Absurdly low speeds

Hi All,
Staying with my parents for a couple days for work and finally got around to taking a look at their broadband. They'd been complaining for a little while that it was increasingly slow and that they've been struggling to get onto catchup apps or even browse the Internet / download emails recently.

Logging onto the router stats page gives 282kbps download / 929 kbps upload. I'm not even able to reliably run a speed test but the 2 occasions it actually got to the end it was showing a ping of >2k and a download speed of 0.07 and 0.1 mbps.

Unfortunately didn't get in until late so wasn't able to call customer service with Dad but will do that this evening (assuming they're still open when I get back from work). Just wondering if anyone could suggest from the router stats what the issue could be:

Data rate 929 / 282
Maximum data rate 936 / 2200
Noise margin 6.5 / 7.6
Line attenuation 16.2 / 33.5

Thanks in advance,
Stuart.

On hell of a lot of noise!

Failed router/hub/modem?

Those figures are not good reading ... especially te 33.5dB down attenuation when up is just 16.2dB



With PN your dad cann go on the website and add you as an alternate contact. That way you can call PN without him there, or if he has already guven you password access to te account, you can do it. PN are easy to deal with whencalling as an alternate contact.

Is this FTTC or ADSL? Do you know what the quoted speed was when they joined? And finally, have you tried connecting the router to the test socket?

Hey MHC, hope you're keeping well!

Thanks - looks like their CS are open until 8pm so as long as I leave the office relatively on time I should get there early enough to call them with him. I'll let him know about the alternative contact thing though because that could be helpful in future.

It's the router they were provided when they signed up a couple years back - plusnet hub zero? (rebadged sagecom thing). I think I still have an adsl hub sitting around somewhere in my old room - is it worth trying that?

Adsl - it's connected to the master socket but I've suggested to Dad that he checks the internal wiring where he can (ex-BT so he knows his way around an RJ10/11) before we call.

Not sure what the quoted speed was but when I lived with them they got ~8mbps on BeThere (remember them?!) / O2. This is definitely a significant deterioration.

Just checked on his account and it suggests 5-7mbps.

Definitely get yourself as an alternate contact. I am there on my father-in-laws account - makes things much easier.

May be worth trying the other hub and also run with no phones conected. Inspect all leads &c just to make sure, plug and unplug too.

Cheers - just heading home now so I'll give that a try!

Have you tried replacing the filter as it could be that has gone wrong?

Have you plugged in a regular phone handset to check for noise? You can do a silent line test by dialing 17070.

I had a friend who was getting very low speeds on FTTC during lockdown. She eventually agreed to call in the engineer after discovering that he probably would not need to enter the property. He could find nothing wrong but went to talk to her and discovered that every time she had finished with the computer, once or twice a day, she would turn everything off and unplug it including her modem router. This was for electrical safety reasons. Needless to sat the BT system thought it was a fault and kept slowing her connection down to cure it.

The man reset her profile, she changed her habits and now all works perfectly.