Infinity 2 speed frustrations

Back in early July, we made use of our "personal offer" to upgrade from Infinity 1 to Infinity 2, more than anything because we were offered a promo price of £14pcm for 24 months and our Infinity 1 was going to increase from the setup promo of £10pcm to ~£25pcm.

However, our sync speeds (especially download) are worse than they were before the transition!

Before the transition, we were getting ~23Mbps sync, but now it is syncing at ~18Mbps.

Router (HH5) stats from a reboot in the last 30mins...

1. Product Name: HomeHub5
2. Serial number: +076286+1516001119
3. Firmware version: v0.07.05.0A13-BT (Type B) Last updated 9/12/2015
4. Board version: 01
5. VDSL uptime: 0 days, 00:21:36
6. Data Rate: 4486 / 18000
7. Maximum Data Rate: 4557 / 29237
8. Noise Margin: 6.2 / 10.1
9. Line Attenuation: 40.1 / 25.2

For a short period around August, our sync speed increased to ~23Mbps and I noticed the download noise margin at that time was ~6.1, but it now seems common to see it at 10+.

The BT online fault checker is useless, it thinks my line is good with a ~16.5Mbps speed test, on a product that is capable of supporting over 70Mbps in better circumstances.

Whats more, our initial e-mail for Infinity 2 stated a minimum guaranteed speed of 20000Kbps, which we are clearly not getting.

http://www.dslchecker.bt.com/adsl/adslchecker.Teleph... gives us (sorry, horrid copy/paste format)...

BT BROADBAND AVAILABILITY CHECKER
Telephone Number xxxxxxxxxx on Exchange MOORHILL is served by Cabinet 11
Featured Products

Downstream Line Rate(Mbps)

Upstream Line Rate(Mbps)

Downstream Range(Mbps)

WBC FTTC Availability Date

WBC SOGEA Availability Date

Left in Jumper

High Low High Low
VDSL Range A (Clean) 32.4 22.4 7.3 5.7 -- Available -- --
VDSL Range B (Impacted) 25 10.5 6.4 2.3 -- Available -- --
ADSL Products

Our flat (same one for ~10 years) has never been great for broadband, apparently there is some sort of "star" wiring in the loft. It was only when Infinity 1 was installed that the old basic telephone socket was replaced by engineers and at the same time, they disconnected the unused extension to another ancient BT socket.

I'm clueless about what to do, it is complicated by we hope to move before next summer, where there is a good chance our Infinity 2 package will work much better due to better internal wiring and perhaps closer to the cabinet.

But right now, for the sync speeds we are getting, we might as well be on the basic BT non-fibre package that is up to 17Mbps and £7pcm in the current promo that ends later today.

I'm starting to think I should have thought more seriously about Virgin, there is a completely separate "Cable & Wireless"(?) phone socket in the lounge, which I presume would completely by-pass that mess in the loft (no ring tone if phone connected to it) and give much better speeds.

Any ideas/suggestions please?

Edited by SteveC (Thu 08-Sep-16 10:40:17)

You need to contact BT ASAP and tell them that you were mis sold Infinity 2 as your line is not capable of even the top speed for Infinity 1 let alone Infinity 2

You're in a banded profile due to an unstable connection. Have you had an engineer out to address the star wiring?

Have you had an engineer out to address the star wiring?

cough

It was only when Infinity 1 was installed that the old basic telephone socket was replaced by engineers and at the same time, they disconnected the unused extension to another ancient BT socket.

In reply to a post by robertcrowther:

You need to contact BT ASAP and tell them that you were mis sold Infinity 2 as your line is not capable of even the top speed for Infinity 1 let alone Infinity 2

Except that the OP was below 40Mbps before these issues. I am assuming they upgraded to Infinity 2 as the deal made it cheaper than Infinity 1 but presumably knew they weren't going to actually get a speed upgrade.

The problem is not that the line is incapable of Infinity 2 speeds but that it has suddenly taken a nose dive - the actual Infinity version should make no difference to the speeds the OP is getting (in this case).

When the engineer visited, they simply did not connect the wires that went to the extension socket, when installing the Openreach NTE5 socket to replace the old master.

They did not go into the loft at all to look at the "star" wiring.

