Advice on BT FTTP 900 not reaching 940/120

Hey there,

So this is purely out of curiosity more than a complaint, I'm aware the speed difference isn't massive however pretty much my issue is that with using a CAT5E cable, direct connected to the ONT I am only ever able to hit 920/97mbps speeds. Most of the time my upload is more like 93mbps however my download is always solid 920.

Can anyone think of why I may not be getting the 940/120 some others are getting? My setup was done a bit ghetto and has some bends in the fibre but I don't think it'd be bad enough to cause this, I have put images below however.

I am the first fibre installation for this entire area, and it's a brand new installl as of recent.

https://www.speedtest.net/result/9733799239.png

https://photos.app.goo.gl/Vp6mdhS6UWCtdosv6
https://photos.app.goo.gl/9tS97Gd2NTLWcYiJ9

Edited by deleted (Thu 09-Jul-20 23:06:21)

Much repeated from my reply in the other thread.

You can't get 120Mb up, it's only provisioned at 115Mb before any overheads.

Bends in the fibre can't cause a limit to 910Mb. It will work or it won't.

You're getting 2.4Gb to the ONT from your fibre, it's just rate limited to 1000Mb.
The fibre can definitely handle 940Mb.

Some are only getting 910Mb.

BT Wholesale might be using different settings on different kit or in different areas.
If you're consistently getting 920Mb max then that's how your line has been setup somewhere.
For others it's only 910Mb.

I doubt you'll ever speak to anyone who can tell you why the differences between users but as it's sold as a 900Mb package there will be very little point in raising it with BT.

Yeah, I agree, no point complaining but more wanted to squeeze out more on the upload if anyone had any tips but think I'll just be stuck with this.

I totally agree, we have never got to or above 940Mb (down) and 120Mb (up) which is totally fine due to we wasn't expecting it would, but we have got close to 120Mb, on average we get around 117Mb (up), and 920Mb to 935Mb (down).

I was told on the phone when ordering that we would get 910Mb (down) and 110Mb (up) not even a mention of "up to speeds" and we are getting at least that so all is fine.

A fluctuation in the speeds would still be fine here due to we are paying the same price that we were paying for Full Fibre 250, so we are very happy.

Paul

The speeds they quote will be based on the SamKnows testing they do, i.e. a median average - this might be testing inside the router itself rather than a standalone box these days.

Any Gigabit provider selling at 940 Mbps is probably doing its maths wrong, due to all the TCP/IP overheads involved, i.e. a speed test of 940 Mbps is the perfect result, so to get this as a median (50% getting this) is very hard.

For the original poster it may be things like RWIN, MTU, PC performance are an issue, or the average from the ookla result is not showing some ups and downs, seeing the graphs from a test at https://www.thinkbroadband.com/speedtest might give some clues for people to comment on.

Might be down to your ethernet chip/drivers? Doesn't take much of an overhead at these speeds to knock off 20mbit.

I get "only" 895 on speedtests - given I was on 15mbit not so long ago, it'll do

Edited by deleted (Fri 10-Jul-20 10:47:34)

I totally agree, on my White Box Monthly Report Card for last month it says an Avg of 928.4Mbps (down) and shows a constant 119Mbps (up) which is about right.

I can also see some dips now and then too.

TBH I was shocked we even got these speeds, I was expecting to get about 910:110 that was quoted to me over the phone, so to have slightly above that is nice.

Paul

Hi,

Mine's been fitted about 3 weeks now and I get a solid 880mbps down and 110mbps up.

What router are you using? What specification of computer with what network chipsets and what OS are you using. Squeezing every last drop of performance out the network is a black art. Getting two PC's directly connected together over some Cat5e (aka no switch involved) to max out a 1Gbps link is difficult enough, random junk and some none ethernet in the middle is even worse. When you move to 10Gbps its next to impossible, the max I have ever been able to get a work is 8.6Gbps out of a 10Gbps link. Oddly enough 40Gbps links do better, but that might be down to The £1000 Mellanox cards in them.

I would add most stuff out there in the internet cannot keep up with a 1Gbps link, and at work I have had one of those for the last 15 years. Dell are the absolute worst in my experience.

