In reply to a post by craski:

Yeah, I wanted a business service with a service level agreement but to date the SLA hasnt been worth having. I wont be renewing this contract with Zen.

can't say i blame you,Have things improved today for you?

In reply to a post by craski:

Yeah, I wanted a business service with a service level agreement but to date the SLA hasnt been worth having. I wont be renewing this contract with Zen.

If it was me I'd be demanding to be let out of contract with no penalty as Zen clearly aren't meeting expectations for a residential service, let alone your business grade one. Including going to the ombudsman if they won't budge

Nah, still rubbish and Openreach refusing to look further into it without another engineer visit. How hard can it be to look at utiliisation/throuput at peak periods and confirm or deny that is the problem. Any ISP using BT Wholesale seems powerless, they are selling a service they have no control over whatsoever. Never thought I would say it but it will be a talk talk business ISP for me next, anything to try and get away from BT Wholesale based service.

In reply to a post by craski:

Nah, still rubbish and Openreach refusing to look further into it without another engineer visit. How hard can it be to look at utiliisation/throuput at peak periods and confirm or deny that is the problem. Any ISP using BT Wholesale seems powerless, they are selling a service they have no control over whatsoever. Never thought I would say it but it will be a talk talk business ISP for me next, anything to try and get away from BT Wholesale based service.

If they present it correctly to BTW then they have to foward it to the correct department, BT openreach engineers visiting your home & checking your copper d side pair isn't going to fix a overloaded Svlan or other part of BTW's network topology , I'm surprised Zen let BTW get that one past them for an engineer visit,lol

If you have TAP3 tests and other evidence of the problem that show impacted throughput levels they have to do something, this send an engineer is the default BTW bs, that the isp have to get past and it escalated to the correct person in BTW

Thing with Svlans there's sadly no guarantee that the one you are moved to wont become as over utilized, that could occurs within a month or two, or it maybe 6-8mths, BTW obviously like to run things hot

Edited by tommy45 (Fri 29-Apr-16 21:59:20)

In reply to a post by tommy45:

If they present it correctly to BTW then they have to foward it to the correct department, BT openreach engineers visiting your home & checking your copper d side pair isn't going to fix a overloaded Svlan or other part of BTW's network topology , I'm surprised Zen let BTW get that one past them for an engineer visit,lol

I've collated all my BQMs, speed tests and data usage plots into a single document organise by day for a week before the connection became problematic and for the last week which it has been problematic. Hopefully that will help get it resolved.

I understand BTOR would want to run things "hot" but that shouldnt be hot to the point throughput drops by 90% at peak times. Either they dont have the tools available to them to monitor and adapt to these issues or they blatantly ignore the problems and wait for users to complain. Either way, the whole SVLAN hopping nonsense only works short term as you say as BT will just keep lumping folk onto it until it cant cope again. What a way to run a network eh!

A&A are definitely on the list but only since they increased data allowances, I could have never survived on their old packages as we are using about 500GB / month easily every month.

In reply to a post by craski:

I understand BTOR would want to run things "hot" but that shouldnt be hot to the point throughput drops by 90% at peak times. Either they dont have the tools available to them to monitor and adapt to these issues or they blatantly ignore the problems and wait for users to complain.

Not sure it is a want but when they see capacity issues they just take too long to fix it by getting more capacity to where it needs to be.

Some Aberdeen areas were affected very bad end of last year/start of this and we're seeing an increase in the amount of SVLANs being congested. We have one open case currently where one is sat at 117% utilised and the other 99% (according to BT) and the fix date they've given was end of June and now that has brought forward to end of May - although an improvement, still unacceptable given this was first raised at the start of this month.

BT put providers in very awkward positions. They offer a product with assurances rates but then don't put measures in place to safeguard those assurances. When we point this out they repeat the same "unexpected demand" but whilst compensation can be claimed with difficulty it really does not help when the connection itself is unusable.

Matt

Thanks Matt, very interesting to get another take on it.
Citing "unexpected demand" sounds like a convenient loop hole in the contractual agreement/regulations to me

The really annoying part is that BT/OR continue to bring new users online to a system that is clearly already overloaded which just makes the problem worse for everybody. If the system is running so hot, BT/OR shouldn't be allowed by regulation to sell more connections until that capacity has been increased. I bet it wouldnt take BT/OR quite so many months to increase capacity if they were not allowed to bring any more users online until that was done.

I'd also put money on it that BT Wholesale favour BT retail connections over other ISPs in this SVLAN shuffling they do in attempt to pacify customers receiving a sub standard service.

In reply to a post by craski:

I understand BTOR would want to run things "hot" but that shouldnt be hot to the point throughput drops by 90% at peak times. Either they dont have the tools available to them to monitor and adapt to these issues or they blatantly ignore the problems and wait for users to complain. Either way, the whole SVLAN hopping nonsense only works short term as you say as BT will just keep lumping folk onto it until it cant cope again. What a way to run a network eh!

It's not Openreach, it's BT Wholesale.

It's funny how other providers are ok though, BT Consumer for example. It's down to Zen to order enough the correct product from BTW so that this doesn't happen.

In reply to a post by craski:

I'd also put money on it that BT Wholesale favour BT retail connections over other ISPs in this SVLAN shuffling they do in attempt to pacify customers receiving a sub standard service.

We've not seen any evidence of this and hear from people that do see congestion that their friends on another provider get worse/better throughput.. but are likely then on a different SVLAN with different loads.

Cabinets are sometimes closed for orders due to actual bandwidth capacity (BT also do this on the exchange level for 21CN ADSL) as well as port capacity but as to what threshold that is applied at I don't know.

Matt