Origin Broadband - Evening Speed Issues

I have been with Origin for many years and had a few issues but all tended to be okish.

A few years ago I had problems with speed but after they upgraded network the speed was great. I have an 80:20 connection with them and last few weeks speeds have been fine except between 7-11pm - and it's almost clockwork that the service degrades significantly.

I have spoken to them a couple of times and first time they reached out to Openreach to see if congestion at the exchange which apparently there isn't, I am synced at 80:20. So they don't know what cause is.

They suggested it's because I am a heavy user - I had use nearly 100gig a day but not sure why that matters. All our TV is consumed through internet Netflix etc. family of four. I have also been working from home with tons of Video Conferencing and file transfers etc.. I don't torrent or anything..

They said they needed me to contact them in a slow period so they can run some more tests and I forgot on Friday and they close at 8.30pm so hard to get through.

I have been running a speedtest every 10mins for a lot of the last 2weeks. The machine the test is running on is hardwired.

The results are here: https://testmy.net/myaverage/Bounderboy

As you will see the dip is almost clockwork. I wondered if anyone had any ideas on what it might be, what I can try and how I can approach getting it fixed..

Thanks in advance.

100 Gig a day.

Maybe I'm out of touch but I don't use 100 Gig a month.

Edited by busterboy (Sat 18-Apr-20 22:49:29)

Sure you aren't out of touch - I think my normal usage is nearer to 60gig a day but with working from home it has increased a lot - work for a video production company and we are using cloud sharing quite a lot...

Anyway my usage wouldn't explain performance drops in the evening... as I am sure i am using more in the day not the evening or at least just as much

In reply to a post by bounderboy:

Sure you aren't out of touch - I think my normal usage is nearer to 60gig a day but with working from home it has increased a lot - work for a video production company and we are using cloud sharing quite a lot...

Anyway my usage wouldn't explain performance drops in the evening... as I am sure i am using more in the day not the evening or at least just as much

Usage doesn't matter you're right. If usage was an issue Origin Broadband shouldn't be advertising unlimited data with no fair usage. So if thats the issue they appear to be suggesting I would use that as a potential excuse to leave as they clearly cannot provide the bandwidth at peak time.

I used to be with Origin and experienced exactly the same issues you're having now, albeit a little worse (random IP address loss, packet loss) but non the less the issue you're having sound very familiar to me. As soon as I left Origin my issues went with them.

Have you checked the drop in 'performance' isn't caused by all your TVs and things in the house?

Disconnect all the wired devices, apart from your test PC, and turn off wifi. Run the test and see what it is like when you are in the 'slow' window, say like at 1900

Hi,

People forget that broadband speeds are like a dinner table that is heaped with food. One person would have more than enough food but start adding people and soon enough each person is only getting a TINY portion of the servings. If you only have one device that uses the internet then the speed should be more than enough but start adding devices and they end up having to fight for a portion of that speed.

HTH people understand things a little better!

Yours,

Though given devices don't use a constant amount of Internet this equation is not as simple as made out.

In reply to a post by mking90031:

Hi,

People forget that broadband speeds are like a dinner table that is heaped with food. One person would have more than enough food but start adding people and soon enough each person is only getting a TINY portion of the servings. If you only have one device that uses the internet then the speed should be more than enough but start adding devices and they end up having to fight for a portion of that speed.

HTH people understand things a little better!

Yours,

If you have multiple devices connected to a router but only one of the devices is doing anything rather demanding a router would typically give the vast majority of the bandwidth to the device asking for it. A TV streaming netflix would not impact speed nor would it use 100GB of data per day, as it appears OP is doing file transfers and it noticing his speed isn't at what it should be despite what his modem/router is reporting. I imagine OP is doing the speed tests while no other devices are doing anything otherwise that would defeat the purpose of doing a speed test.

thanks all.

In reply to the speedtest validity its an interesting one for sure. The results are just run every 10mins using a PC wired to router.

The rest of my network is Wifi (well it's Unifi Wifi so the APs are connected to the router.). Now I understand that because I am not isolating a single device for the speed tests there is definitely going to be an overhead that prevents me from seeing top speed and also even the best speedtests have overhead themselves.

So my complaint isn't with topline speed as that is around 30-40mbps (not full 80) and when speed is hovering around this then I don't notice any degradation in performance. It's only in the evening that I notice performance problems and the speedtest graph shows consistently that the speed drops proportionately every night between 7&11pm. I am pretty sure my usage is flat throughout the day and "Peak time viewing" isn't the issue as everyone is home watching tv all day etc...

So it feels that although there is some flaws in my test for full speed comparison it still feels valid for showing degradation.

And my original reason for posting was to understand if it feels like this is mine, openreach or origin's problem and if there is anything I can do to solve - without leaving preferably.

Hope that makes sense

If while you are working you are transferring large video files, and you do most of your work during the day and not the evening, if it was due to your usage I'd expect speeds to be better during the evening.

From what you have posted it's not something at your end and definitely down to Origin.