Not nice, its want the Ofcom rules require

if the samknows was reporting 828 and 90 averages for the collective group monitoring then BT would have to drop speeds in adverts

In reply to a post by MrSaffron:

Not nice, its want the Ofcom rules require

Huh, what's not nice?
Did I say something wrong, or was you referring to where BT never mentioned the up to or minimal speeds when I was upgrading over the phone?
TBH I think she was more shocked about the actual speed I was upgrading to due to all I heard was "Oh WOW"

In reply to a post by MrSaffron:

if the samknows was reporting 828 and 90 averages for the collective group monitoring then BT would have to drop speeds in adverts

This is true.
I know when BT started selling their 500 and 900 packages I had to get SamKnows to add the two packages to their list of speeds.

Paul

Edited by PaulKirby (Sat 11-Jul-20 11:38:24)

Not nice meaning, should be no surprise that the SamKnows boxes/monitoring is showing above the speed sold at. Meant to be that 50% or more lines can be shown to get that speed at peak times.

In reply to a post by MrSaffron:

Not nice meaning, should be no surprise that the SamKnows boxes/monitoring is showing above the speed sold at. Meant to be that 50% or more lines can be shown to get that speed at peak times.

Oh I get you, well on April 24th when we first got the 910:110 package from BT we were getting about 884Mbps down, which was fine due to its a lot faster than what we had before.
The samknows card for April showed min 261.8Mbps, 886.3Mbps and an Avg of 293Mbps.
The low SK speeds on the card was due to it was also including the 24 days of the old 300Mb (293Mb) speeds.

SK Download chart: 2020-04-24 -> 2020-05-24

As you can see on this download chart it did start off at a lower speed below the quoted download speed, but that was fine, then on May 10th at 8pm there was a drop spike to 752Mb but that could of been a download going on at the time.

Then on May 15 in the early hours the connection dropped for a several mins (seems BT possibly did some stuff to the hardware) to come back up at the 920Mb upwards speeds and has been at that speed since.

Looking at the chart hourly for any day I can see a small drop of about 6Mb in the evenings every day.

SK Upload chart: 2020-04-24 -> 2020-05-24
Nothing really to say about the upload speed, is seems a constant 118Mbps.

I know we shouldn't have any speed issues between us and the exchange due to there are only about 4 to 6 of us on our Splitter Node which only supplies the hardware on one pole, but that will probably change once / if the rest are allowed to order FTTP.

Paul

I have the Fibre 900 product and I am impressed that so many users appear to receive consistent solid speeds. Which speed test utility are they using? I have tried several of them now, the Think-broadband one being the most pessimistic. 'FAST.COM' which is the one OR engineers always ask me to quote (they say that the OR speed-test does not function well with FTTP!) gives me speeds between 480Mbps and 930Mbps, Speedtest.Windows App slightly lower speeds. Also there is no consistency during successive tests. If I run 'Speedtest' I may get a 850Mbps result and then if I test again immediately I would get 620Mbps so you can see my concern after reading how consistent other user's speeds are.
All these speeds are above the minimum rate accepted by BT so there is no mileage in contacting them for that reason. My upload speeds are rock solid between 115 and 120Mbps, it's just the download speeds. I do not use the SH2 as that caps my upload speed to 50Mbps for some reason and I am using an Orbi RBR50 connected via PPPoE. I have tried making a PPPoE connection from my PC direct to the ONT, but that seems to max out at a download speed of 250Mbps.
Any ideas how I can get more consistant download speeds?

Well I only use speedtest.net and the TBB Speedtests which seem to match up give or take a few Mbits, fast.com is rubbish (well for me it is) it has given me nothing but wrong speeds like the link to the image of the test I did yesterday on fast.com.

Now I wish I got this speed FAST Results 20200710 so I only stick to the speed tests sites that are consistent with each other.
I also use the same servers on speedtest.net that I know give me consistent speeds every time (give or take a few Mbits) when I do them along with the TBB Tests.

As to what have I done to get this, nothing, I am using my own router that says its able to handle up to 10Gbits throughput, so that should be future proof for a while yet.

