BeFibre - Raw speed ok but not responsive

We had BeFibre installed to replace our Sky broadband.

A Nokia ONT was supplied and installed with an Adtran 854-V6 router.

I replaced the Adtran with a Draytek Vigor 2865, this then connects into our 24 port gigabit switch with WiFi provided by a Unifi setup which are unchanged from when we were on Sky. The Draytek is configured with the same MAC address as the Adtran was supplied with.

DNS servers are configured as Primary: 8.8.8.8 and Secondary: 8.8.4.4

In general, the new service performs very well. The raw speed, especially on the wired connections is great.

However the experience does not seem as 'snappy' as the Sky broadband, and we regularly get pages which are slow to load or time out completely.

Its almost as if each time a site is used for the first time in a while, we have to find our way to it step by step. Once found, the speeds are just fine.

The following is a prime example of this. My laptop has been away from the home network for a few days. I thought I'd carry out an Ookla Speedtest this morning.

I entered 'speedtest' in Google and clicked on the search result for Ookla. It took it's sweet time and then gave me a raw text page, albeit with the 'Speedtest' logo in the top left corner.

Refreshing the page resulted in a normal looking Speedtest page, however it just sat there 'Finding Optimal Server'

Another refresh and I could start the test. 21ms ping, 755mbs on the download and then 0.00mbs on the upload.

Another refresh and it did 17ms ping, 808mbs download, 397mbs upload. Repeat tests since all yield similar results.

Close browser, restart, try again - all fine.

Any ideas?

With the larger providers such as BT and maybe also Sky, you are often receiving content from popular sites from a cache. I believe BT even have massive CDNs for Netflix etc so traffic remains within the BT network. This obviously makes for a snappier experience on slower lines but at your speeds it should not be the case.

Have you tried a DNS benchmark such as DNS bench from GRC if you are on Windows?

Other things to look at are are those tests on wifi or cabled?
Have you checked any bufferbloat tests?

Routing 1gbit is obviously more difficult and brings with it its own requirements.

Have you tried limiting the MTU on your Draytek?

Might be worth dropping it a bit to see if it helps..

Edit: maybe try 1460, and if no help, 1430.

Also if you're given a real IP on BeFibre (I've seen conflicting info..) try setting up a BQM to see how consistent your latency is.

Edited by summat (Wed 19-Jul-23 17:38:35)