I've got a peculiar issue on my connection but seem to not be alone: Article
I'm currently on a FTTC connection synch'd at ~79000 Kbps/~18500 Kbps. Speed isn't the issue here though as speedtests show that I can fully saturate my connection.
I've noticed since the start of 2019 I've been getting latency spikes when just browsing the Internet or streaming Netflix/Amazon/YouTube/BBC/etc... It doesn't seem to be tied to using a service in particular like the article above suggests but just using the connection in general. I've notice that using more than 8 Mbps causes these spikes of 100-250ms, and the spikes only happen when initially downloading data. If there's a constant stream of data over a long period, the latency spikes do not appear, just only when initially starting a download. This makes online gaming extremely difficult when streaming and not really when just downloading. The latency spikes do not happen when using the upload at all.
The article suggests that this is a BT Consumer issue however, I've recently moved away from BT as I was an employee until this month so dealt with it because of the discount. I'm now on Cerberus Networks with BT Wholesale backhaul and are still experiencing this issue which leads me to believe this is a problem with BT Wholesale and not BT Consumer.
My set-up is an EdgeRouter-12 and Vigor 130 Modem but I've already ruled out any hardware issues as I've tried connecting directly to the modem and using the BT Smart Hub which made no difference. I'm monitoring my bandwidth using SNMP on my EdgeRouter on the PPPoE connection to rule out any devices which may be using bandwidth which haven't been accounted for but that just shows I'm using ~2500 KBps whilst watching Netflix at 4K with a minimum latency of 9ms, average latency of 60ms and consistent peaks of 250ms.
The current fix is to set-up a smart queue on the EdgeRouter and limit downstream bandwidth to 8 Mbps but I might as well downgrade to ADSL at that point and save some money!
I'm connected to the Birmingham Wednesbury PoP (acc-aln1.bm-wed.21cn-infra.bt.net). I was wondering if there's anyone in the surrounding area or just in general who are on BTw backhaul and are having similar issues?