Sorry by “residential grade” I meant that my TTB service has the same minimum speed guarantee (450 Mbps ) as the cheaper residential targeted FTTP services from the likes of BT Retail. So purely from a technical point (raw speed), it’s exactly the same. Sure, I have some business specific features such as better SLA, multiple static IPs, 7 day support etc but none of these has an effect on the actual speed. I do occasionally get 900 Mbps but mostly it’s between 800-900 Mbps which I can live with.

The final post in that older thread, (dated 27th August 2020), indicated that Zen knew of an issue and it would take a week or two.

In reply to a post by tboorman:

I suspect that Openreach will not find a fault at your end. Zen are aware that a number of customers on the Full Fibre 500 and 900 products are experiencing poor download speeds. The update I had from them this afternoon is:

We're continuing to try and resolve throughput issues for our customers reporting issues on the FTTP 500 and FTTP 900 products.

We are trialling with a small sample of customers adding an elevated traffic status with BT Wholesale to see if that allows higher speeds to be met & also more consistently higher.

We do need a reasonable amount of time to try and fix this and can take a week or 2 to resolve this issue and will keep you updated accordingly.

That post was from last August, therefore, by now the specified week or two weeks to find a solution has certainly come and it has gone. - Perhaps, these issues are ongoing or they are getting worse and if these old issues are part of the problem then by now a proper solution should have been decided upon.

Conversely; I have not seen any posts from Zen 900 Mbps FTTP residential customers who post that they are happily getting consistently get close to the advertized speeds.

Edited by Fido (Fri 09-Oct-20 20:52:14)

Yes.

Both my BT and Zen services consistently deliver either close to or above 900. This doesn't really help you of course as we're extremely unlikely to be on the same equipment.

If the ONT is showing link then it is happy and running at 2.4 Gbps down, there is no poor connection lower speeds, its either all or nothing.

Best Zen 900/110 test in Oct so far http://tbb.st/1601716480583465055
Best BT one http://tbb.st/1601911216363605755

Fastest test so far in Oct http://tbb.st/1602155020237971755 1700 Mbps down 185 up

In reply to a post by MrSaffron:

Fastest test so far in Oct http://tbb.st/1602155020237971755 1700 Mbps down 185 up

I could totally beat that if I could get a compliant browser.

Thank you Mr Saffron; it is good to know that good speeds are available so there may be light at the end of the tunnel.

In my case it is nowhere near as bad tonight as per this speed test;

https://www.thinkbroadband.com/speedtest/16022770475...

However, but it is still up and down.

Regarding your speed tests and mine, I have noticed that my latency on the above speed test is reported as being 60ms and usually my latency on Thinkbroadband Speed Tests since my getting FTTP is reported as being around 35ms but the reported latency on your speed tests much lower and is only 21ms.

It is hard to see a reason for this difference in reported latency since with a fibre line, with properly made fibre joints and good equipment why would the reported latency be so much different ?

In reply to a post by MrSaffron:

If the ONT is showing link then it is happy and running at 2.4 Gbps down, there is no poor connection lower speeds, its either all or nothing.

From that, all or nothing approach, it appears that as long as the ONT syncs up all is considered to be good but what about spliced joints that are not properly made and that suffer from Optical Splatter or Reflection: Would the ONT not still sync up if there were defective Fibre Joints?

What we know is that the engineer who fitted our FTTP made a spliced joint outside the house and since he did not appear to have a Fusion Splicer or a Mechanical Splicer with him he is likely to have used a field splice which is considered to be inferior. - Could not poor spliced joints be the reason why some of us get consistently good speeds and other don't ?

Also, we have one of the new small Nokia type ONT devices with one RJ45 Port and most of us who have had FTTP fitted in the last few months will probably have one of these Nokia ONT but are they as good as the older Hauwei ONT that others will have. - I have no idea but I do know that these erratic speed problems are either due to line issues, equipment issues or contention.

Regards,
Fido

Don’t pay too much attention to latency shown in speed tests as it can be rather erratic. Either use the ping command in Windoze (or equivalent in other OS) and/or run the TBB BQM to get a better idea. I get anywhere from 20 to 60 ms shown on speed tests yet this is what my BQM looks like:

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

My other BT Business 330/50 line has a better latency by 1-2 ms but it’s nothing to get my knickers in a twist over

If the light levels are too low then it simply refuses to link up

Getting full speeds from a Nokia ONT here. Whether they fusion or mechanical spliced no idea, as kept out of the way during install due to social distancing.

