Sounds like an ISP capacity issue.

The BT speed test will pull data directly from BT's network for its speed test, which gets more indepth when you advance to the further testing stages of the test (when you have to login with a generic user name). This is so that BT can see if the issue is being caused by issues on their network, rather than the ISP's,

As 3rd party speed testers make use of the entire connection, so to speak, it is largely limited to how much the ISP is throwing down the line at you. If the BT test is coming back with a much higher speed than the 3rd party tester, it indicates that the performance directly from BT is ok, but from the ISP is poor.

I would ask your ISP to look at their connection nodes. I suspect they may be overloaded, or getting busy at peak times. Or, as a previous poster has said, it could be packet loss, but that is easily checked by tracing out to something reliable, like bbc.co.uk or similar.

Having given that very comprehensive answer about the nature of the BTw speedtest.... what about when an end user is unable to get a BTw speedtest to run... when every attempt over a long period at any hour of the day or night results in a prolonged wait before receiving a site busy message with the additional blurb about reporting repeated failures....... what is the EU supposed to do then?

I would be really interested to see your comments.

Report that to the ISP who should listen and a good one will check the appropriate settings/load of nodes anyway.

One possibility is that the RWIN if this is an XP machine is set at a value that works OK for the latency of the BT Speedtest, but is not so good once the latency of the extra network to reach outside world is introduced.

I found large differences running speed tests, Avasts Webpage watcher slowed some tests down, and I would suggest that you try your tests from safemode with network, using ethernet cable, that removes a lot of the progs that may slow your speeds.

I posed that question as Ben has Enta support in his signature, it was Enta support who flatly refused to deal with the issue for me recently, telling me to contact BT directly, which of course I have no route to do, and sadly this point seemed lost on a number of forum members here, becoming quite heated at one stage as I pointed out that end users have no way to approach BTw over matters such as this. Maybe it is time for me to take on Enta support again... or just move to an ISP with a support staff who will actually deal with issues.

My issues persist with a variety of machines and operating systems and 2 different router types. Seems to me my issue is outside of my control.

Apologies for hijacking the thread tho, but my own thread just seemed to attract people who wanted to argue that "its not for my isp to tell BT how to run their site". Thanks to Mr S for clarifying that point

ISP's have contact with BT Wholesale and at some level should be able to sensibly raise issues over the checker not working. Sometimes there are very good reasons.

In theory if you can email me [email protected] with the phone number of the line affected, I can enquire of BT Wholesale bypassing the ISP.

BT Wholesale is far from perfect, but so are the ISP's and too often a game of blame anyone but themselves exists.