Fibre speed halved

I've been on fibre with Plusnet for just over a year now and for most of that time have had speeds averaging 18Mbps down and 2.5Mbps up. In the last week however I have noticed this has dropped by half.......http://www.thinkbroadband.com/speedtest/button/142960538685266366024.png.

The BT wholesale speedtest site says there is nothing wrong with my line and this is the speed I should expect. So how come it's dropped by half after over a year? I might add that nothing has changed on the set up side in the house. I also have several examples of speedtests taken through thinkbroadband over the year to prove I was getting 18Mbps!

Probably cross talk from other new customers.

Are you on WiFi or a wired connexion?

Could well be crosstalk of wired, mine went from 80MBps to 65MBps over the course of 14 months as more customers signed up.

I'm on a wired but you may be right. Fibre's only been available in the last year and I'm pretty sure I was one of the first to sign up. No doubt everyone else has now caught up. Pity, after only getting 2Mbps before I was really enjoying it. I suppose a lot of people would say I'm lucky to be getting 9Mbps!

Ok. Just done a little bit of research on "crosstalk". Good article here for those of us who aren't as au fait with all the technical aspects of FTTC.......... http://www.increasebroadbandspeed.co.uk/2014/vectori...
So next question is where are we with BT introducing "vectoring" which seems one of the more obvious ways of alleviating the problem? I know they are trialling it in certain areas but if it's not introduced soon, reading the above article, the situation will only get more and more worse across the country.

What is the line length? If the 18 Mbps was good for the line length then probably cross talk.

Can tell its an Ethernet connection from the test, and also looks like hitting connection limit rather than being limited due to errors.

To get some idea you really need a VDSL2 modem that gives access to the stats. A small chance you have an ECI modem on a Huawei cabinet where G.INP has been turned on and this can impact speeds, in addition to increasing cross talk as more people buy service. The Billion 8800 NL is fairly popular as supports G.INP and while not fastest wireless, with your connection 802.11n is more than enough.

Thanks for reply. I'm using an Asus RT-AC68U router but, at the moment, have left it in it's normal set up configuration. I don't suppose there's anything I can do on it to make matters better though from a wireless point of view I have switched to 5GHz.

For some reason, and having checked many times with different kit, on my ASUS RT-N66U with which I'm generally happy I've found the 5GHz wireless, (one of the things I bought it for), totally useless compared to the 2.4GHz.

It's not bad when browsing, but downloads or speedtests are dreadful, varying hugely over the timespan. On 2.4GHz I normally get the full speed - only fractionally down from wired.

It's a pity ISP's don't mention up front in their adverts that there is a possibility that speeds could drop quite a lot for some customers due to crosstalk issues but then again that would be like asking turkeys to vote for Christmas

Thanks for the info Roberto. Funnily enough the BT Openreach engineer turned up at my door about an hour ago. I didn't even know that Plusnet had requested him. Long story short he has been to the cabinet and put the speed back up to 40 Mbps from 27. However he is still puzzled as I am still only getting 13.75Mbps down although the sync speed is showing 40Mbps. I am about 1300m from the cabinet but he still thinks my speed should be faster. The ping this time was 25ms as against 36ms when he first tested it. He says there is nothing wrong with the line from the cabinet to the house.
My technical knowledge on FTTC is limited so when I say he has now gone directly to the exchange to have a look I'm not sure why.

Adverts can only cover so much, the estimate at sign-up is when to deal with this as you have the details of the line and the full A-B range from Openreach.

Have you checked firmware versions, using an RT-N66U here (behind ECI modem) and wireless is fine, at the 19-21 Mbps I connect at.

I would recommend running the 5GHz on its own SSID, makes it easier to tell if a device is using it or not, and the fall off as you pass through walls is worse on 5GHz to be expected, and oddly RT-N66U 5GHz takes longer to appear in the Wi-Fi lists on an iPhone at least.

Also ENSURE you have actually got any QoS controls turned off, easy to turn this on and forget you had something set-up to slow you down to preserve latency for gaming etc

If the sync is showing 40Mbps then you have always had a problem. Which Plusnet product are you on?

If the sync was 17Mbps prior to the engineer coming then that would give an IP Profile of ~16.45 Mbps and a Plusnet Current Line speed of ~16.44Mbps. Although the IP Profile should rise immediately the sync does, the Plusnet copy (Current line speed) only updates from that a few times a day. That will be restricting the speed.

If you run a BT Wholesale Performance Test, (ignore the red instructions and just say you've done them), then on the results page ignore those as well and go down to click Further diagnostics. That asks for your phone number then gives much more information.

Please copy and paste the full contents of the two text boxes of results. We don't need the graphics.

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