Don't forget if it's the first day you've had fibre you may be getting a load of errors on the line, which will have the effect of slowing the connection. Once the DLM takes action your sync speed may drop but actual useful through put will increase.

Not saying it is errors causing the slowdown, but it may be.

As your with Plus Net I would suggest getting a static IP for a one off payment of £5 and setting up BQM on here, it help you see whats going on with your connection.

Wired, 3 of us, tests made while agreeing not to interfere. It's back up to full whack now, absolutely solid full speed, so yeah I'm pretty sure it was related to congestion in some way. If it was related to the 10 day training, I wouldn't expect it to mysteriously slow during the most obvious peak time and speed up again as people start to go to bed.

Can't complain really - even though for a few minutes things dipped right down to ADSL1 and 2 speeds, it also kept peaking up kind of like a roller coaster. The overall performance averaged out to ~30 during the busy period (about 6-10pm) compared to 60 normally... to be fair, for the price, and considering I was testing with fairly non-essential and bandwidth heavy things like Steam, Usenet and speedtest.net (plusnet themselves admit download sites and usenet have a lower priority) it's probably not so bad. I still grabbed a 6.6GB game in Steam in 40 minutes(!) - alright it would've taken 20 during the day, but on ADSL it would've taken half a day so it's nothing to grumble about

Most importantly the upload is very consistent, I guess it's handled separately.

I was uploading photos to my FTP site, testing with speed tests, uploading random files to Dropbox etc. Not at the same time as download speed testing, as I was used to uploads affecting downloads on ADSL. Consistently it gets the full speed I expect (20 minus overheads etc) even during peak time, so no complaints whatsoever there!

Edited by deleted (Tue 15-Oct-13 23:55:03)

I hope it is only congestion, and it does sound like it. My line have never been fast enough to notice it, I'm current getting about 43/8 Mbps

There is no ten day training period. You get two days grace (unless very bad) from the DLM (Dynamic Line Management) system then it constantly monitors and adjusts your line if need be, usually in the early hours of the morning.

It is very nice to hear somebody accepting Plus Nets priority system and not moaning about it, I've been with them 10 years now and have no complaints, maybe the odd grumble now and then though.

Was there only you using the connection at the time? If the other two people in the house are streaming/browsing doing stuff, they'll take priority over your steam downloads. You may see it rollercoasting as well because those sorts of activities tend to grab their data in bursts.

PM over your username so I can determine how you were connected. I'd like to see if we could identify any reason for it on our side as well.

The other 2 weren't doing anything while I was testing.

Indeed right now they're not doing anything and I ran the thinkbroadband speed tester and am getting 20 down, 15 up.

Will do..

What OS are you using? I have found XP doesn't seem to like the TBB speed tester.

Although you say you are wired, if you have wireless on the laptop/PC have you turned it off to make absolutely certain that's not being used?

It's bang on peak time and I can max my line with both the TBB Speedtester and Speedtest.net.

Speedtest.net does work better with XP, but I have found no matter what OS you are using you need to try a good few different servers until you find a good one. I've always found Maidenhead, Sheffield and Sittingbourne very good.

OS X, but my professional opinion as a 10 year experienced IT technician is that is very unlikely to matter (especially during specific times of day )

Okay, testing right now, both others in the kitchen so definitely not doing anything, nothing left downloading/uploading/etc. Plugged into wired networking via a gigabit network switch, wifi disabled.

TBB: 51.56 / 11.16
Speedtest.net (Manchester server which I normally use): 27.25 / 15.59

Second test a minute later

TBB: 38.94 / 11.58
Speedtest.net (Manchester): 14.81 / 15.21
Speedtest.net (London): 35.74 / 15.72


So yeah, long story short it's inconsistent at this moment in time, which is what I found yesterday at peak time as well. One minute it might almost max out, the next minute pretty slow. Averages out about 50%, which... I don't think is too terrible for absolute peak time to be honest.. (certainly I'd absolutely love for it to be hammering along at max at all times of day, but my expectations are in line with cost and bearing in mind other servers out of anyone's control may be under load at this time)

Edited by deleted (Wed 16-Oct-13 19:29:30)

We looked at the cross browser and OS issues a few months after launching the new flash tester earlier this year.

So curious to here what you think the problem is with XP. Looking at those two results I see no problems. The graphs we provide give a large insight into what a connection is actually up to.

Those graphs I posted tonight were done on a WIndows 7 machine, I have XP at work and it always seems to give much lower results on the single threaded test, often used to be about half the 6 threaded test. But I guess that could be just XP not configured very well.

http://www.thinkbroadband.com/speedtest/results.html...
http://www.thinkbroadband.com/speedtest/results.html...
http://www.thinkbroadband.com/speedtest/results.html...


Obviously the fact the the 6x one shows the expected speed for our sync (40/10 product) shows something is causing the single threaded one to slow down.

And this one just goes to show what can happen when you get a massive amount of errors on the line, note the upload & ping stayed about the same as usual.

http://www.thinkbroadband.com/speedtest/results.html...

Edited by R0NSKI (Wed 16-Oct-13 20:00:07)

Probably the twin set too small new operating systems scale the twin so it does not limit single thread downloads