BT Broadband

[Nigel]

Some time after going over to " BT Infinity ", the irony is not lost on my I assure you I went from about 8mb/s to my current 1.9 mb/s.
Having boned up on this I understand that the speed I now have is within the basic compliance for ISPs but my goodness is it bloody irritating.
I am girding my loins to phone BT , to be taken through their usual crackly narrative of "unplug the modem- plug it in/ put your ethernet cable in the test socket - we'll send you a new filter " etc etc but I suspect the reason is much more Purelake in its nature i.e cheap , insufficient and patently not doing what I was promised it would .

I don't know if if changing ISPs is the solution , I would be loathe to do it anyway but grateful for any advice . I live off of Lawrie Park Road , a staggering 600 yards from the BT exchange.

A very good evening
NIgel

[Tim Lund]

On Admin's advice I've been with Zen for years now - very happy, and also recently switched to them for my landline.

[Sid Nam]

I'm with BT and not far from Nigel and have been with the slowest broadband speed and without landline for a week. Reported to BT who after given me the check this, reboot that, run around, conceded it was a fault at the exchange and finally fixed it today. Seven days later. It was an underground problem, apparently. Ageing subterranean infrastructure and soggy ground not good combination. Have requested this month's payment is amended to suit the service.

[admin]

Nigel, having admonished your amateurism once this evening I'm loathed to upset you more by quoting my speed as reported by: http://speedtest.btwholesale.com/ a few minutes ago.

Download Speed (Mbps): 73.53
Upload Speed (Mbps): 10.29 << bit slower than usual.
Ping Latency (ms): 34.63

I think I'm about 100 yards from you but a little further from the exchange and using BT fibre between. As Tim mentioned I use Zen which is nearly twice as much for what is supposed to be a similar service to Infinity except it isn't. Cos they spend their money on decent infrastructure and peering rather than footy. Oh and people at the end of the phone in Rochdale who know rather more about IT than me without being patronising. Not that I call more than once every five years unless it is about an upgrade.

As they are primarily a business orientated ISP they don't get rammed in the evening, because they are small they have not been bamboozled into stopping you seeing what Mr Cameron doesn't want and they don't sell your details to dodgy US sharks.

But otherwise they are pretty ordinary

Admin

[admin]

Nigel: BT are watching you!
Your posts automatically generate tweets @sydenhamtown. BT picked your post above up and replied:

BT ‏@BTCare 4m
@sydenhamtown What issues are you having with your broadband service? I can help.

So if you are into the twittery lark it may be another way into their support service ...

Admin

[admin]

Another test @ 23:00: http://speedtest.btwholesale.com/

Download Speed (Mbps): 77.40
Upload Speed (Mbps): 13.72
Ping Latency (ms): 27.13

Using this service on our BT line: http://www.zen.co.uk/home-office/broadb ... dband.aspx

Admin

[chrisj1948]

I have BT Infinity. My test results a couple of minutes ago were:

Download: 74.99
Upload: 17.23
Ping: 21.25

Other speed tests give similar results. Location is at the Sydenham Road / Newlands Park junction.

Regards
Chris

[JRobinson]

your speed vastly depends on usage - not just your own, but of those around you within the same location using the same BT exchange - at 4 am you'll probably get a very high speed test, but a weekday evening or over the weekend, when every body is using it, you'll find it drops off a lot.

You can have the fastest PC/device, the fastest router, and the super wizzy fiber optic cable to the exchange, but the exchange is where the bottle neck is, and if every man and his dog is downloading huge pdfs of planning applications, and streaming live winter olympic coverage, then your speed will suffer.

[admin]

your speed vastly depends on usage - not just your own, but of those around you within the same location using the same BT exchange

This is incorrect and specifically the point I was trying to make. The bottleneck is unlikely to be in the shared fibre between your streetbox and the exchange. In the exchange your connection may be routed through different equipment and trunks depending on your ISP. When it gets to the ISP it is then peered out to the world through their own infrastructure and peering agreements.

Hence two homes next to each other may experience very different performance simultaneously from two ISPs even though they share the same streetbox and exchange.

The basic fact is that certain ISPs (BT & Virgin come to mind) compete on low price with very heavy marketing and sales expenditure. They have very little to spend on hardware compared to other ISPs who charge more but spend less on marketing and footy. The telling phrase is 'traffic management'. BT & Virgin do it heavily, my ISP does not.

