In reply to a post by s_h:

Does all this activity clearly drop the speed of your own wireless connection pretty dramatically now, during peak viewing hours?

I'm not sure about the peak viewing hours, because that isn't critical to me yet...

After moving house, BT still hasn't managed to install a phone line, so all business & personal stuff relies on 4G through either EE or 3, via WiFi, and the most in-your-face-critical aspect is VoIP, while the other critical aspect is the VPN (or techy equivalents). I guess VoIP is notably sensitive to problems on either wireless leg.

Swapping from using the 4G modem indoors (even propped by a window) to an outdoor antenna improved things from "barely usable" to "casually usable" (improving 4 bar to 5 bar coverage)

We were still getting quite a few problems with this setup, and most notably during the day.

Swapping from 2.4GHz to 5GHz cut out over half the problems, and made it behave reasonably - qualifying as almost dependable for business - except for a few times when the cell would obviously have problems.

Finally I had a brainwave - my router, redundant without a phone line, could be reflashed with a variant of OpenWRT, and could then be made to host the 4G modem. That gave us more statistics over signal strength, which let us site the antenna much better: instead of getting a signal of -73 dBm, at the bottom of 5-bars, I could tune it to be as high as -55 dBm.

We now get a much more dependable connection, but the amount we're paying means evening streaming is not an option!

First, apologies to chris_here for taking over his thread - however these are new speed test results half an hour ago.

Three wired, and three wireless tests, alternating with each other within a ten minute period between 8:12 and 8:20 p.m.

Wired is from a Macbook situated close to the router and connected to it via ethernet cable with wireless switched off, wireless tests are on an iMac in the next room, connected via wireless to the same router.

I don't know an efficient way to post links to the six tests (help on this welcome)
though all are recorded in my profile, this is simply a list of results copied from the profile list:

Text

1 23 45 67 8

Flash Speedtest Results        Date                 Down TBB     Down HTTPx6     Upstream       Wed 12/11/14 20:19      12.30 Mbps      9.53 Mbps       16.32 Mbps       Wed 12/11/14 20:18      11.96 Mbps      11.60 Mbps      17.54 Mbps      Wed 12/11/14 20:17      9.42 Mbps       9.43 Mbps       16.11 Mbps       Wed 12/11/14 20:15      10.36 Mbps      11.76 Mbps      17.57 Mbps      Wed 12/11/14 20:13      9.97 Mbps       10.73 Mbps      16.17 Mbps       Wed 12/11/14 20:12      12.31 Mbps      11.24 Mbps      17.51 Mbps

nos. 3, 5, 7 are wireless (iMac)
nos. 4, 6, 8 are wired (Macbook)

Obviously not late in the evening, I noticed the speed was already dropping earlier at 7:00 pm.:

Wed 12/11/14 19:00 12.52 Mbps 32.32 Mbps 16.54 Mbps

Just tried again (wireless - done first - slightly faster than ethernet this time):

Text
1 2	Wed 12/11/14 21:02      11.04 Mbps      10.50 Mbps      17.45 Mbps Wed 12/11/14 21:00      12.51 Mbps      14.63 Mbps      16.42 Mbps

p.s. If this part of this thread is now off-topic, and should be moved to a new thread with a new title, will do this - though not sure how best to do it.

If you haven't registered on the Community forums I suggest you do so, and either repost here with that early fast speed test plus a copy of this latest post, or at least a post with a link back to this thread.

For dummies a few of us post there with a link to here and call for a rep. You're no dummy, and posting there yourself would be far better.

There's no way that is a common problem, otherwise all of us would be up in arms. It's still OK during the day is it?

I nearly suggested it in my previous post, and if it had been a wireless problem I would have recommended that while we sorted it.

I think what I've just suggested about the Community Forum is best, then just a report back here at the end. Anyone following the earlier part will ask if urgent for their decision, and any coming across it later will only need a result post.

I am a dummy when it comes to working out how to present the results of the speed tests, to make readable posts - the PN forums won't use the same methods, and don't know the optimal way to do this. So might link back there to this thread at some point, and my earlier thread posted here. All rather time-consuming.

Any ideas what might cause this are welcome, I think the daytime download speed has consistently been around 37 Mbps since first connected a week ago.

The PN forum posting is very similar. The biggest difference is you cannot shorten "quote" to "q" or "/quote" to "/q". And it's a flat forum of course, so all you can do is add a post, so sometimes @xxxx is needed, or click the "Quote" button as here. Just remember to delete anything unnecessary from the quote, as "full-quotes" are rightly frowned upon.

To do a link there back to here if you prefer, I usually click the "Link" icon then fill in the link and text. The resultant structure is identical to here but somehow if I just type/paste as here it doesn't work .

Thanks for replies, will see how it bounces back tomorrow. One question - if the Plusnet router is set up as instructed, with the password (Key) supplied, and indicates it is 'locked' in the SSID I can see for it, is it correct to assume it simply cannot be accessed without this password. I have not changed its settings since it arrived.

From general access, yes, it's locked. A determined hacker can of course break most passwords. Though the default one on mine is quite complex, so I kept it that way.

In fact I no longer use the Plusnet one, but have used the same password on my new router, which makes swapping easy if mine dies.

At least the passwords aren't the same for all they send out!

Not posted a conclusive update so far re: my slow evening speeds, as the issue is still being addressed, but is there a chance you could interpret this please from PN support:

. . . I am aware of an issue in your area related to capacity causing slow speeds. I can confirm our suppliers capacity team have commissioned a new port, this has been added and the network rebalancing will commence over the coming week.

What is a new port - could this be related to why the cabinet stopped accepting new connections so soon after it was first available (earlier post).