Have you tried doing the speed tests in the early hours like 1 to 4am ?
I just did 2 tests on speedtest.net (Single-Threaded, Multi-Threaded) and 2 test on TBB (IPv4, IPv6)

Also BT Wholesale: BroadBand Performance Test works better in Chrome for me and gives around my speed most of the time.

What download speeds did you get on your SH2, if it was around 890 to 920Mbits then your Orbi RBR50 "might" be having issues with the high speeds, I don't know that NetGear model router so I might be wrong.

Also when you connected your PC to the ONT, when is the specs for the PC.

Paul

BT most likely just fiddled with the profiles they use to manage the traffic rather than anything actual local FTTP wise

I’m surprised to receive consistent speeds too.

When signing up for fibre 900 I expected to hit max speeds of course but I always assumed there would be very few places that could send me data at a sustained 930Mbps.

I found a few Ubuntu and centos mirrors to try, just because.
Didn’t actually need any ISO’s.

I was amazed to see over 520Mbps from a centos mirror only New Zealand!

Speedtest.net also gives me consistent 920-930Mbps speeds. I’m sure I saw nearly 940 once which is the perfect result. Very rare.

WiFi of course is much more variable dependent on load and setup.

Very pleased with fttp so far.

This was direct connect to ONT so no router, I am using Windows 10 with a good CAT5E cable to my motherboard Realtek PCIe GbE port, however I have also done tests to my server NIC which is 4x1Gbps QLogic (Dell R210) and receive exact same speeds on Windows Server 2019.

Just doesn't make a lot of sense to me that some people can max out 110-120 but I can't even reach 95. I can't complain really, hopefully Openreach release 900Mbps upload eventually

Edited by deleted (Sat 11-Jul-20 17:27:56)

In reply to a post by MrSaffron:

BT most likely just fiddled with the profiles they use to manage the traffic rather than anything actual local FTTP wise

Yeah its possible.

Paul

In reply to a post by oldskool:

I’m surprised to receive consistent speeds too.

Yeah, me too, I knew I had a very consistent connection when on the Fibre 250 (FTTP), but I was a bit wary with the 900, but I was happy to see it was fine.

In reply to a post by oldskool:

When signing up for fibre 900 I expected to hit max speeds of course but I always assumed there would be very few places that could send me data at a sustained 930Mbps.

I too did wonder if I got these speeds everywhere, most places I go to I get almost max speed, but its hard to tell with some due to the download sometimes finish too quick LOL

I know Steam, BattleNet and several other do handle the max speeds.

In reply to a post by oldskool:

I found a few Ubuntu and centos mirrors to try, just because.
Didn’t actually need any ISO’s.

I was amazed to see over 520Mbps from a centos mirror only New Zealand!

Same, but it depends on the download mirrors you use.

In reply to a post by oldskool:

Speedtest.net also gives me consistent 920-930Mbps speeds. I’m sure I saw nearly 940 once which is the perfect result. Very rare.

Yeah I got 934.52Mbps which is the best I have seen so far and probably won't see it again LOL

In reply to a post by oldskool:

WiFi of course is much more variable dependent on load and setup.

We only use Wi-Fi for mobile devices and that's it, I chose the router I am using due to it has no Wi-Fi and can handle up to 10Gbit Throughput, and I have Wireless Access Points placed where we need them, that way the router can be anywhere I want it and it won't affect wi-fi.

In reply to a post by oldskool:

Very pleased with fttp so far.

Same here.

Paul

In reply to a post by oldskool:

I’m surprised to receive consistent speeds too.

When signing up for fibre 900 I expected to hit max speeds of course but I always assumed there would be very few places that could send me data at a sustained 930Mbps.

I found a few Ubuntu and centos mirrors to try, just because.

Blizzard can do 700mbit. Suddenly those mammoth patches don't seem so scary when you get 5Gbytes/minute

I know I was surprised to get somewhere between 50MB/Sec and 70MB/Sec form blizzard and steam

Origin was very variable

No longer is it a pain in the .... to turn on the pc and play some games, which I do only a few times each month or so. Inevitably there are always huge patches each time I do so.

Yeah, I remember getting into a couple of WoW Betas back when we were on ADSL2+ (4 to 5Mbits on a good day) by the time we downloaded the beta there was another update of the exact same size, so I ended up giving up on it.

Paul