Issues with Broadband

Hi all,

Hope everyone's well. Apologies if this isn't the correct forum to be posting on. I'm looking for some help/advice in relation to my sporadic internet speeds!

I'm currently a customer of SSE. I have a fibre package which has the potential to offer 74.35 Mbps download and 20 Mbps upload (according to the router management page).

The problem I'm having with the internet is the inconsistency of the speed. Early mornings until early afternoon, the speed is fine (testing at approx. 40 Mbps d/l via WiFi), but in the evening time the speed drops to a shocking 0.50 Mbps.

I also play Call of Duty online and when the internet is performing as it should, I have approx 30 ping with 0% packet loss, but when the internet slows down I'm averaging approx. 80 ping and 10%+ packet loss.

I've called them up and they've asked me to take screenshots of my internet speed using the Ethernet cable at 4-hourly intervals to assess when the issue arises. I've done this.

My question is: what could be causing this? I'm no tech wiz, but I understand peak times can cause congestion in internet traffic reducing speeds, but surely that affect wouldn't decrease your speed from 40 Mbps to 0.05 Mbps, would it? I just can't understand how there could be a fault as at certain hours the internet's perfect and at others it's not, so surely a fault wouldn't appear and disappear at set time periods.

Anyway, any advice and tips is truly appreciated. I'll be calling them tomorrow and I'd like a little ammunition in case they try to fob me off with generic answers and 'diagnostic' tips (which they've done in the past!)

Edit: just to add that my internet during the slow speeds becomes extremely frustrating as internet browsing is fine, but watching Netflix, live streams, YouTube or anything other than general browsing becomes slow, stuttered and unenjoyable.

At the time of writing this: 0.23 Mbps Download | 10.5 Mbps Upload | Latency: 83 MS



Thanks!
Lyam

Edited by deleted (Sun 28-Jun-20 22:23:38)

First step, connect a device that will run a speed test using an Ethernet cable to rule out that the issue is congestion or interference that is affecting the wifi but not the broadband

Thanks for your reply!

All the speed tests I've been conducting and cataloguing for my ISP have all been done via ethernet to my laptop. Usually, my ethernet cable is only plugged into my PS4, but SSE specifically requested that all speed tests be done via ethernet. It appears WiFi and cable perform pretty much the same.

Dial 17070 option 2 Quite line test (Free call) , you should not have any noise at all, check different times of the day.

How long has it been going on ?

SSE, could be the problem, with there 'backhaul' being congested at peak times.

Don't forget during 'Lockdown' some parts of the internet has taken a hammering.

Hi Aptman,

I don't have a landline but I think I could borrow one from a neighbour and do this. What exactly would I be listening for? If there's no noise it's a pass, and if there's noise it's a fail?

It started around 2 weeks ago. For the first week I kind of just ignored it and thought "it'll fix itself" but then it became consistent with the times and progressively worse (in regards to the speed). When the lockdown was first introduced and weeks after, there were no issues with the line.

In the morning, my internet had a d/l speed of 45 Mbps over WiFi, whereas 8 hours before it was 0.5 Mbps.

In reply to a post by Lyam:

Hi Aptman,

I don't have a landline but I think I could borrow one from a neighbour and do this.

???? If you don't have a landline how is service delivered? And borrowing one from a neighbour ... how will that help with yours?

I'm going to assume he means phone as that makes sense.

Yep, the phone

In reply to a post by Lyam:

My question is: what could be causing this? I'm no tech wiz, but I understand peak times can cause congestion in internet traffic reducing speeds, but surely that affect wouldn't decrease your speed from 40 Mbps to 0.05 Mbps, would it? I just can't understand how there could be a fault as at certain hours the internet's perfect and at others it's not, so surely a fault wouldn't appear and disappear at set time periods.

It almost certainly is pure congestion somewhere in SSE's network.

Think of a motorway with heavy traffic. There doesn't need to be any obvious specific cause of a holdup for the traffic to come to a complete halt, then a couple of minutes later starts moving and soon gets back up to normal speeds. Just someone going slowly in a particular lane, especially if in the outer lane and trying to cross over to an exit slip road later than they should have done.

That can cause a full-width crawl or stop miles long.

Or in relation to broadband, if things slow down a bit, causing lots of people to do speed tests, kerrunchh!! (One of the wholesale providers had that a few years back and had to put out a message to their ISP customers to ask users not to do that as it stopped them diagnosing and sorting out the actual bottlenecks).

Live or catchup streaming of football matches at the moment won't be helping.

Thanks for the analogy!

So if this is the case, what are my options? Can SSE do anything about this? Also, I wasn't experiencing this 2 months ago so I don't understand how it could be happening now unless SSE have taken a bunch of new customers on recently, which given the circumstances I doubt is true. Any ideas?