How is everyone's experience with upload speed and Hey! Broadbands peering?

As far as I can tell, F&W, who provides the infrastructure for Hey! broadband only peer with a couple of other networks.

I'm on the 1gbps package, and for me, the upload rate to everything except the ookla speedtest servers is fairly abysmal. I've hosted an openspeedtest server on my network, and generally, people who I've asked to use it see their download (my upload) capped around 50mbps.
I've also routed it through a Cloudflare tunnel, and that's improved it to around 70mbps.

If anyone wants to give it a go here are the links (report back because I don't log the results).
This test is directly through HB.

and this test is through cloudflare

My upload speeds seem fine. I can upload a >gigabit file to a file sharing site in a few seconds.

The peering for Hey! is pretty shameful though. It's worth noting that there are other ISPs with better peering arrangements that use the F&W infrastructure: https://fwnetworks.co.uk/partner-with-us/current-par...

I hope I'm not jinxing things by saying this but I can't fault HB's service at the moment. A strong 920Mb/s up and down. I'm not one to hesitate to raise issues with them but I've nothing to complain about at the moment.

Here's the last 24hrs of speed tests to the Ookla service
Here's the last 24hrs of latency to 8.8.8.8

The only criticism that I have is the odd routes some things take. Anything Amazon / AWS takes a very odd route.

Edited by nofappingway (Wed 13-Mar-24 10:44:51)

Have you got a BQM set up? Every few days I get a period of packet loss lasting a couple of hours, then back to being fine.

Also my first hop is to apfutura.net, one of Carlos Bock's Spanish ISPs.

It does seem like Hey! is bodged together from a bunch of Bock's other ventures.

I don't use it, no. But I have my own monitoring at a 3rd party I run myself which is polling my connection checking for availability. This is what it looks like for the past 24hrs.

Note that this is checking the availability of a service rather than a vanilla ping hence the higher latency....but there is no packet loss and latency averages 15ms....which includes the time it takes for the service its polling to respond.

I certainly do. It looks like there was a short outage last night too.

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

I've gone ahead and tried to restart my chat with support regarding my upload speed, as we got as far as them acknowledging that the issue was on their end, and then they stopped all correspondence.
I have 3 months worth of hourly speedtests with ookla.

https://ibb.co/y4nvDzm

Edited by Dreovid (Thu 14-Mar-24 08:22:19)

I installed the speedtest container on my server & ran some tests against your connection, as well as getting my daughter to run some. She is on a Hyperoptic synchronous 1Gbps.

I have the 900/900 HB connection & get pretty constant >900/900 speed tests unless it's during one of the evening latency spiking sessions...

From me to your connection: 93 down, 167 up, 27ms
From Hyperoptic to you: 77 down, 319 up, 11ms

It does seem like your upload is not right. You would also expect HB>HB connection to be pretty fast, as there should be very little routing in between. Obviously not the case...

From Hyperoptic to me: 607 down, 162 up, 21ms

Seems my upload is pretty much as it should be, but either my download or my daughters upload is pretty poor.

Feel free to run some tests to mine at speed.kans.one. I won't leave the container running permanently though. DM me if you want to do some other testing etc.

Thank you Kans,

That's super helpful, as testing on your server let's me rule out my own equipment.
On my network, I've got 69.9mbps download and 86.8mbps upload to your openspeedtest.
Then measuring through a laptop directly connected to the ONT with a known good cable I got 74.8mbps download and 144mbps.
But I did have one test which got up to around 500mbps, so I went back on the network and also got a lucky one at 500mbps.

So whatever the issue is, it's intermittent, and I think i can rule out my equipment, but I might invest in a better cable tester anyway.
Both to the ONT and on the network were averaging around 100mbps up & down, which is what makes me think it's a gigabit ethernet cable somewhere that's negotiating down to 100mbps intermittently.

Well after 6 months of trying to get a stable service from Hey! I have given up, dealing with Tech support and complaints has been a nightmare. They never respond, call when they say they will.

The main fault is that the service kept dropping for 30-60 mins, I traced this down to their DHCP servers not responding to requests for an address once their 5 min lease expired. They couldn't even get their own router to work correctly on day one, let alone in bridge mode. I provided them with full logs and technical details.

They wanted an early termination fee, but after months of chasing them and actually only getting them to respond when writing something negative on Trust pilot

I managed to exit without any fees, by pointing out

Section 52 of the communications act 2003, companies must have and maintain procedures to resolve disputes.

They failed by taking 2-3 months to respond in emails and they admitted this in emails to me.

There is also the "Not fit for purpose" within the consumer rights act 2015, I also used this. Just clearly explain what you expected and what they didn't provide. For example paying for a 1 day SLA and they not responding within in that time period.

Document every telephone conversation, keep copies of emails.

When you hit them with this it becomes more difficult for them to day no.

I hope this will help some of you.

In reply to a post by uplinker:

Well after 6 months of trying to get a stable service from Hey! I have given up, dealing with Tech support and complaints has been a nightmare. They never respond, call when they say they will.

Their customer service certainly seems sporadic. I've never had any long delays when dealing with support. My most recent email with an issue was answered in 2 hours, 20 minutes on Sunday afternoon & escalated to the "senior team". It was then resolved by the time I got up Monday morning. Admittedly all they had to do was force my connection to a different subnet but still, it was dealt with quickly.

The service itself certainly has a lot of issues though. I would move elsewhere if I could get anything above 120/30 from another provider.