In reply to a post by Realalemadrid:

Typical useless response from ISP support, you have very high noise margins (which is a good thing) because you are on a very short line. I guess the FTTC cabinet is just outside your door. You could easily get higher speeds on your line if you upgrade to a higher speed service (80/20). As for your intermittent access I cannot offer any advice, but there is certainly nothing wrong with the speed of your connection.

Speed when its there isn't bad, FTTC Cabinet is approx 200m away. We were with +net on a similar package until 14months ago who emailed to say that we would be "upgraded to a better speed" which was a bit disapointing as were were on 80meg and their "upgrade" reigned us back down to the correct speed!!

A basic okala speed test shows an initial upload of 100meg which rapidly melts down to the 10-15 normal speed. Speed can drop a bit mid evening as you'd expect but weekdays it also wavers as there in a recently built community college/school nearby with heavy IT infrastructure.

In reply to a post by MrSaffron:

The router is also reporting 230 hour up time for the WAN connection, so around 9 days and no issues with the speed test a good one for a full sync 40/10 product

Yes this replacement router and the one before it both held the connection ok, its just its dozed off and if you click while its asleep you have to wait for it to wake from its slumber.

Its not a permanant thing, the rural workshop I'm based at this morning had gone idle, opened the laptop and plugged the lan in only to find the email client timed out unable to reach our server. Pull the data line, wait for the red light and pop it back and as soon as it had logged back on to the exchange we were off. It doesn't drop continusouly as theres a desktop uploading the weather station to the met and our website at regular intervals and it manages those, plus I'm sure its not a local network effecting it as that one also has cctv running 24/7 with no dropouts

We also have another site which is in the same village as the exchange serving it and there are no FTTC cabinets until you get to the outlying villages so that sites line is straight into the exchange which always make the openreach engineers chuckle when the see the lines potential.

I'll see if I can narrow the fault down to a specific trait.

You have a 40 Mbps sync, which means speed test maximum MUST be 38 Mbps so if a test is showing 100 Mbps it is wrong.

What is showing the 10 to 15 normal speed as the speed test you did showed a very good speed

A school will usually not be on a Sky fibre service so their usage should not affect you

I wonder, from the OP�s latest wording of the router �dozing off�, if this problem may be failures to renew the PPP leases for some reason?

The BQM would most likely be top to bottom as no IP to ping at that point, unless it renews very quickly, not sure but I think WAN uptime would also be lower

Data line - is that the phone line? Or Ethernet cable into laptop?

Next time you have this 'idle' log into the router and see what the connection status is before you do anything else.

True. Scrub that idea .

In reply to a post by MrSaffron:

You have a 40 Mbps sync, which means speed test maximum MUST be 38 Mbps so if a test is showing 100 Mbps it is wrong.

What is showing the 10 to 15 normal speed as the speed test you did showed a very good speed

A school will usually not be on a Sky fibre service so their usage should not affect you

I use the ookla speed test mainly for convenience and on the sky fibre the download pulls the 35-38 mark most of the time. when it kicks over to upload it romps off straight away to 80+ or more but quickly subsides down to the 10-15 normal result. Just something I've noticed with it!

I can understand a school not using the sky fibre but it just seems noticeable if ever at home around school time that the speed seems to back off a bit similar to early evenings, being a bit of a night owl I'm often around late and you can see the speed results climb back up to their best again then.

In reply to a post by MrSaffron:

Data line - is that the phone line? Or Ethernet cable into laptop?

Next time you have this 'idle' log into the router and see what the connection status is before you do anything else.

That'll be me. I call the RJ11 adsl lead the data lead as I always rig up modems next to the master socket with a two port plate and do away with all the filter aggro. so Data lead and phone lead.................!

I'll see if I can catch it again but IIRC from the past negotiations with sky I did check that for them and pretty sure it shows connected. Thats the weird thing its as if the modem is assuming its all tickity-boo but infact when you click a link or open a page there is nothing, often we will be both browsing away and reading whats cached and then the one who uses the connection finds there's "nothing there" IYKWIM?

In which case next time you to do something very basic when you get to this state, to rule out the going to sleep is because of some PC/router interaction e.g. DNS lookups broken

Open a DOS command prompt and type and try the following command, expected response is shown too

C:\Windows\system32>nslookup labs.thinkbroadband.com
Server:  UnKnown
Address:  192.168.0.1

Non-authoritative answer:
Name:    labs.thinkbroadband.com
Addresses:  2a02:68:1::13
          2a02:68:1::12
          80.249.99.73
          80.249.106.133

then try

C:\Windows\system32>ping 80.249.99.73

Pinging 80.249.99.73 with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 80.249.99.73: bytes=32 time=25ms TTL=60
Reply from 80.249.99.73: bytes=32 time=25ms TTL=60
Reply from 80.249.99.73: bytes=32 time=24ms TTL=60
Reply from 80.249.99.73: bytes=32 time=24ms TTL=60

Ping statistics for 80.249.99.73:
    Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
    Minimum = 24ms, Maximum = 25ms, Average = 24ms