IDNet to Aquiss

So I've now moved from IDNet and off Zen's backhaul to Aquiss via BT Wholesale (I believe) then to CityFibre/Entanet and thought it might be helpful to give an update as I've been vocal about getting of Zen's backhaul. All my kit exactly the same, and every test wired Ethernet.

The move went perfectly and couldn't have been easier and initial speed tests were promising and on par with IDNet/Zen. (900/100 package).

However things are not looking so good now. Yesterday morning after a bit of a stuttery Whatsapp call I checked the BQM, and from just before 9am I see latency ramping up. Single thread speedtest was down to 80Meg, and multithread around 300. I raised a ticket and later in the day got a response that there were no problems and things had improved on the BQM, and indeed speeds were back up higher and latency down, not the best speeds for that package, but okay. Pings at the time to the bbc showed the increased latency (up from 6ms to 25ms), but pings to the gateway were still at 6ms, so this seems to suggest it isn't a backhaul issue and the congestion/issue is from the gateway onwards.

I've not been able to check the BQM to see what happened at 9am this morning (as BQM had some down time), but speeds have dropped again, with the most annoying aspect that uploads are less than half or a third of what they should be, and it is the upload speed I have this faster package for.

I will raise another ticket about speeds this morning.

Recent speed results this morning:
https://www.thinkbroadband.com/speedtest/16390446844...
https://www.thinkbroadband.com/speedtest/16390440276...

BQM from yesterday showing the issue starting at 9am
https://www.thinkbroadband.com/broadband/monitoring/...

The word Entanet should be enough to scare anybody of. Twice bitten and never again!

That is a disappointing response to your ticket. Have you got any further with getting this resolved?

Yes did exchange more tickets but it's not been as bad since so I just have to monitor it.

I'm beginning to suspect it is because business traffic is prioritised. During the first working week I've had Aquiss there is change from all green on the BQM at around 9am to more yellow that carries on for the working day, then disappearing as the working day ends and gone by the evening (speed tests are still acceptable but lower during the working day). Given we are on Saturday, perhaps no surprise to see no uptick on the BQM.

Speeds haven't dropped again so drastically that triggered me raising the first ticket, so perhaps there was some reduced capacity that day. Also since then I've dropped PPP and now on a different gateway.

Today (Saturday)
https://www.thinkbroadband.com/broadband/monitoring/...

Friday
https://www.thinkbroadband.com/broadband/monitoring/...

Wednesday when throughput dropped to ~80Meg
https://www.thinkbroadband.com/broadband/monitoring/...

Edited by E300 (Sat 11-Dec-21 10:08:00)

In reply to a post by E300:

I'm beginning to suspect it is because business traffic is prioritised.

We don't do anything at all like that. Home and Business FTTP services are delivered exactly the same with the Care levels being the only difference.

Apologies I wasn't clear, I wasn't meaning at Aquiss end, but within CityFibre/Entanet network. It wouldn't be a surprise if they prioritise more profitable business traffic than their wholesale traffic, assuming the networks aren't completely separated and so end up meeting somewhere.

Are you able to share what your experience has been since then please?

In reply to a post by rusty8976:

Are you able to share what your experience has been since then please?

Issues are still on going with what appears to be congestion starting at 9am weekdays, with maybe one day out of 10 where things are so bad there is packet loss, speeds plummet and minimum latency and jitter increases, during this time video calls and VoIP are ruled out.

Apart from this ongoing issue in the 3 months I've been on the service there has been 2 days of complete meltdown (affecting many customers) and just today I've been advised to disable IPv6 due to an issue although it seems okay for me. There was some funny latency spikes over the last couple of days on IPv6 so perhaps that is a new problem they are trying to resolve.

This is the worst broadband for problems and quality of service I've had from any ISP. I'm in contact with Aquiss most weeks chasing up news but CityFibre (who Aquiss are reselling) seem unable to diagnose the problem. I'm guessing this is a local issue to me (some port or kit is at capacity) and I assume other customers are all good, but you only know how good a company is when they are challenged to fix a problem and 3 months in, no further forward.

I'm quite sure there are many happy customers and I'm just an outlier unlucky enough be on some bit of congested kit CityFibre don't have the ability to identify and sort out, so try not to let one persons experience put you off.

Thank you for the update - sorry to hear you're still having issues. Fingers crossed they get resolved soon.

I'd be interested to know what is causing this. My impression is that Cityfibre GPON isn't particularly high quality, anecdotally I've seen some Vodafone users have issues too. Perhaps you have a few users hammering the upload on the PON, but while theoretically possible I'd be surprised if this was happening in reality.