Hm. It's "up" to 10mbit now, I'd have thought by this time of night any congestion issues would be gone.

I left a download going actually and it failed with a network error so something is very borked somewhere

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

I've eliminated the router and the cable connecting the modem and the router as problems.

Threading the download offers a significant improvement (still only about 20-25mbit worth of speed, but much much better than the 2mbit it gets on a single thread) which I seem to recall reading somewhere as an indicator for congestion as well.

Edited by deleted (Mon 23-Dec-13 00:08:08)

When there was congestion on my local exchange the approximate peak slow down hours were 6pm-11:30pm Mon-Thu, 6:00pm-2:00am Fri, 4:00pm-2:00am Sat and 3:00pm-1:00am Sun.

Had to suffer it for 3 months before it was sorted.

Edited by simon194 (Mon 23-Dec-13 01:06:12)

Sounds about right.


Here it is at 2:45am, it's near perfect now
https://www.dropbox.com/s/4thuf9k2vr5d9y1/Screenshot...

Certainly seems to walk like congestion and quack like congestion.

Edited by deleted (Mon 23-Dec-13 02:45:30)

Ok Chaps,

Just ran a test on the BT Wholesale checker and got the following results:

Results Image not loaded


1. Best Effort Test:

Download Speed : 65.95 Mbps

2. Upstream Test:

Upload Speed : 15.41

That seems pretty fair to me. However, if i go to any of the website download speed tests, it seems to average out at the following:

35.5mbps Download

14.5mbps Upload

Quite a significant difference in what BT is telling me and what i am actually getting


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

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

http://www.speedtest.bbmax.co.uk/results.php?t=13878...

Well it's after 6pm and ta-da, it sucks again. In fact the TBB test actually gave up first time!

TBB Avg x1 3.19, Avg HTTPx6 19.31. Line is capable of 47-50...

Reported as a fault, will see what happens

Edited by deleted (Mon 23-Dec-13 18:26:59)

Looks like it's going to be similar here.

At the moment there's pretty much no point to having FttC (but I guess the upload speed is nice?), and there are times when it's slower than the ADSL we had before. Whenever I come to use it, i.e. am at home, which means after work when everyone else is at home - it slows to ~7mbps on speed tests, but sometimes the real world downloads actually go down to what I seem to recall is about ADSL1 speed (if not dial-up speed), downloads of 40KB/s. Absolutely pathetic.

plusnet can't help much of course, we've gone to the far end of a fart on diagnostics but it all boils down to "looks ok to us! " because they work 9-5 when the speed is ok. All they can do is send a BT engineer out to check the wiring etc (no point, it's fine, the wiring doesn't know what time it is and mysteriously go bad at peak time - plus the BT engineer would also be 9-5 and would just say "huh? looks fine to me!") and add us to a list of complaints so that hopefully one day they might upgrade the dslam. Yay.

Edited by deleted (Fri 03-Jan-14 23:25:05)

I have been onto BT about mine. They keep calling me back saying everything thing is fine.

I explain that the sync speed both up and down are very good, but download speeds are shocking.

Where my problem is, is the download speeds NEVER exceed 3.5mbps. I have spoken with friends who have done tests on various servers and download sites and they are getting between 5 & 7mbps downloads, so i know its not the servers holding back.

The tech support dont seem to understand the difference between sync speeds and downloads. I got so fed up with trying to explain, i have now said to stop calling me (it was like 3 times a day) and i'll live with it.

It really sucks, getting 4mbps currently. If it wasn't for the upload advantage, I'd be asking to switch back to ADSL. Might as well rename it to superslow broadband!

Worth persevering with your ISP, after some pestering on the forums ours has a fault number now.
http://community.plus.net/exchange-information/

So hopefully we'll get somewhere soon.

No promises, but I don't think I'll be complaining about interleaving any more. After dropping to ADSL1 speeds on the evenings and struggling to even stream video let alone do Steam downloads etc, it really puts the previous drop from 62 to 50 mbps into perspective. It's almost as if someone went into the exchange and turned a few things off to make a point.

Edited by deleted (Thu 09-Jan-14 12:22:06)