New 1Gig Service

Now my broadband service with Zen works perfectly no issues and always has! Mine from day one on FTTP has been at the correct speed I pay for!

But a good friend has signed up with a new ISP (not going to name and shame) it’s been 7 days - but something smells very fishy!

He signed up for a Gig service, on the final day of installation the Openreach engineer tested and stated the following light test gives 16 ? That’s okay he reported but it’s not great he continued to complete a speed test and got 50 (this is supposed to me a Gig service) the Engineer then stated he always sees slow speeds on Gig service and it will get faster over 48 hours ! It needs to train and there are lots of updates going on.,,,,

Currently my friend does not get any faster than 90-100Meg, via router, direct from PC with just a PPPoE connection

ISP has said with a Gig connection 100-150Meg is about what Openreach states is guaranteed! this does not sound correct st all when BT now have a minimum guaranteed 700Meg over Gig connection?

And if that’s true why order 1Gig if you only get 90 !

Comments?

Well unless there is obvious cable / NIC / router port auto-negotiation issue which is capping speeds to under 100 Mbps that sounds as though there is either a fault with the service or a misconfiguration of the speed profile which has been applied.

Can your friend test directly (from laptop / desktop) directly into the ONT? May need to setup a PPPoE client on the machine and username/password (dependent on the ISP).

Bad ethernet cable is the first place to look when the download speed seen is in the range of 92-95Mbps.

he has connected direct to the ONT with PPPoE from desktop using a brand new Cat 6A cable.

My friend is not a noob and very technical in the engineering job he does, working with TCP/IP devices on LAN installations.

Edited by einsteinagogo (Tue 31-Oct-23 10:12:41)

Fair enough. If cables have been swapped to eliminate that as a possible issue, then next stop is the ISP as either the ONT has a fault (rare but does happen) or the service is simply at fault / not provisioned correctly.

Hi,

Openreach only warrants 110Mbits/sec continuous down on their 1000/115 product (or 330Mbits down on their less common 1000/220 product). If your ISP chooses to advertise it as 1Gbits/sec then they are taking the risk associated in the difference between Openreach's commitment and their own advertising.

The shared nature of Openreach GPON FTTP is such that unless we only want to be offered speeds below ~80Mbps (2.4Gbps / 30 subscribers) then the capacity will inevitably be over sold to some extent. In general this works due to the bursty nature of the traffic.

Having said all the above, if someone is only getting ~100Mbps at any time they try then either they are sharing a PON with 20 prolific downloaders or, much more likely, something is broken. Once you've eliminated the users equipment (including cables - a common source of dropping back to 100Mbits/sec ethernet!) as a cause of the problem then that leaves the ISP and possibly Openreach (which again is the ISPs problem) as causes.

it surprises me that the ISP has not escalated this to Openreach despite the Engineer stating he only got 50M at installation!

and I considered this ISP over all others, but if that's how they treat new customers charging a premium service, and they are just going through an Openreach scriprt before escalation, there is no better than signing up with BT, PlusNet, Vodafone etc they all use the same fibre to the house!

So what are you paying the additional money for ?

Edited by einsteinagogo (Tue 31-Oct-23 11:11:46)

And was told a string of misinformation by the engineer ....."the Engineer then stated he always sees slow speeds on Gig service and it will get faster over 48 hours ! It needs to train and there are lots of updates going on.,,,,

Yes, but it was reiterated by the ISP Customer Support Analyst, and almost told wait 48 hours for routers, ONT and everything else needs to upgrade.

I'm appalled at this ISP, I expected better, but it looks like all Customer Support in the UK has gone to [censored] these days!

Hi,

It is reasonable to give a period of time after provision of a FTTP service to ensure that the correct configuration has reached all parts of the network involved - there is no guarantee that this has happened when the link initially goes live. 48 hours is not an unreasonable period for that (although towards the upper of of what I would expect). That is of course nothing to do with any kind of training.

After that time, if the link isn't delivering the agreed performance then there is something wrong and the ISP should be fixing it. Are they really saying that after a week, there is still a reason why no more than 100Mbits/sec is acceptable.

To avoid red faces, you have checked that you friend has (a) checked to make sure that his computer is reporting a 1G link speed on the link to the ONT and (b) isn't running anything on his computer which may throttle network throughput (anti-virus software / deep packet inspection firewalls being common offenders).