BT Digital Voice and huge drop in upload speed sync on route

Hi Guys,
On the 21st November I was moved over to BT Digital Voice.
I did not mind moving over to BT Digital Voice, and to be honest I have been waitnig for my turn to come. Even spashed out on two of their cordless handsets that connected to the Smart Hub 2.
I was posted a new Router (Smart Hub 2) as my old BT Router did not support VOIP!
Not a problem again.
I changed over the router (Smart Hub 2) the night before the move to Digital Voice.
By the next day (21st) my upload speed went from a solid 20Mbs (Well slightly less by the looks of it ) right down to a 11Mbs
I thought OK there has been an update on the contract because of BT Digital Voice, so maybe the line has been reset and need to wait the 10 days for the retraining of the VDSL line. But still on the 10th day and beyond no chnage. I have not been rebooting my router all the time to see if it will connect at a better uplaod speed as I know if you keep doing that the greenbox in the street thinks there might be an issue and reduce the speed.
On the 21st when Digital Voice became live. I checked the old analogue phone and there was a dial tone in the morning, but in the afternoon there was nothing. Totally cut. And looking at the stats that is roughtly the time the upload speed on my line dropped! Could there be anything related to this, as the cut was probably done at the exchange and not the green cabinet in the street.
Below are the stats from the new Smart Hub 2.
Tomorrow Im going to experiment. Im going to re connect my old router and leave it a day and see hat happens. Yer I know I will be without Digital Voice.
Can anyone think what else might have caused this massive drop in upload speed?
I called BT today and they were not interested in sending an engineer to investigate/fix the upload speed issue. There is only a download speed guarantee!
Eventually after been persistent they have booked an engineer! But as above if anyone knows what it might be please help !
My downlaod speed has not been affected at all.

ROUTER STATS
12:16:04, 20 Nov.
DSL Link Up: Down Rate=79999kbps, Up Rate=18399kbps; SNR Margin Down=3.6dB, Up=6.0dB
01:16:15, 21 Nov.
DSL Link Up: Down Rate=79999kbps, Up Rate=18256kbps; SNR Margin Down=3.7dB, Up=6.0dB
15:34:40, 21 Nov.
DSL Link Up: Down Rate=79999kbps, Up Rate=11681kbps; SNR Margin Down=3.7dB, Up=6.1dB
01:42:51, 23 Nov.
DSL Link Up: Down Rate=79999kbps, Up Rate=11998kbps; SNR Margin Down=3.9dB, Up=6.1dB
03:48:09, 23 Nov.
DSL Link Up: Down Rate=79999kbps, Up Rate=12118kbps; SNR Margin Down=3.9dB, Up=6.1dB
16:47:31, 30 Nov.
DSL Link Up: Down Rate=79999kbps, Up Rate=11532kbps; SNR Margin Down=3.5dB, Up=6.1dB
18:19:36, 05 Dec.
DSL Link Up: Down Rate=79999kbps, Up Rate=11995kbps; SNR Margin Down=4.1dB, Up=6.1dB
18:37:55, 09 Dec.
DSL Link Up: Down Rate=79999kbps, Up Rate=12002kbps; SNR Margin Down=3.8dB, Up=6.1dB
13:08:19, 16 Dec.
DSL Link Up: Down Rate=79999kbps, Up Rate=11883kbps; SNR Margin Down=3.4dB, Up=6.1dB

Thanks
Simon

First thing I’d try is putting the old router back on and see if this produces a better upload sync rate.

It is possible that you have had cab work done, and the new port is the cause maybe ?

The ceases of dial tone from the exchange don’t happen that quickly.

Strange the noise margin for both up and down didn't change when you switched to VOIP although the upload speed did, that doesn't seem right to me.

In reply to a post by Zarjaz:

It is possible that you have had cab work done, and the new port is the cause maybe ?

How likely would this be?

It's possible. Apparently Openreach will be doing compression work in some cabs to free up line cards for spares.

Hi
I've had the same. We were getting up to 70mbps and experiencing that as well. At the point of cut over to Digital Voice the potential has been halved and the real speeds we are seeing are sitting at 20mbps. Yes there is likely to be a technical fault on the line but that doesn't explain how BT knew the potential speed drop was going to be this dramatic.
The documentation about the move to Digital Voice states that it won't have a noticable impact on your Broadband Speeds.
I was just fed a line about age of copper wiring being the limiting factor. I wonder if they are trying to squeeze more customers onto the same equipment.
This doesn't feel right at all.
Rob

The addition of Digital Voice to a line will have no effect on Download or Upload sync speeds, and a minimal effect on data throughput speeds when a VOIP call is in progress.

