My connection is slow in the evening?

On Bt Total BB option 3.
Is there anything up with BT speeds at the moment? The last 2 evenings my speed has dropped to less than half a meg, although it's been fine during the day. My connection has been very stable up until now.
Also my email is playing up for the 3rd time in recent weeks. For the last 3 days I've been unable to send email using Outlook Express and Thunderbird. Receiving mail is fine. The last time this happened the issue resolved itself after a few days although BT helpdesk refused to admit there was a problem.

Regards
Flim

p.s. the recent speedtests from BT users on http://www.dslzoneuk.net/speedtest.php seem to indicate there might be an issue with speed as there are a lot around the 500-800kbps mark at the moment.

Edited by deleted (Wed 07-Mar-07 21:34:06)

Sounds like exchange congestion, do the BT speedtest @ http://speedtester.bt.com at different times during the day. Say one in the morning one at lunch one at 8PM and one just after midnight. Just make sure you have one between 7-10PM as that is really peak time.

By what you have described it sounds like exchange congestion.

Pop your number in here: http://status.zensupport.co.uk/exchanges/ and see what it says.

Also when you do a BT speedtest never mind what time this one is, post the results on here. That way we will be able to see what your IP profile is set at in relation to your sync.

The exchange checker says Green.
Here are the result from the BT Speedtester site:
This hasn't changed from what it usually says - my IP profile has been at 1500kbps for months now as I'm a long way from the exchange.
Surprisingly it says my throughput is 1364 whereas all other speed tests disagree and web browsing is very slow.

Test1 comprises of Best Effort Test: -provides background information.
IP profile for your line is - 1500 kbps
DSL connection rate: 448 kbps(UP-STREAM) 2048 kbps(DOWN-STREAM)
Actual IP throughput achieved during the test was - 1364 kbps

If you wish to discuss these results please contact your ISP.

If you are experiencing problems with specific applications, servers or websites please contact your ISP for assistance.

Your test has completed please close this window to exit the performance tester.

Edited by deleted (Wed 07-Mar-07 22:05:47)

It could be congestion on the wider network outside of BT's control. e.g. if you are connection to a host in Canberra, Aus BT won't have a network which goes all that way. It may only be theirs until mainland Europe and then hand off to carriers.

Sorry to hijack your thread mate, just a quick question my exchange is showing as red and has been for a couple of months. Would this explain my slow speeds since I signed up to BT? (About 2 weeks ago) Despite having figures which say I should be able to achieve 5-6Mbps I can only get 3.

My question is when the exchange is upgraded on the 28th March will I be able to see significant speed increases or is my profile now stuck at around 3Mbps. If that is the case can you do anything about it?

Cheers :-)

There is some sort of wider internet problem going on at the moment
A lot of Be users are having problems with YouTube and other image upload sites and we're having problems at work with a lot of sites on an Easynet connection
I've also seen reports on here from people on other ISP's about slowness

Nicola to the rescue thanks again I was sure I was not imagining things.

Yes that would be the reason.

Don't know exactly what it is and there may be more than one different problem, but something ain't right
I do know there was a high speed fibre link cut over in Canada earlier in the week affecting Cogent traffic and possibly the cause of the YouTube problems.
Looks like there is some sort of upstream transit / peering issues which would obviously affect different ISP's in different ways

Yeah just done a traceroute to youtube.com and it goes over the Cogent network.

Don't get me wrong something is wrong, its just one of those times when you can feel that something aint right with one or more companies peerings. Even just doing a google search it is taking a long time to come up.

It may just be even due to the fact that one of Cogent's high speed links have been taken out affecting routing. The knock on effect being that other routes have to take the strain and they are just not coping. If that was the case traffic could be going all over the world to get to Americas. From Tokyo to Miami even Argentina which cant be good. Slower ping times etc.