Slow evening throughput on 80/20

Could any of the experts here give a logical reason why from midday my throughput tails off before dropping to almost unusable in the evening?
Sam Knows White Box reports the following
Midnight 73.58
6am 73.09
12noon 69.74
6pm 11.15
8pm 29.65
10pm 57.82

I've only had fibre 2 weeks and have noticed this is a regular feature, except at the weekend when the slowest throughput is was 50 on Saturday at 8pm & 23 on Sunday at 6pm.

My ISP want to send an engineer around to check my wiring. There isn't a problem with "my wiring" as I get accptable speeds from 10pm to the early afternoon. They ran line tests last night & created a horendous ping my end (225ms)
Attribute: DownStream-BE UpStream-BE
TAP ID: TAP-1 TAP-1
Test ID: 1370808570 1370808571
Start Date/Time: 09-06-2013 21:08:14 09-06-2013 21:08:28

Profile Rate: 77436 20000
Test File Size: 16873692 493020
File Transfer Average Throughput/Session: 10990 16800


Test Outcome Pass
Test Outcome Code GTC_FTTC_SERVICE_0000
Description GEA service test completed and no fault found .
Main Fault Location OK
Sync Status In Sync
Downstream Speed 80.0 Mbps
Upstream Speed 20.0 Mbps
Appointment Required N
Fault Target Fix Time
Fault Report Advised N
Profile Name 0.128M-80M Downstream, Interleaving Off - 0.128M-20M Upstream, Interleaving Off
Time Stamp NA
Parameters MIN MAX AVG
Down Stream Line Rate 80.0 Mbps 80.0 Mbps 80.0 Mbps
Up Stream Line Rate 20.0 Mbps 20.0 Mbps 20.0 Mbps
Up Time 0 Sec 79195 Sec 42168 Sec
Retrains 0 0 0
Current and Last 15 Minute Bin Performance
Last Traffic Count(Upto 15 mins) Current Traffic Count(Upto 15 mins)
Start Time Stamp 2013-06-10T15:26:30Z 2013-06-10T15:41:30Z
Ingress Code Violation 1 0
Egress Code Violation 18 5
Errored Seconds 13 4
Severely Errored Seconds 0 0
Unavailable Seconds 0 0

I haven't a clue what the above means, but I don't think it warrents an home visit? Could it be the OR engineer has piggy backed me to another user & the drop in speed is when they are online/streaming?

Thanks in advance

It sounds like congestion somewhere. Which ISP are you with?

Could it be the OR engineer has piggy backed me to another user & the drop in speed is when they are online/streaming?

No. Can't be that.

Have you seen there's a couple of threads on the Plusnet section of this forum with people having issues with speed and pings on their Plusnet FTTC service ..... I wonder if something is borked somewhere ?

http://forums.thinkbroadband.com/plusnet/t/4242884-m...

http://forums.thinkbroadband.com/plusnet/t/4244052-s...

http://forums.thinkbroadband.com/plusnet/t/4243585-t...

http://forums.thinkbroadband.com/plusnet/t/4243924-s...

*Deleted*

Edited by Andrue (Tue 11-Jun-13 08:29:53)

a mate is on plusnet FTTC and is having the same problem, suppose to be getting around 78, but most of the time he gets 40, sometimes not even that.

Plusnet sent someone down and the engineer said that the equipment is showing 78Mb/s, so we took it down to Plusnet doing their traffic management. eveytime my mate complained they wanted to send someone else down. So I think he is going to wait now until his contract is up and then jump ship back to Bloated toad.

I know they are the same company.

In reply to a post by zyborg47:

a mate is on plusnet FTTC and is having the same problem, suppose to be getting around 78, but most of the time he gets 40, sometimes not even that.

What's his latency look like?

What does the TBB Broadband Quality/Ping Monitor show?

The line seems to stay up so you could set it up for a couple of days using your (Dynamic?) IP and then remove it when your IP changes. That will shown how good/bad the latency is and if it is changing in the afternoon/evening and from that an interpretation might suggest congestion.

It looks like congestion.

However, if it is congestion, then it isn't something that is common to all Plusnet customers. Here are my Samknows figures, showing the average over the month of June. I am on Plusnet, on the Fibre Extra product, syncing at 80/20:

Time	Average (Mbps)
04:00	72.7
10:00	72.7
16:00	70.7
18:00	71.6
19:00	72.3
20:00	71.9
21:00	72.4
22:00	72.8
23:00	72.8

There is an interesting thing to note about your figures - the worst case comes at 6PM. However, Plusnet (as a whole) experiences their peak hour between 9PM and 10PM weekdays (yes, weekends are less busy).

You can see a whole set of TBB graphs here, which tend to show just how busy things are. They also show that things were quite busy last night - and Monday nights tend to be the busiest (but they're all live graphs, so you need to look before this evening).

So, what could it be...

#1 - You need to be sure nothing is happening on your line during your congested times. It might be extra noise causing errors & packet loss, or it might be disconnections. It probably isn't one of these (your line looks perfectly ok), but you want to be sure.

Someone else mentioned using your own BQM. It can be useful, and if you want to keep it permanently, then it needs a static IP. You look to be on an unlimited package, so you can order a static IP for a one-off £5 from Plusnet.

#2 - It could be a problem with the particular gateway that you enter plusnet on.
Use this link to check which gateway you are currently on, then change to something else. You need to tell the router (not modem) to disconnect, wait a minute, then re-connect. Check again, and you should be on a different gateway.

#3 - It could be more local congestion, perhaps with the backhaul from your cabinet to the exchange, or from your exchange back into the BT wholesale core network.

There isn't a lot you can do, other than find neighbours on FTTC, and see if they suffer the same problem.

#4 - Is the Samknows box correct with those figures? Do you experience the same thing when you run speedtests?

I don't think it warrants a visit either. And no, you aren't piggy-backed with anyone.

I like these graphs as well.

Interesting loss of a gateway at midnight there...

And from the look, something else just happened at 2PM too. Perhaps not - the graph just fixed itself after a refresh.

Edited by deleted (Tue 11-Jun-13 14:34:01)