Yet Another BT Nightmare

Yet another person fighting the many headed, thousand teeth demon from hell that is BT's Broadband service. BT have been a nightmare for us from start to finish, we moved house last September and it took them 3 and half months to install a line and then a further 4 weeks to get our internet running on the infamous Option 3 "Unlimited". From that time we have never had the speed we were supposed to. The way I test our maximum download speed is to DL something from Steam, as it usually gets the best speed I've ever seen this line put out. Having said that on a 4288k Downstream line I have never seen speeds above 250kb/s. In my naievity I thought this was pretty fast, but in the back of my mind I was sure we should be getting more. Having been reading every forum out there where people actually download at mb's a second I've realised the extent of my denial.

Well the proverbial excrement hit the fan about 3 weeks ago when even our lowly speed plummeted. The downstairs computer was using dropbox, so I figured it was just a congestion issue there, but it turned out that was getting horrendous speeds aswell. Games were lagging, latencies were consistently above 200. And download speeds from Steam fluctuate wildly from 24kb/s to 120 kb/s but are never consistent. Speedtests from speedtest.net have showed us having from 0.30 mb/s to 0.9 mb/s with latencies from 64ms to anywhere upto 648, but these fluctuate in a matter of minutes.

Yesterday we had an engineer from BT in who tested our line and the downstream looked good but thanks to a wiring cock-up we had two master sockets on both ends of the line, so he replaced the one at the router end, did a check-up and ok to go... apparently. Still hideous speeds, I knew we would have to wait for speed to pick up to what we should be getting, but there had been absolutely no improvement whatsoever.

At this point I did a test a speedtester.bt, and the line said:

4288kb/s Downstream
1000kb/s IP Profile
367kb/s Throughput

So I gathered my remaining courage and called India's finest to find out there was a fault on the line, they'd get someone to fix it, call me the next day, dear lord these scripts reading muppets might actually do it. No...of course not. Today i got a call saying the line was fixed, so did another speedtester.bt test, IP Profile was up to 3500kb/s but the sync rate was still at 567kb/s and the download speeds and latency are still testing the same as they ever were at speedtest.net, 23kb/s-100kb/s on steam. Despite my protests, as far as "Angela" on the other side of the line was concerned this was fixed.

We are quite heavy users, but we haven't been physically able to go over there throttling thresholds recently, neither of the people I spoke to said we were being throttled in any case. We're using the Netgear DG834GT as our ADSL router and it's stats are as follows:

Downstream:

Connection Speed: 4288kbps
Line Attenuation: 46.0db
Noise Margin: 8.6db

Upstream:

CS: 488kbps
Line Attenuation: 30.5db
Noise Margin: 14.0db

Using a PPPoA network type.

Edited by HenryW (Tue 21-Jul-09 14:19:52)

PM me your BT account details and I will look into this for you.

BT Support

Just a few points re your post, hopefully to help you a little though don't necessarily solve the problem. Though might do.

The connection rate of 4288kbps is the sync speed.

The 367kbps (567?) throughput is exactly what it says - the download speed test result.

The actual speed limiter on your line is the IP Profile, see this FAQ for more info.

When download speed/throughput is way below IP Profile then it is usually exchange or ISP congestion, if it isn't throttling. Have you checked the VP paths at your exchange? Although I don't expect it to be that.

A connection speed of 4288kbps is poor for an attenuation of 46dB, even allowing for a possible "target" noise margin of 9dB that you may have on those figures. Both the high noise margin and low sync could be due to high noise variation on the line. This can frequently be cured by a BT iPlate or more cheaply and usually better by following this FAQ.

(Please note you confuse many of us by confusing kb(its)/s and kB(ytes)/s, as 1Byte = 8Bits).

Edit, do you use a plug-in phone extension cable?

Edited by RobertoS (Tue 21-Jul-09 16:05:36)

We are starting to see some mild improvement. Speed tests this afternoon have had the download rate at over 2 Mbps. However it's the speed fluctuations that are causing the most problems. The conncection only stays at this rate for a matter of minutes, seconds even before plunging back into caveman speeds. Still waiting on the 3 hour wait to be over before I ccan do another speedtester.bt test.

Do check out the inside of the master socket. You don't need to do what the FAQ suggests, just plug your filter into the test socket you can see on the wall at the back.

If that gives a higher significantly higher connection speed, and also stability, then your home wiring is the problem and you need to follow the FAQ or get an iPlate.

Note that even if the connection speed improves in the test socket, (it can be over 2Mbps and your figures indicate this for you), download speed will not improve immediately due to the delay before the IP Profile adjusts. Also all extensions will be disabled while you have the faceplate off. If they aren't, then the wiring is incorrect.

Again, do you use a plug-in phone extension cable? That can screw everything. Also do you have a Sky box? If so try disconnecting it, possibly double-filtering it. They are notorious and double filtering them can work.