interneet speed

Fri 14 Mar 2014, 10:24

Hi all.

If you see your broadband slow down dramatically in the evenings, it is most likely not due to ISP rate shaping but rather contention. When we buy DSL we have to share that bandwidth with other users. BT used to publish contention figures as 50:1 for home users and 20:1 with business users, this means that you are sharing your bandwidth with 49 other DSL connections. BT no longer talk about contention but instead just talk about 'reasonable statistical multiplexing gain' which in English means they provide enough bandwidth from our Charlbury exchange to the regional BT POPs to allow all users a reasonable amount of bandwidth. (must less than our normal rate)

A key point of this is that the main contention is with BT, on the links that connect our Charlbury exchange to their POPs. This connection has nothing to do with our ISPs at this point so this explains why our broadband is slow regardless of what ISP we are with as we all really use BTs network for the first several hops.

This link is quite good at explaining the contention:
www.kitz.co.uk/adsl/contention.htm

The capacity of Charlbury's virtual paths (all the BT kit that delivers us to our ISPs) is showing as Green:
usertools.plus.net/exchanges/?exchange=Charlbury&exact=1715&plugin=vp
But this needs to be taken with a pinch of salt, the tests that BT run are not constant, and the bandwidth has to degrade severely before BT consider adding more bandwidth from the Exchange to the POPs.

When the fibre broadband arrives in June, we will sadly still have this contention (unless you pay extra for a business service) but we should be less impacted by it as we start off with a much bigger amount of bandwidth.

Cheers
Simon

Wed 12 Mar 2014, 19:09

UPDATE

Thanks Frank - that would help explain recent slow downs - but, in the past, even in the evenings I still managed around 13 download. They may then have become more aggressive in traffic shaping - issue is our VPN into work suffers in the evenings - not a great situation now, not a problem in the past.

It may be time to move on - seeing as I am down to ~3 Mbps this evening (traffic shaping kicking in?). The other disappointment is their call centres had an hour waiting time in the evenings this week - not a great sign for level of service which not long ago was considered one of the best. Interesting articles here: http://www.trustpilot.co.uk/review/www.plus.net

Wed 12 Mar 2014, 17:33

We are on Plusnet and I think your experience is typical. Plusnet operates traffic shaping which means their download speed will vary with time of day and the types of download their system is experiencing. They are well known for being quite aggressive in their implementation of this - just do a search online. So, at quiet times of the day we typically get 13-14Mb/s but at others it will drop to about 2-4Mb/s. Plusnet has a detailed explanation of this here: www.plus.net/support/broadband/speed_guide/traffic_management.shtml

Wed 12 Mar 2014, 14:56

Ran some more tests on PlusNet service - not very far from Green Cabinet on Hixet Wood. Nothing else connected while running the tests. So far:
Yesterday evening around 20:30: averaging just over 2Mbps again
Today, around 6:45 am back up to 13Mbps download (this is normal service for me).
Today, around 7:40 am down to 7 Mbps
14:30: 13 Mbps (normal)
Will update this after checks this evening when the real slow down has been happening. PlusNet could not update me on where they have got to, their fault management system was down!

Wed 12 Mar 2014, 12:56

I have just checked my speeds which are 13 and 0.8. It is strange that my line and deal (with TalkTalk) is the same as Jean's! How can this be?

Wed 12 Mar 2014, 12:35

I am also with sky my internet is fine 1st thing(5-7am) in the morning but as the day goes on its awful and when it gets to the evening I might as well not bother as I can not load anything.

Wed 12 Mar 2014, 10:47 (last edited on Wed 12 Mar 2014, 10:48)

It's possible I could be giving people a degree of false hope about possible speeds.

As I type this I am sitting looking out of my window and can see the telephone exchange only about 50m away, so I may be getting a better connection than many will find possible using the current copper wire cables.

I don't think this will have any effect on internet speed, which should be independent of the OS, but I use Linux, a different operating system on my computer to the normal windows or mac which most of you are probably using.

PS: I have just used the test site again and still get the same speeds as I reported last night.

Wed 12 Mar 2014, 10:36

Thank you for the link. Last night my D/l 7.22 and U/l 0.73. Is this to do with where I live - below Fiveways?

Wed 12 Mar 2014, 07:37

I did the speed test several times more yesterday evening and got down to a new low of 5.08 Mbps for the download speed. This morning I've broken a personal best by achieving 0.64 Mbps download speed! This can't be right and it's very frustrating.

Tue 11 Mar 2014, 23:49

The new high speed broadband doesn't go live till June apparently. So the green boxes are a bit of a red herring (to mix colours and metaphors)

Tue 11 Mar 2014, 21:04 (last edited on Tue 11 Mar 2014, 21:05)

I'm with PlusNet. In the evenings, my speed has dropped from average of 13Mbps to just about making it above 2 Mbps. Early mornings, I can get 13 again. This may be a coincidence, but it feels to me this happened around the time the new larger green cabinet was installed at the bottom of Hixet Wood - ironically, I think it was installed to allow faster fibre optic services. I spent 40 minutes last night waiting for PlusNet customer services to answer the phone and have reported a fault. I didn't mention the new green cabinet - in case it was just a complete coincidence / wild goose chase.

Tue 11 Mar 2014, 20:27

We're with Sky and Google has been painfully slow intermittently for the last 24 hours or so. Sometimes it just won't open at all. Download speed of 11.62 and upload speed of 0.94. I've done the usual de-bugging and de-fragmenting with no improvement but it's vaguely comforting to know I'm not alone! Any advice would be welcome, or is it likely to be something out of our control?

Tue 11 Mar 2014, 19:22

Try using the test of speed at www.speedtest.net

I have just used it and got a d/l speed of 17.1Mbps and u/l of 1.01Mbps.
How does tat compare with yours?

Tue 11 Mar 2014, 18:21

is anyone else finding there slow to