Current Broadband Speeds � An Overview

Hi,
 
With slow broadband speeds currently affecting some customers, here is a post to provide
some insight into the current situation.
-
What's causing the slow speeds?

There is currently an unprecedented level of demand for streaming traffic due to live
coverage of current events. This demand is currently creating bottlenecks on the DSL
access network (from local exchanges, through to BT backhaul and IP centrals).
Our core network, transit and peering links are unaffected.  These are built with sufficient
(as well as redundant) capacity to ensure that there is no congestion on these parts of our
network.

How does this affect customers using Zen services?

During the next few weeks, at times when demand for streaming services is at its highest,
some customers will experience slower broadband speeds than usual. All broadband
customers could potentially see some slowdown.

What is Zen doing about this?

In recent weeks we have worked with content delivery networks to increase the available
capacity between their networks and ours. We have also upgraded peering capacity.

Each day Zen will publish the times of events that may contribute to poor broadband speeds
on our service alerts page at http://status.zensupport.co.uk, providing at least some degree
of predictability for customers.

Outside of periods of high demand, for those customers who are still experiencing performance issues,
we ask that the diagnostic steps listed in the following link are completed prior to contacting
Zen tech support:

http://www.zensupport.co.uk/knowledgebase/article.as...

These steps are to help us identify whether speed issues are specific to your connection
or due to the situation described above. If the issues persist we ask that you contact our
technical support team on 0845 058 9009 - if your connection speed is low and it is *not* due
to high widespread demand for streaming traffic we can still help diagnose and resolve these
problems.

I'm starting to feel like a broken record, but I'll ask again just in case..

What does 'Traffic Prioritisation or Elevated Rate' (http://www.zen.co.uk/Broadband/ML_Business/medium-large-business-broadband.aspx) mean? Particularily in situations like this. Shouldn't we be unaffected by these issues? Or at least less effected? We're receiving the same thruput during peak times as our customers without prioritisation. Should we expect this to effect our hosting at Zen too?

Hi rogermwl,
Traffic Prioritisation and Elevated Rate is seen in two ways, the first one is on those products the minimum speeds that BT consider to be a fault is higher on the office based lines. This is higher on those lines than say the residential style products (http://www.zensupport.co.uk/KnowledgeBase/article.aspx?id=10549).

As for the Prioritisation, this is in place however the people with elevated prioritisation on bandwidth being impacted by similar increased demand for bandwidth on the VP's and BT links that serve their connection.

A great many people are streaming the live events in workplaces, which typically have office based product and thus are on the Higher Prioritised levels.

On the question about hosting this should not be impacted as the servers are on our core network. The issue's impacting broadband connections are do to with the infrastructure that gets the data from the telephone exchange to our DSL access network. As your hosting service's connects to a separate / different part of our access network they would not be impacted at all. Any issues you see with regards to the Hosting Services, could be due to many other factors and as such we would ask that you speak with either myself or our hosting support team directly.

Edited by drefsab (Wed 23-Jun-10 14:09:18)

http://status.zensupport.co.uk is not working for me and is returning a "Page not found" message

In reply to a post by Gadgetnutter:

http://status.zensupport.co.uk is not working for me and is returning a "Page not found" message

Hi Gadgetnutter,

I have just checked the service and the link you have posted and all is working fine. Can you please check again and let me know if you are still having issues.

Hi Gadgetnutter,

Is that page not working or is it not working through the link on Paul's post? The link in the post has picked up the comma and included it in the link itself, which is why this is failing when clicked (I'll speak to Paul to amend the post if possible).

Thanks

Darren