Am I right to complain?

Have just spent an exhausting 3 days embarked on phone calls with BT's Help Centre Operators. Ever since my move from ADSL24 (adsl) to BT infinity I have been unhappy about the latency and sometimes dramatic drops in upload speed I have experienced. Generally latency hovers around the 30ms mark and uploads 5Mbs. During one particularly entertaining week latency has been as high as 935ms and UL speeds dropped to an astonishing 0.48 Mbs!

Having been continually reminded that my upload speed is within the promised values, that upload speed doesn't matter and almost no reference to latency at all, a final call a few moments ago has led to the agreed acknowledgement from both side that nothing will be done as "the line is working within acceptable limits" complaint has now been closed.

Am I expecting too much? On adsl my latency was 8ms I'd be happy with anything below 15ms is this unreasonable on an FTTC line?

I thought perhaps naively that online gaming, Ventrillo type apps and things like Dropbox were dependant on low latency (gaming, chatting) and a decent upload speed (Dropbox)

Am I just too greedy or am I right to be concerned and raise issue with BT. I would really welcome some clarification on this from TB members?


Duncan

In reply to a post by Opabinia:

Generally latency hovers around the 30ms mark and uploads 5Mbs. During one particularly entertaining week latency has been as high as 935ms and UL speeds dropped to an astonishing 0.48 Mbs!

Those sound horrific. How are you testing this? What equipment do you have?

I have a Samknows box attached to my BT Infinity 2 FTTC, but I'm using an ASUS router instead of the HomeHub 3, and I have no such problems, and have the regular test data to know. Just coming up to 12 months of service in Sept.

Sounds like you need to get an HG612 modem from Ebay if you haven't one already, and unlock it and start monitoring the stats, and find out whats really going on.

Once you have some graphs people will be able to take a look and advise you.

What was your speed estimate? Put your number in here and it will tell you.

Do you know how far you are from your cabinet?

.... the question no one has asked, how are you connecting ? If via wireless, then that pretty much negates all those test results.

Thanks to everyone.

I am connected via ethernet cable to the HH.

Line WBC FTTC Up to 32.9 Up to 5.9 according to above test link currently 34-36 & 5-6 in practice. It varies.

Have been giving much consideration to getting new modem and or replacing HH altogether. May I as which ASUS model you have?

Cabinet I would say is within 200-300m of premises.

Edited by Opabinia (Sun 01-Sep-13 00:43:30)

If your estimate is as low as that, then I doubt very much your line length to cabinet is 200 - 300 meters, unless they've updated the estimate to match your speed.

What cabinet does the checker say your connected, and which exchange?

Somebody might then confirm it's location.

On the subject of modems, you should currently have two devices, a small white box, which is the modem and will be either an ECI or a HG612, and also the router, which is the HomeHub.

The exchange is Menai Bridge, the cabinet number is 4. The only cabinet I know of is at the end of the road and I really can't see it being further away than that. This may be unconnected with my line of course.

I do have a "white box" it's ECI and of course a home hub which is the third version.

I also mentioned on a previous post that I was concerned about the internal cabling that had been fitted.

Thanks for replying.

This is Menai Bridge Cabinet 4, how far is that from your home?

Thanks.

I live on Bro Llewelyn. According to Google Map's strange way of getting there it is 643m, though that is far from a straight line and it's from the rear of the property not the front where the phone line enters the house. Though there is no telling the vagaries of phone cable routing. The way I think the phone wires go as they are (I think) overhead, it's 539m.

My confusion over distance arises from the fact that there is a cabinet at the opposite end of the road that I had wrongly assumed was ours which is only 347m

Despite all this my apologies for quoting an incorrect estimate.

What does all this mean in terms of the problem.

Apologies for the delay in replying. My back is playing up again

Your speed sounds right for the line length but you shouldn't be getting sporadic drops in upload and latency. My line is 550-600m from the cab and my latency is 8ms.