Speed fluctuations

For the past few weeks I have been experiencing downloads speed reductions particularly in the evenings.

I am preparing to contact my ISP (Pipex) but am anticipating a standard response that speed is bound to be affected during peak times.

I accept that inevitably due to sharing the same physical media there will be contention.

The question is, is what I'm seeing reasonable?

I live at the far end of the copper and the best speed I can achieve is 2.3M. This is reducing to as low as 0.3M during the above periods averaging around 0.9M.

BT has my line profile at 2.5M.

I can post full details but I just wanted to see whether there was any point in pursuing it with my ISP/BT.

Cheers, Peter.

The question is not necessarily whether it is "reasonable" but whether it suits your requirements. I would suggest you could find a far better ISP that would meet a higher level of performance (but it may cost you more).

I understand Pipex are going through a dodgy time at the moment and therefore not necessarily the best performing ISP.

Are you locked into a contract? Have you considered switching ISPs?

Remember that the websites themselves may be contended and busy, and this is out of the control of your ISP.

So its a case of seeing if there is any pattern to which sites are slow and fast, i.e. if one is consistently good, then the broadband side of things is probably not having any problems.

Thanks for the observations.

Ian,

The answer to your requirements question is no, it doesn't suit. There are certain things like streaming video - BBC news clips, youtube etc. (i.e. not HD films) which I find simply unusable due to the buffering pauses.

I'm not locked in to Pipex but my concern is that I might switch ISP only to find that the problems persist because of physical/contention issues.

Andrew,

I've been running ThinkBroadband speed tests and these show the wide variation in performance. In addition, the tbbMeter shows that when the speed is degraded the speed recorded during the test is erratic whereas when I'm getting a good 2.3M it stays flat.

So another way to put the question is could contention be the cause of such a dramatic speed variation?

Cheers, Peter.

In reply to a post by RollingJ:

So another way to put the question is could contention be the cause of such a dramatic speed variation?

Yes. In fact it is by far the most likely cause.

In reply to a post by RollingJ:

I'm not locked in to Pipex but my concern is that I might switch ISP only to find that the problems persist because of physical/contention issues.

The vast majority of contention exists at the ISP and is caused by shoehorning far more customers onto their purchased capacity than permit them to deliver acceptable speeds.

Of course unless you research it properly you may well end up with an ISP that is no better or even worse.

Do you have any LLU suppliers available? Thinking specifically of Be/O2 here as they would most likely provide you with the best possible service (but NOT O2 Access).

If you don't have O2 then it is possible it is exchange contention but relatively unlikely these days. More likely is that it is pipex.

Looking at ISP like Zen, AAISP and a few others would potentially give you a far better service.

Thanks.

Of course that opens up the dreaded "which is the best ISP?" question. I'll probably give Pipex a chance to resolve it but I suspect I'll be switching forum quite soon.

I started getting drops in speed since the middle of July - I wonder if the School holidays are affecting capacity for some ISPs.
Hopefully things will return to normal in a couple of weeks !

School holidays could make a difference. But as I understand Pipex have recently been bought by TT? (I think) then things may only get worse.

I have noticed that during these summer holidays transfer speed is still an issue during the day (though perhaps not quite as bad as the evening) where in the past (read term-time) daytime has usually been the best. Lends weight to contention being the root cause.

As to what impact the move to TT may have - "I couldn't possibly comment".