In reply to a post by RobertoS:

As I pointed out earlier, the 1Mbps is a custom protocol on port 4095, which Plusnet traffic management will have at the bottom of the priority list if there is congestion.

The 6x is HTTP on port 80, with higher priority.

I believe plusnets traffic management is specific to individuals lines, not overall plusnets traffic.amounts.
So even if it was de-prioritised it would be because your own line is full of other traffic and there is only a small amount left.

I am assuming with so many people running tests where they fail are not all because they are maxing out their connections while running a speedtest.

Just speculating - is a common factor the Flash version of speedtester? I've only had the odd results using that whereas the 'newer' version hasn't done it as yet although the single threaded result always shows a distinct rising curve at the begiining of the download but does always build to around the same value as the multi threaded result.

The traffic management applies across the network, as well as at line level. This was stated by one of the more senior Plusnet reps at the time of this blog post, when many of us were asking that question.

If you think about it, it has to. Otherwise your VOIP or gaming could be swamped at gateways by several other people's 4K streaming. The prioritising of such traffic has to be all the way through the Plusnet system, otherwise operating on the individual line is pointless.

I'm also not suggesting anything is being maxed out at system level. More that whatever protocol the thinkbroadband single stream is on is right at the bottom of the list. The protocol of traffic is one of the main determinants of priority. I expect port numbers are involved as well.

That is over 4 years old!

On https://www.plus.net/help/broadband/about-traffic-pr...

it now talks about "In exceptional circumstances the network could become much busier than expected. This could be due to a major news event leading to a huge amount of online traffic, or in the rare case of network failure, for example. In these situations, we would prioritise traffic on our network to help ensure you get a great service no matter how busy it is."

Now as people are getting the funny x1 speeds even at off peak hours it would strongly suggest that the network isnt contended at that point in the day, otherwise at peak times it would grind to a halt for everyone, which it does not.

Looking at wireshark the DSCP flag for both the x1 and x6 is the same, so doesnt point to DPI being the culprit slowing x1 traffic but not x6 traffic.

In reply to a post by MrSaffron:

Someone may be wanting to make it look like passing the buck, but they are not.

Anyone who looks around will be providers like AAISP and Zen who've had issues and found solutions without us needing to change anything. So its not our tester or network at issue, which I'm sure some would love it to be.

May be able to produce some analysis, that will let us look at this more easily i.e. breaking down monthly speed test analysis by different ways, and this may help to identify a common link. Alas that takes time and hypothesis are not always right - so the more people test with http://labs.thinkbroadband.com/speedtest the more info we have to work with.

ANy insight into what they did to fix it? In the Zen foum there is a long thread that looks the same as this so not sure if everyone else has fixed the issue themselves. NOt suggesting its a TBB problem but also not sure everyone else apart from plusnet is working fine on x1

It is still valid.

There were also links to many explanations of their prioritisation but their recent Help revamp has either moved or removed them. The other links didn't mention "lines". Just traffic types.

Speed test.

No I've seen it on the HTML version as well. I've removed Flash from all my computers now and in any case my machine kept having issues with it under Chrome.

In reply to a post by apone:

Now as people are getting the funny x1 speeds even at off peak hours it would strongly suggest that the network isnt contended at that point in the day, otherwise at peak times it would grind to a halt for everyone, which it does not.

It's also difficult to use congestion to explain why bouncing a connection can apparently fix the problem then and there. I got rubbish results around 8pm. Bounced the connection and immediately got normal results and have done for a week since.

I suppose it could be route congestion but I don't think it can be attributed to overall network congestion.

http://www.thinkbroadband.com/speedtest/button/14821...

All fine here at the moment as well. I don't anticipate it changing as the evening progresses either.

Edited by Andrue (Mon 19-Dec-16 18:46:21)

I agree Andrue.

It is something wrong in the Plusnet network causing it. But (was it you?) as someone has posted, their real-life use isn't impacted. Just the tbb custom protocol speed test.

It points to a mess-up in the new network setup to me, similar to what we had for a long time two or three years ago.