Exchange congestion?

I am with fast.co.uk on market 1 exchange so only have adsl 8mbit available (sadly).

I am getting slow speeds at peak times, not sure when it starts as only use the connection in the evening but it fluctuates between 2mbit and 3.5mbit until about 11pm when it usually starts to speed up to 6.5mbit+ which is about right for adsl @ 8mbit it would seem (7mbit on a good day).

I have been in contact with them and they have been fairly helpful although running speedtests is quite boring now. I am just wondering if there is some way to pay extra for a less contended service rather than having to put up with slow speeds because there appears to be a lack of bandwidth to go round, its not really fair when others can get FTTC/cable or pay £4 a month to plusnet for a similar service.

Any advice would be welcomed.

Thanks

There seems to be a general problem. See this post by an Entanet reseller ISP.

Which exchange are you on?

General to entanet? Or general to IPStream Max?

If your exchange is 20CN you should have the option to go on to Max Premium which will probably cost you around £8 extra. This gives you faster uploads (up to 832kbps) as well as a higher priority on the BT network. I've seen people suffering from exchange contention find that improves things.

In the post I linked to, Martin said

In reply to a post by aquiss:

It should be also noted that many of the 20CN exchanges are no longer being upgraded by BT for backhaul as there is basically no more than 6 months before those get moved over to 21CN. As Service Providers we have had for some months the exchange lists for the final push over to 21CN.

We get many reports from customers (only on 20CN) where Entanet's nodes are sub 50% (evenings are good example)....yet, if we press with BT directly (and we do have those means to bypass Entanet for information) then it's becoming very clear that BTs own VPs are also red-raw in places.

So while I take your points, there are also questions to ask of BT about the lack of upgrades to what BT deem a dead network.

Doesn't that mean he believes it is general to IPStream/ADSL Max, not just Entanet?

Edited by RobertoS (Fri 01-Nov-13 12:10:00)

I'm Martin btw

My statement still stands.

Hi Martin,
Did you see my PM from last Saturday asking if it would be possible to see your 20CN upgrade docs?
Or perhaps you could let TBB publish them?

Thanks.

Had not followed through as a lot to do

Sorry Martin. Fixed.

I often mix the two of you up . Usually I check before posting .

http://www.samknows.com/broadband/exchange/STEASTK

Tiny exchange so can't imagine they would upgrade to 21cn although it looks like most of the larger nearby exchanges have it.

I will see if fast can offer anything more as currently all they are saying is we can book a BT engineer to visit, which would be a waste of time, if this is all they can do then I might as well try a different ISP as nothing to lose.