The BT business plan is to squeeze the maximum number of punters down the thinnest possible pipe. They can only do that with heavily managed networks and when demand gets a little too much it isn't just Sydenham Road that comes to a halt. The principle of what's happening is only too similar.

Whereas other ISPs may offer wider roads and have more predictable and even traffic demand so everybody gets to 'travel' at the maximum quoted speed most of the time.

Having said that - ISP performance should always be measured from a hardwired computer. Today's abundant and competing wifi connections can also be a real bottleneck especially if you have not tuned your connection to the more favourable channels.

Admin

[Wing]

I agreed what Admin said. I am on Virgin Media 30mb broadband. We had on two occasions ( during the London Olympics when we did a lot of watching the games online) had letters from Virgin complaining our heavy usage during peak hours and we should upgrade to a 60mb package or else we be subjected to traffic shaping. The so called 'unlimited use' adverts by BT, Virgin and others are misleading - yes, you can have unlimited broadband but if you do a lot of streaming or downloading during peak times they will slow you down.

[Nigel]

Thanks for the helpful responses . I should have said my download speed has been under 2 Mb/s at all times of day and quite late at night eg gone midnight .
I think I have to make the dreaded call and just complain until they fix it .
The 75 meg sounds amazing but I really only want enough to watch YouTube without buffering and to send and receive the odd large mp3 - ie what I seemed to get for the six months of "infinity ".
Thanks again and a
very good evening
Nigel

[marymck]

I usually get 86.5 mbps with Virgin cable. But their catch up tv service is utter c**p. Made me miss what would have been the highlights of my xmas viewing - The Tractate Middoth and Mark Gattis doc. And their call centre in India is worse than useless. Am thinking of leaving but I get sent and send a lot of mp4 and .mov with BITC, so I need fast broadband. Was thinking of BT but now you've scared me Nigel! Oh and I don't want to lose Fox for my LJ Gibbs fix.

The BT tweeting is a bit creepy, don't you think?

[bensonby]

I must say where I am in Kent I am really rather happy with BT infinity. I get decent download and upload speeds: I don't really measure the speed but there is no issue with having a film stream over the telly, playing a game online and browsing all at the same time. I would consider myself quite a heavy internet user but have never been told I am "over-using" in the amount I download. The service did go down over a weekend a few weeks ago which was annoying and we were out for about 4 days. However, in the 3 and a half years I've lived here it has been the only down-time I have noticed. (my wife insists it has gone down for short periods before - but it must have been for short periods whilst I was out at work.

[Nigel]

Happy to report a gratifying outcome to this problem , but first thanks again for all the helpful suggestions .
This morning as I was finishing my last mouthful of toast and Frank Cooper's excellent marmalade I got a call from BT Openreach . Minutes later a real live engineer was pootling around checking sockets . He tracked the problem down to an unused extension that had visibly been degraded by what I assume must be Luddite mice who had nibbled the cable .
As soon as he disconnected that we were back to 38 mb/s . Great stuff and all without any nonsense about micro filters - power starting routers etc.
Anyway a good start to the day
A very good evening
Nigel

[admin]

[Nigel]

Admin
That is amazingly intrusive - thanks for pointing it out .
I do hope Frank Cooper's are less predatory in their habits .
Could this be the place for some Purelake baiting - could be one their competitors would tweet it - whatever that means
A very good evening
Nigel

[chrisj1948]

Admin

So posts to the forum are auto-tweeted! I hadn't realised that.

Regards
Chris

[admin]

Do you think that a good or bad thing?

Admin

[Rachael]

I can remember being a little disconcerted by the auto-tweeting when I found out. But then I reminded myself that this forum is entirely open and searchable online. There is no difference between BT searching twitter for mentions and replying to them and them searching google and making a reply here.

[marymck]

Do you think that a good or bad thing?

Admin

I think it's a bad thing. The limits of tweeting truncates our posts and inevitably misrepresents them. If you're writing a tweet you tailor what you say accordingly. Our STF posts aren't written that way. It's bad enough when other forum users retweet extracts of other people's posts out of context occasionally. But for it to be a built in part of the system is a step to far for me.