The shape suggests a throughput issue somewhere and not a light issue with the local fibre.

On latency, FTTP does not massively lower it unless your old FTTC service had masses of interleaving on it.

To see if its contention issues, you need to stay up very late, or get up early. Given people appear to be staying up later this year based on speed testing patterns I'd suggest an early rise of 6am for testing.

I had a similar issue when I upgraded to Zen's Full Fibre 900 package. After several visits by Openreach engineers which found no fault, Zen admitted that they had other customers who were also experiencing poor download speeds on their faster FTTP packages. They enabled an elevated traffic status feature on my circuit, and this resolved the issue.

I would also recommend that you use the Fast.com or Measurement Lab speed tests for testing your download speeds, using a bootable USB Linux distro with a PPPoE connection on a laptop connected directly to your ONT.

When it was first fitted the Thinkbroadband Speed Tests reported very low speeds, the browsing was dire and web pages failed to load so I contacted Zen Technical Support and the Technical Support person said not to use the Thinkbroadband site for speeds test because of the high speeds involved and to use this speed test site; https://zen-internet.speedtestcustom.com/

The first recorded test on that site at about 4:00PM in the afternoon gave a ping of 19, a jitter of 54, a download speed of 145 Mbps and an upload speed of 95 Mbps - oops

The next recorded test on that site at about 20 minutes later gave a ping of 19, a jitter of 1, a download speed of 123 Mbps and an upload speed of 9 Mbps.

The next test about 42 minutes after the first gave a ping of 12, a jitter of 1, a download speed of 326 Mbps and an upload speed of 110 Mbps.

Since then the reported ping on that test site has been between 11 and 13 and the reported jitter has been between 0 and 2, the download speeds have been between 904 Mbps and 88 Mbps, and the upload speeds have been between 50 Mbps and 111 Mbps. - (On average the Upload speeds tend to be over 100 Mbps irrespective of the major variations in the download speeds).

The speeds vary at unspecified times of the day and I am just as likely to get over 800 Mbps at 9:00PM at night as I am to get 312 Mbps at 4:00AM in the morning.

Regarding my copper line quality: up to three months ago, my copper line was about 725 meters long, (as was reported by my router), my router never lost sync, my sync speed was up to 53 Mbps with a SNR, set by the DELSLAM/DLM of 3db. and a flat line Thinkbroadband Speed Test Graph of around 47 Mbps with zero unrecoverable CRC errors on the router or at the exchange reported. - Three months ago, we had one of those Openreach Engineer changes at just after 2:00AM in the morning, (probably to fix someone else's fault), when the line went off and came back much worse with a reported length of 740 meters, no router errors, about 200 exchange errors per day and about 12 unrecoverable CRC errors per week. - The speeds went down the toilet but after a profile reset about a month ago the sync speed had gone back up to 47 Mbps, the flat line graph speed tests were back to around 44 Mbps and the SNR had dropped back down from 8db. to 5db., there were still zero Router Errors reported, there were still around 200 Exchange Errors reported per day and there was still about 12 unrecoverable CRC errors per week. - (We use the higher rated Fritzbox 7590 which kept a good weekly record of the DSL line).

Back to FTTP: I have no idea if interleaving has been applied to the new FTTP line. - However, since there are supposed to be zero loses on a fibre line with properly made fibre joints I cannot see why it should be unless there was an equipment problem.

It is either a line problem. an equipment problem or a contention problem.

The theory is that the line either works or it does not but it would be nice to test the quality of the optics to rule out any possibility of fibre line issues cause by dirty equipment etc..

Since it does vary irrespective of the time of day and night and I do not consistently get a full speed at 4:00AM in the morning contention is a far less likely culprit, (coupled with the fact that I am with Zen who usually have very low contention), but contention cannot be ruled out at this stage.

If contention is the problem then I am glad that I am with Zen and not someone else as I am confident that Zen will sort out any contention issues. - I hope that my faith in them is not misplaced but on the whole Zen have been an excellent ISP.

I do not know if it is an equipment problem or not; perhaps, there is an issue with my ONT or with the equipment at the local exchange.