There is no dramatic potential speed drop so there must be other reasons for the change in speed.

Report a speed fault to support.

Edited by Realalemadrid (Thu 21-Dec-23 15:45:32)

I have reported a speed fault but the main problem is that BT have used the migration to force us onto a lower grade service. They have halved the potential of the service and are talking about reducing the price by only 15%. They are still charging us the full £49 pm at the moment. They are not giving us any options and have done this to at least one other neighbour. I spoke to another broadband provider today and they will migrate us back onto an 70Mbps potential circuit in 10days in the same exchange but we lose our telephone number. BTs approach and behaviour with this is appalling.

Edited by rslatem (Fri 22-Dec-23 20:54:04)

In reply to a post by SimonInReading:

Hi Guys,
On the 21st November I was moved over to BT Digital Voice.
I did not mind moving over to BT Digital Voice, and to be honest I have been waitnig for my turn to come. Even spashed out on two of their cordless handsets that connected to the Smart Hub 2.
I was posted a new Router (Smart Hub 2) as my old BT Router did not support VOIP!
Not a problem again.
I changed over the router (Smart Hub 2) the night before the move to Digital Voice.
By the next day (21st) my upload speed went from a solid 20Mbs (Well slightly less by the looks of it ) right down to a 11Mbs
I thought OK there has been an update on the contract because of BT Digital Voice, so maybe the line has been reset and need to wait the 10 days for the retraining of the VDSL line. But still on the 10th day and beyond no chnage. I have not been rebooting my router all the time to see if it will connect at a better uplaod speed as I know if you keep doing that the greenbox in the street thinks there might be an issue and reduce the speed.
On the 21st when Digital Voice became live. I checked the old analogue phone and there was a dial tone in the morning, but in the afternoon there was nothing. Totally cut. And looking at the stats that is roughtly the time the upload speed on my line dropped! Could there be anything related to this, as the cut was probably done at the exchange and not the green cabinet in the street.
Below are the stats from the new Smart Hub 2.

Thanks
Simon

This may be a coincidence that migrating to DV caused loss of upload speed. I'm on FTTC DV voice service and I do not really see any loss of upload speed.

Data rate:19.221 Mbps / 79.757 Mbps
Maximum data rate:19.221 Mbps / 82.046 Mbps

For me getting 19.2 Mbps is the lowest I get with BT FTTC. Most of the times it is synced at 20Mbps. One of the cause is recent firmware update of the Smart Hub 2 router and router can re-sync sometimes lower or higher. There were also some occasions when after 14 days Smart Hub 2 router is programmed to reboot causing a changes in sync speeds but this should also stop doing that eventually.

My upload speeds have been that way for 2 years now even shortly before switching to BT from TalkTalk. It may be slight impact of crosstalk.

However, if you continue to turn your router on and off this will trigger DLM to reduce your speeds. You have to leave it alone and it should correct itself over time.

I personally don't see any reason why DV should cause a reduction in upload particularly if you have the Digital handset switched off. You can make an experiment to unregister the handset and if you have any existing old telephone connected to the router, unplug it and see if that solves the issue but I doubt this has anything to do with it.

Regarding the dial tone, it is completely normal to have no dial tone on the old analogue phone when plugged into the master socket! This is not a defect. I have mentioned it on many posts previously. When you switch to Digital Voice your analogue line gets turned off meaning if you were to connect a phone into the Faceplate socket telephone port it will not get any dial tone any more!

In essence what we are getting now under Digital Voice is SOGEA (Single Order Generic Ethernet Access) without analogue phone service. VOIP is simply included as part of this switch and from now on you can only connect your phone to the router.

Whether or not the digital handset is on or off will make ZERO difference to the sync speed. This is the raw data rate between the chipset in the router and the chipset in the DSLAM in the cabinet.

The obvious thing that *has* changed here is the router itself. Try putting back the old router and see if the upload speed is better.

Otherwise, it's *possible* that in the process of reprovisioning you as SOGEA, you have been moved to another port in the cabinet. But that's fairly unlikely, as they'll want to avoid engineer visits for this sort of stuff.