BT INfinity not as fast as promised.

Hi Everyone. I am new to the forum and am not an IT expert so any help and advise would be greatly appreciated.

Basically I signed up to bt business infinity 100gb/month usage and upto 40mb download with an expected speed of 31.4mb and 8mb upload.

The engineer arrived on December 22nd and before he installed/set up my infinity service he said the cabinet was at the end of my road (which is about 40-50 meters away) and that I should get at least 35mb. He then put a machine into my phone socket to test what my line was getting and he said I was getting the full 40mb but I would lose 1mb of this using wireless. I was well chuffed with this and after he left I did a speedtest on bt's test site and also on speedtest.net.

Both came back at 14mb down and 9 upload.

I'm really happy with the 9 upload but was disappointed to be getting 14mb download when i was expecting 31+. However bt state they guarantee me priority traffic as a business and say i'll have a guaranteed download speed of 16mb at the worst times. Infinity in my area is brand new and the engineer said I was the first person to go live on it.

Can anyone please shed some light on why I am only getting 14mb when I was expecting 31+.

The bt speedtest also said "Your configured download throughput speed for this service is 14262 k"

and...
"IP Profile for your line is -14262 Kbps"

what do these mean?
why is speed only 14mb?

All help greatly appreciated.

Are you using a wireless connection to the router/modem? I've seen people only able to get around 15-20MBit/s on wireless (due to adapter limitation) but full speed when connected via ethernet on FTTC and Cable.

EDIT: If it says "IP Profile for your line is -14262 Kbps" then your being limited by BT to that speed but it should rise in a couple of days or so - if it doesn't then assuming its like ADSL you will need a profile reset..

Edited by Rroff (Mon 26-Dec-11 04:34:17)

Try and see if you can unlock the modem to view the stats.

Not sure that's a good idea on a brand new installation where the performance is below the guarantee. I think a simple call to the Business Support center is indicated.

Connect the PC direct to the router and turn wireless OFF.

Open Task Manger so you can see the network speeds. It will default to 0 to 1% when no traffic is running.

Then run a TBB meter speedtest and see what the graph indicates - should;d be 30 to 35%.

Then run a full BT speedtest. At the end copy all of the text into a file and do a screen shot to capture the BT speedtest and Task Manager. Host the images and post the links and BT speedtest text back here.

Hi All, thanks for your advice. Quick couple questions.

1. how do I turn wireless OFF
2. Where do i find task manager
3. how do i run a TBB meter test and what it is it?

Sorry for the questions but as you can see I'm no expert when it comes to technology.

In reply to a post by trogoy:

Hi All, thanks for your advice. Quick couple questions.

1. how do I turn wireless OFF
2. Where do i find task manager
3. how do i run a TBB meter test and what it is it?

Sorry for the questions but as you can see I'm no expert when it comes to technology.

1. Assuming you are using a BT Business hub: http://home/xslt?PAGE=C_2_1 and untick Enable Wireless Interface: followed by SAVE (at bottom of page). You can turn it on again afterwards

2. Task Manager - depends on te operating system you use. On XP and others, <Ctrl><Alt><Delete> shouild bring it up, or a menu which gives you and option to run Task Manager. There will be a series of Tabs at the top - select Networking.

3. TBB meter - it enables you to download large files to test the connection but it sounds unlike you will have it loaded, so use one of te two standard TBB meter speedtests:

http://www.thinkbroadband.com/speedtest/broadband.html - flash based
or
http://www.thinkbroadband.com/speedtest.html?utm_sou... Java based

Frankly, in this case, doing anything the others suggest is a bit pointless, except for one thing.

The BT speedtester is telling you that the IP Profile is just over 14.2Mbps - and your sync speed is likely to be about 3% higher than this (when you sync at 40Mbps the IP Profile is 38717).

The actual download speeds you can achieve are 14Mbps, so you are fully utilising the existing link. This means that any requests to do more tests with wireless turned off, or with a direct PC connection, or whatever, are pointless. It is only worth doing that when the profile value goes up and your tests can't get remotely close to that value. For example, an IP Profile of 38717 should be able to sustain 37.5Mbps on a "speedtest.net" test.

In your case, you look to have been hit by the DLM process. In FTTC, the cabinet tries to run you at the best possible sync speed for the first 2 days, and then intervenes if you are getting large numbers of errors on the line - either by adding interleaving, or by limiting the speed, or both.

In my case, the engineer's JDSU showed I synced at full speed when he first installed the line. However, 2 days later, DLM intervened and added interleaving (so latency increased from 11ms to 18ms) and reduced speed by 4Mbps. I used the "think broadband quality meter" (TBB BQM), and this showed I was getting about 4% packet loss during the first 2 days - so presumably the line suffered lots of errors then.

At the time, you couldn't unlock the modem, so I couldn't see the error rates. Now you *could* unlock the modem to get these numbers (so is the one bit of useful advice). However, this is non-standard, because the modem is part of BT's service. You would be better off just reporting this to the BT help desk, and getting their help.

If you are < 100 metres, you should *easily* get full speed, and an initial JDSU speed of 40Mbps is a sign that you *can* sync high enough. The drop to 14Mbps is huge, and can only come from the error rates. Therefore you almost certainly need an engineer to help sort this out...

... but like ADSL, some self-help can be useful. Do things improve if you unplug everything else from the line (especially fax machines)? How about if you disconnect any extension wiring by removing the front-plate?

Get your own BQM here.

My BQM on the day DLM intervened: My BQM

Thanks for the info.

What do you mean by "DLM process". Sorry but I do not know what it stands for or what it means?

DLM = Dynamic Line Management, a process that runs at the other end of your line and manages it in the way WWWombat outlined.