In reply to a post by Spetznaz:

Hi,

I've been using Infinity through BT retail for just under a year having finally being able to access FTTC last January, until recentely it seemed fine but in the last month or so there have been some significant slow downs which seem to happen during the evening mainly.

I have tried all the obvious stuff and ruled out any issues within the house, done the livechat with BT 'help' who claim to have tested the line at their end and got 49Mbit when I was getting 7-9Mbit through speedtest.net and speedtest.btwholesale.com at the same time.

Conveniently their own speedtest which you can run when logged into your BT account for fault finding diagnosis always reports a problem saying it didn't complete then at the end of the other pointless bits they test says your 'speed appears normal' (how very convenient!).

Just looking for advice on what best to do next if anyone has had similar issues?, I've been through this before with ADSL which was pretty much exactly the same with it being terrible 7-11PM but fine after midnight in the last 2 years or so of using it, I got nowhere as they always denied the issue, so I'm hoping I am not going to find the same here, why do BT seem to plan so badly for bandwidh provision??.

Maybe I'm best to just cancel and try another ISP?, I'm not sure if my contract is 12 or 18 Months but given that the speed I'm getting is often well below their own minimum threshold I do not think it right that they can hold me to contract in any case!.

Email Gavin Patterson - he will get his team in Newcastle to call you and they will probably shift you onto a less congested segment. That's what they did for me anyway

According to BT I was upgraded to the 55/10 package, I had a email to that effect anyway a few months back. I do understand the line rental thing, even so there are cheaper packages available, I checked my last bill which was around £60 (in total), seems steep for a 8Mbit service? (unless used at restricted times).

The attenuation figure seems odd, I am no expert but with ADSL wasn't it roughly 1dB per 100M?, I was (am) 2.0Km from the exchange and had 22-25 normally, the cabinet is around 650-750M max (line length) so surely it should be more like 9dB?.

I think you could be right about the lights, hopefully when these come down it may improve my sync slightly, I was one of the first yes and expected a drop off but it has been worse than expected, but then again as I said ADSL was almost unusable here so it was obvious a lot of people would move over quickly as they were effectively forced to, I thought G.INP or vectoring was supposed to offset this somewhat?.

I have a suspicion this issue has been going on for a few months but only got more noticeable over xmas, so I will see how it goes in the next couple of weeks now xmas is over, then I guess the only option is moving ISP and hoping they have more influence on BT than BT (hmm...) ?.

I can live with 30/40Mbit but when it is dipping well below 10Mbit I am basically back on ADSL and BT should only be able to bill me for this level of service, w!f is ofcom actually there for?.

Edited by deleted (Mon 02-Jan-17 19:11:01)

laaaaaaaaag..

Oh I'm back, thanks I'll give it a go but sounds too good to be true..

In reply to a post by Spetznaz:

According to BT I was upgraded to the 55/10 package, I had a email to that effect anyway a few months back. I do understand the line rental thing, even so there are cheaper packages available, I checked my last bill which was around £60 (in total), seems steep for a 8Mbit service? (unless used at restricted times).

Sorry, my post seems to have been a bit confusing.

I was pointing out that although you are now on 55/10 with BT, the rest of my post is about the Plusnet you suggest instead at £4pm. It is 40/2 resulting in probably under 38Mbps at good times. With a much lower upstream. Also I see no Plusnet package at £4 apart from an addon call plan.

The 8Mbps is the main issue of course, discussed by us all in other posts.

I'm exactly 600 metres from the cabinet, on a clean line, and my VDSL2 attenuation is 18.9dB. VDSL2 attenuates much more rapidly than ADSL2+. Graphs vary, but here's a reasonable one.

xdslctl: ADSL driver and PHY status
Status: Showtime
Last Retrain Reason: 200000
Last initialization procedure status: 0
Max: Upstream rate = 14321 Kbps, Downstream rate = 64316 Kbps
Bearer: 0, Upstream rate = 14306 Kbps, Downstream rate = 54999 Kbps
Bearer: 1, Upstream rate = 0 Kbps, Downstream rate = 0 Kbps
Link Power State: L0
Mode: VDSL2 Annex B
VDSL2 Profile: Profile 17a
TPS-TC: PTM Mode(0x0)
Trellis: U:ON /D:ON
Line Status: No Defect
Training Status: Showtime
Down Up
SNR (dB): 9.3 6.1
Attn(dB): 18.9 0.0
Pwr(dBm): 13.6 7.3

My 54999 sync and 9.3dB downstream noise margin are due to banding having been applied on my line a few months ago. I'm hoping that after a period of stability with my new modem DLM will remove the banding.

Note that on two HG612s I have used the highest sync achieved was under 60Mbps and the Max Attainable also under 60Mbps. With luck, once DLM relents I shall get well over 60Mbps actual connection speed. Also soon DLM will apply a 3dB margin instead of the default 6dB on the whole network. (Openreach are relaxing that, as BT Wholesale did a while ago on ADSL2+). That will add a few more Mbps I hope.

I was not expecting more than 55Mbit so sounds like I wasn't too far off, I was just hoping G.INP would improve things, hopefully it won't drop much more though at this point ISP congestion/cabinet congestion/exchange congestion (which ever it is!) is more of an issue than sync speed.

Thanks for the explanation.

Done and already got a reply similar to what you had by the sound of it, impressed so far as was not expecting a reply on a bank holiday evening, hopefully this rectifies things for me shortly but also means that OR become aware of an issue that is probably effecting other users in the area and work on improving capacity.

Thanks for the advice.

You might be mixing up G.INP and G.FAST.

G.FAST is the higher speeds than we have now, and is being trialled I think. G.INP is just an improved method of error handling instead of simple interleaving.

Simple interleaving that we had on FTTC for the first few years typically adds at least 8ms to latency, has a depth in the thousands, and reduces the sync speed by 7-10Mbps or even more.

G.INP goes with a very low depth of interleaving, eight or ten, and removes the extra latency. Almost the full speed of Fast Path is restored. But no extra. G.Fast gives higher product speeds, well above the 80/20 current max. As long as the line is short enough.

In reply to a post by Spetznaz:

Done and already got a reply similar to what you had by the sound of it, impressed so far as was not expecting a reply on a bank holiday evening, hopefully this rectifies things for me shortly but also means that OR become aware of an issue that is probably effecting other users in the area and work on improving capacity.

Thanks for the advice.

Did it resolve the issue for you?
I ask because my connection just dropped by 85% for several minutes and nobody else was using the connection at the time.

I only noticed it because I had just got loads of rubber banding in the game I was playing at the time and then got DC'd, I was also getting loads of errors over voice chat as well as seeing packet loss, so I did a speed test and was just shocked, it has been worse when I lost 95% of my connection, sadly I never kept a copy of the result.

Paul