I knew about the "star" wiring from when we activated BT in 2006, after the previous tenants were using Cable & Wireless (that were taken over by Virgin?) through that other modern socket in our lounge that has nothing to do with BT.

It was the £15 vs £25 that made us upgrade, but I'm pretty miffed we are syncing at 18Mbps now, when we were getting 20-23Mbps before the swapover.

Edited by SteveC (Thu 08-Sep-16 13:41:15)

So, are there any other sockets coming off the wiring in the loft that are still live? What you describe suggests there could be extensions fed from the loft that are before the master socket.

If that isn't the case then it is not star wiring.

In reply to a post by ian72:

So, are there any other sockets coming off the wiring in the loft that are still live? What you describe suggests there could be extensions fed from the loft that are before the master socket.

If that isn't the case then it is not star wiring.

Only one of three sockets are live now, the lounge one that was master before the NTE5 socket installation.

The extension BT socket in the hall is dead now.

The Cable & Wireless socket has always been dead since we moved in.

Post deleted by RobertoS

Post deleted by RobertoS

In reply to a post by RobertoS:

When was the last time you rebooted the HH5?

Maybe just after 1000 this morning.

Sync download speed remained 18Mbps, upload speed dropped ~200Kbps.

Yes, I deleted the question as I'd missed to said in your OP you had rebooted it 30 mins previousy, but you must have already been replying. My previous post was junk as well - it does look like banding due to instability.

So that would suggest there is no star wiring in the loft. There could of course be a bad junction box or something like that but if it is and it is before the BT master then BT should fix it. As RobertoS says looks like banding due to noise somewhere along the line (no pun intended).

In reply to a post by ian72:

So that would suggest there is no star wiring in the loft. There could of course be a bad junction box or something like that but if it is and it is before the BT master then BT should fix it. As RobertoS says looks like banding due to noise somewhere along the line (no pun intended).

It was the engineer who activated out BT landline in 2006 that said they was star wiring up in the loft, I've not seen it myself, I've only been up there properly maybe three times in total.

If the issue is something to do with the loft, would BT/Openreach be obliged to fix it for free, or would we end up with a bill for something silly like £100+?

I take it technically, I am not supposed to "have a play" with any wiring up in the loft, perhaps say looking for bell to disconnect from terminal 3 (IIRC)?

By road, we are ~1 mile away from the Moorhill exchange. What sort of ballpark speed would we get if everything was close to perfect?

Distance from the exchange is irrelevant on FTTC. It is distance from the FTTC cabinet via the phone cabinet that matters.

Assuming the wiring in the loft is before the master socket (and you say the engineer removed all extensions so it should be) then there should be no ring wire in the loft. It should just be a connector block if anything.

Lofts are dodgy places, a court case may have changed willingness for Openreach staff to go into lofts that are not fully boarded too.

If cabinet is around 1 mile away then 18 to 23 Mbps is what you could expect. The line appears banded and is something the Openreach DLM will do at ANY time, probably just coincidence with the sales deal.

If a line proves stable and low to zero errors the DLM will relent on banding in time, so stop fiddling with reboots etc

Since moving to Infinity last year, complete dropouts have reduced, but they come in waves before usually settling down again.

~15mins ago, that sync from ~1000 this morning was reduced to a whopping ~8KB/sec for a Steam game patch!

So no real choice, had to hard reset the HH5, synced at 18000/4752 now (so slightly higher upload than earlier), download on Steam now coming through at 2.0-2.1MB/sec.

I will try to leave it be now, unless throughput gets dire again!

Sounds like the DLM is doing its job then by banding you to reduce drop outs

Thought I'd post an update...

Download sync speeds dropped to ~16375kbps for a while, worse than we had on Infinity 1. I used the BT online fault reports and ran a quiet line test earlier this week, where with our Panasonic wireless phone the line was not that quiet. Didn't follow it up, was going to see if I could borrow an oldskool phone from someone and try again.

Then randomly ~30mins ago, we lost connection altogether and now it's come back, at speeds much more like we had back around the swap-over date from Infinity 1 to 2...

6. Data Rate: 4723 / 23304
7. Maximum Data Rate: 4773 / 30239
8. Noise Margin: 6.1 / 6.3
9. Line Attenuation: 39.6 / 24.8

Slight reduction in download noise margin

Edited by SteveC (Sat 15-Oct-16 08:19:35)