps the Chile Mine Rescue streaming?

[#12]

Those speeds are consistent with the ones I am seeing on mybroadbandspeed as well.
The BT Speedtester gave me a better result earlier (18 Mb/s) but all the web based ones, downloads, video stream etc are very slow tonight.  If it's anything like last night once it gets close to midnight the speeds will jump.

James

[#13]

lol, I don't think most speedtesters can be trusted. Just tried 5 different ones, and they all gave me vastly inferior results to the expected. Only speedtest.net gave what I would consider a true result.


P.S. my speed is slightly low atm

[#14]

@TonyC
I ran the speed testers after your post and was still getting low speeds.  The BT one was the only one giving good speeds (Dave - is this prioritised?)  I see your ping was high, although not as high as mine which was about 180ms at that time.
Video streaming on the 360 kept dropping down to the lowest quality setting, usually it is happy running in top quality even during peak hours.
Everything sped up for me again just before midnight.

James

[#15]

Quote from: TonyC

lol, I don't think most speedtesters can be trusted. Just tried 5 different ones, and they all gave me vastly inferior results to the expected. Only speedtest.net gave what I would consider a true result. P.S. my speed is slightly low atm

If only speedtest was accurate lol