Anyone in Bangor Gwynedd with slow speeds?

Hi,

I'm in Bangor, which is a city dominated by the local university. I'm very close to the exchange and have a pretty much perfect ADSL sync. Over Christmas and new year, I got 7.1Mbit/s download all day, every day - it was great!

However, the students returned at the weekend for this week's exams. I'm now getting around 600kbit/s during the day. After 2am or 3am it will gradually climb back up to 7.1Mbit/s which lasts until 8am.
This is not unique and is the same pattern that I've seen over the whole of the last year that I've lived here.

Plusnet show the BT exchange as oversubscribed:
http://usertools.plus.net/exchanges/?exchange=Bangor...
When this goes green, speeds are okay for a few weeks before dropping back down towards 1-2Mbit/s followed swiftly by sub-1Mbit/s.

My question is whether this is Zen's fault or BTs? Is anyone else here living in Bangor and seeing the same speeds? With Zen, or all ADSL suppliers?

I don't want to leave Zen, having had perfect service from them on another line which I have at an address 60 miles away in Wrexham (which, incidentally, will download at 6.5Mbit/s day in, day out, at peak hours and in the middle of the night). I also don't want to switch and find myself in the same situation!

Could there be any other solution to help with this problem? I believe ADSLMax doesn't have any concept of the lower contention ratios that were available with the old fixed 2Mbit/s ADSL products. Money is not an object if the problem can be decisively fixed.

One of my friends goes to uni there and have BT TBB. They say that their speed drops off dramatically in the evenings, with it being next to useless between 4-9pm. When I went to visit, I checked their router and the sync speed was 4Mb even though they're not that far from the exchange - old house though so maybe the wiring's messed things up there.
It's probably a factor of being with BT who like to throttle and the virtual path congestion leading to them having a p*ss poor connection. One can hope that the VPs get fixed because it's a nice place in the world!

Morning,

Can you call in after doing all the steps in the following guide: http://support.zen.co.uk/kb/Knowledgebase/Kick-start...

A lot of the steps may seem tedious but if we can prove its BT's issue then we can do something about it for you.

Kindest Regards,

perhaps your being throttled? are you using p2p?

Hi -

krazykizza - Zen doesn't throttle connections. I don't download P2P, especially at these times I don't download much at all since the connection will be completely saturated and cause services I run here to fail. I should mention that in addition to extremely slow speeds, the latency on the line becomes worse too. The download usage on my other Zen ADSL line is something like three times higher over a month and I've never seen so much as a wobble from maximum throughput.

Azzaka - I did this back in December, of 2009! The result was an honest and frank email saying that a performance fault could be raised with BT but may not fix the issue and is more likely to be of primary use just to get information out of BT. But I will repeat the process. Unlike in 2009, I'm over the 600kbits/s threshold mark at the moment (well, 700kbit/s!). I believe BT won't do anything until it is lower than that. I'll give it a go again though.

mysticeddy - you appear to describe exactly my situation. I've also asked locally and while many also see slower speeds, at least one person on Demon has not seen such a dramatic dip. There has been a mention of a "lift and shift"? Might this get me away from my seemingly permanently contended VP?

Alternatively, it appears that Sky provide LLU service in Bangor. If I can't get Zen's BT based service to work then I may have to look at Sky, even if they do provide a "toy" service... I must say that a potential 20MBit/s LLU is very enticing when my line synced at 8128 can't even break 1MBit/s!

Edited by nOw2 (Tue 11-Jan-11 20:44:30)

Do me a favour and call in anyway. If it is 700kb/s then we can still try and push it. If you are not sure, then call and ask for me.

Kindest Regards,