EE - Broadband (up to 8meg) - performance incredibly erratic

Hi All,

Wonder if anyone else has ever had a similar experience to me with EE/Orange. Have been a customer for over 5 years now and have had pretty much fault free performance. I'm on an up to 8mbit/s connection, and the downstream IP throughput has generally been around 6mbit/s, which is fine for my needs. For the last few months however the performance of the connection has been incredibly erratic. Symptoms include web pages that load incredibly slowly (like dialup slowly), downloads from major sites that suddenly run at 2-3kbytes/s and a complete inability to stream any youtube video, even at 240p. However, the next minute (it feels like performance changes second by second, click by click) a download will run at 600-700kbytes/s and youtube (the same video) will stream at 720p with the buffer racing away from the playhead. These symptoms exhibit all day, for example it can be very slow at 6am, 2pm or 9pm.

Throughout the problem the router has consistently synced up to the exchange at 8128kbit/s downstream (448kbit/s upstream). Which has always suggested to me that the line is good. EE have sent two Openreach engineers to the house who have both confirmed this!

I get the same performance whether I'm on wifi or wired.

I get the same symptoms across a wide variety of devices (Windows, Mac, Android) - these devices also work great if I take them to a friends house. I don't think it's my technology at fault.

EE seem to be completely obsessed with looking for physical link issues, whilst this feels very much like an IP issue somewhere in EE's (or BT's I guess) network.

It feels like my traffic is being load balanced somewhere across a good gateway and a bad gateway. Get the good gateway and it's great, get the bad gateway and it's awful! In desperation I signed up for the Hotspot Elite VPN service (Anchorfree) on a hunch that encrypted traffic was quicker. This does make a significant difference to the performance sometimes - almost like when the VPN session gets routed through my imagined "good gateway".

I'm getting desperate now. EE don't seem to have anything approaching what I'd called a 3rd line troubleshooting team. I'm not even sure if they have their own network anymore?

Any suggestions? Apologies for the long first post!

Gav

Please copy your results, just the text bits, from http://speedtester.bt.com/ , the Diagnostics button.

Also full router stats?

What exchange?

Here you go XRaySpeX:


Operation Mode Automatic G992.1(G.DMT)
Upstream 448 (Kbps.)
Downstream 8128 (Kbps.)

Noise Margin Upstream 23.0 dB Downstream 7.6 dB
Line Attenuation Upstream 18.0 dB Downstream 30.5 dB

Output Power Near 12.2 dBm Far 19.9 dBm

Interleaved Path FEC Correction Near 1453 Far 7

Interleaved Path CRC Error Near 8 Far1
Loss of Signal Defect Near 0 Far 0
Interleaved Path HEC Error Near 4 Far 0
Error Seconds Near 63 Far 0
Statistics
Received Cells 773566 Transmitted Cells 202444

Broadband Type: ADSL
Broadband State: Connected
Internet State: Connected
Time Connected: 04:43:36
Downstream Rate: 8128kbps
Upstream Rate: 448kbps

Protocol PPPoA
VPI/VCI 0/38
Encapsulation VC MUX
ADSL Mode G992.1(G.DMT)

The exchange is Storrington, West Sussex.

The router is a new EE Brightbox, I had a Livebox before. EE sent me the Brightbox when I first reported the fault. The performance on either router is the same... bad.

I can't get the speedtester diagnostic to run at the moment, it's telling me the system is busy, but I have run it quite a few times for EE. Typically it reports good throughput, 5-6mbits and reckons that the acceptable range of performance for my line is between half meg and something like 7meg. I'll keep trying it.

Gav

Hi Scuffler,

Please send your details landline and mobile number by Private Message and I will get this issue escalated. I will also get the network path looked at.

Regards

Thanks UKDoc, have sent you a PM.