Slowdowns

Dear all, I wonder if someone could help me. I currently have BT Infinity in a small office that I use. I am a self-employed financial trader, so speed of connection is of the utmost importance. My Infinity always shows speeds of 75MB, but at certain busy times of the day I have data slowdowns of up to 2 minutes. The prices of the commodities I trade become delayed and I know the data I am seeing on my screen isn't correct, but a few minutes behind real-time. We have complained to BT numerous times, but they just spout the headline 75MB speed, but this seems irrelevant when I am still having slowdowns.

Someone else has told me that the problem lies because the Infinity lines to the cabinet, or maybe from the cabinet to the exchange are shared by other users. Some have said they are shared by a total of 20 users, others say 50 users. So regardless that Speedtest.net is showing I have 75MB there is sometimes a bottleneck and I am not seeing live prices.

I am thinking of switching to Sky Fibre, but want to know whether I will have exactly the same issues, as they just use the same lines. Sky tell me that their network is their own and is never shared (they're going to say that obviously). I think almost all businesses around my premises will be with BT, so if I did change to Sky, there may not be as many other Sky users sharing my line - so it could be better. I could be barking up completely the wrong tree, but no-one else I ask seems to know the truth of what is causing the problem, or a solution.

Obviously I don't want to commit to a 1 year contract with Sky, if after 1 day I have the same slowdowns.

Any advice would be much appreciated please.

Many thanks,

Kevin

If it is commodity trading then it is latency that is the biggest factor, i.e. how many milliseconds for a small packet of data to reach you.

If speed tests are showing that you are actually getting the 70 Mbps or so, then it cannot be congestion as that would be affecting speed tests.

Gaps of 2 minutes (one presumes nothing else on the Internet works at that time) point to something like the connection dropping out, i.e. check the lights on the Openreach modem, or a DNS/routing issue with the ISP. For the later changing ISP might help, but remember Sky is a consumer only operation and could easily decide to not want you as a customer.

On the congestion, it is usually a 1 Gbps fibre link (or multiple ones) from each cabinet to the telephone exchange. So congestion on that segment is usually negliable, particularly during the day and before kids get home from school.

Can I suggest you do something like open a DOS command prompt window and leave a command like ping -t www.thinkbroadband.com and see if there is any packet loss over the course of an hour or two.

You can trade on a 500kbps connection .... It is very unlikely that the connection form cabinet to exchange is a problem for the sort of delay you are reporting.

Possible problems:
Bottle neck at the Market Data provider
Packets being corrupted by high noise levels or interference.
Packets getting lost
Your PC not sending ACKs
AV software kicking in occasionally.

I assume you are using a wired connection and not a wireless/WiFi


I would suggest talking to you Market Data provider and see what they suggest or ask them to run some diagnostics.

Changing to Sky ... who knows. It could be the same, it could be worse or it could be better.

Hi Kevin,

Streaming graphs/info use very little data as I was a self - employed financial trader and I had a 1meg connection (I now trade on betfair instead), are you saying that your info stops for 2 mins and then starts again or that when it gets to say 2pm-5pm that your graphs/info all end up 2mins behind?. If it stops for a couple of minutes and then catches up to me that sounds like your internet connection went down, contention shouldn't really be an issue (I don't think fibre has a set 20 or 50 contention issue by default it's ADSL that had that).

And ADSL got rid of the standard 20 or 50 concept almost ten years ago

In reply to a post by lordbell:

want to know whether I will have exactly the same issues, as they just use the same lines. Sky tell me that their network is their own and is never shared

The lines between the cab & exchange are run by BT OR and are shared by all users on that cab, regardless of whether they on BT, Sky or whoever. So, that's not going to change. It's only after the exchange that Sky's network kicks in. Their network capacity beyond there is likely be no better than BT's.

No, your issue is not with contention or speed, which you are showing good, but with delay or latency between you and your market supplier.

Why don't you set up a Think Broadband Quality / Ping monitor, you can then see what happens to that when the problem next shows it's self.

You ideally need a fixed IP, but it will work as long as your IP doesn't change. If your IP does change remember to update or deactivate the ping monitor or it will end up pinging someone else.

Do you have Infinity for Business, (I think those prices are ex-Vat), or just the SOHO consumer level that we see here?

The latter is quite likely to suffer small latency issues, and I consider isn't suitable for your business. The former is supposed to ensure priority through the network, and better fault resolution times.

Having said that, a 2-minute lag suggests a specific problem somewhere, as has been said.

Forget the 20/50 ratios, and ignore anything anyone suggesting their current existence says. They have never existed on BT Retail or Wholesale products from ADSL Max up through ADSL2+ (21CN/WBC) to FTTC. Applicable only to fixed rate services, possibly only when they were all there was and not now - that I don't know.

Won't work with HomeHubs as they don't respond to ICMP pings

In reply to a post by MrSaffron:

Won't work with HomeHubs as they don't respond to ICMP pings

So, the BT Home Hub 5 will be pointless then.