Broadband performance fluctuates

For the last 2 days my broadband speed has fluctuated wildly over a 24 hour period. In the morning it is about 2mbps. From about 17:30 pm the speed falls to
around 0.02 mbps.

Our house is in a v small village about 3.5km from the cabinet. The exchange / cabinet was upgraded to FTTC a few months ago but we are too far away to get superfast broadband.

I read somewhere that a fibre upgrade can cause problems in terms of capacity sharing which is what these symptoms suggest to me. Has anyone else had a similar problem? If so, what was the cause? What's the technical name for this phenomenon and what can be done to fix it?

I'd welcome a reply couched in simple terms as I'm not very technical.

Thanks

If the sync (connection speed) is staying the same then it is likely to be contention. Lots of people sharing the same bit of network.

However, this may not be local to your exchange and could be in the ISPs network. Which ISP are you with? Some ISPs may run higher contention ratios than others to keep costs down.

Though while good to raise the contention spectra, the general performance of FTTC based services is pretty good.

The performance at the end of 3.5km FTTC line is going to be VERY marginal and I am leaning towards this been a noise issue. What ADSL speeds were possible before.

Does the original poster have a VDSL faceplate or are you using micro-filters? On such a long VDSL line, then a faceplate is the way to go to remove the influence of extension wiring.

I wasn't sure if the OP had actually upgraded or not - wasn't clear from the post.

Mmm yes you can read the post that way too

If the original poster is on ADSL and it is an up to 8 Mbps old fashioned IPStream service, then possibly nothing to do with the fibre roll-out, but peoples usage going up and increasing the shared nature which on these older exchanges is more keenly felt.

We did look for a general trend and old IPStream exchanges overall don't look to be slowing down, so if that is the scenario it might get fixed in the future.

It could also be coincidence and for whatever reason the OP has ended up on a more highly contended part of the ISPs network (been seen in the past with PlusNet gateways).

Thanks for the responses. No, I haven't upgraded to the fibre service. BT would not let me. My ISP is BT. According to the BT engineer who came a few weeks ago, my faceplate is correct ... 2 sockets one above the other, a horizontal line across the middle and a label at the top saying openreach.

My gut feel is that it is a noise issue rather than contention.

First move will be to ascertain if the sync figures and noise margin are stable or changing and if so, is it a gradual change or a sudden step.

Get a copy of Router Stats Lite from http://www.vwlowen.co.uk/internet/files.htm#routerst... (FREE) ensuring you choose the right version - there are a couple of router specific ones. Install that, set it to monitor Downstream sync speed and SNR at 30 second intervals and then leave it running until early evening. Get a copy of the screen shoot hosted and provide a link. Leave it running for another couple of days and get those graphs too.

Which telephone exchange is it?

Thanks for your reply. I'll give that a go but it may take some time as I'm not at all technical.