IDNet Home Plus Fibre - 72 Hours Later...

[.Griff.]

I've been a LLU user for the best part of 7 years now. I worked for and started off with Ukonline (my work involved rolling out ADSL2+ over the Easynet network) and following that I spent 5 years with Bethere. As a result this is my first experience of BT Wholesale for a very long time.

It was Monday morning that I had "IDNet Home Plus Fibre" installed and I've been monitoring it with some interest since and these are my findings and opinions over this short period so far.

Latency

Relatively low and extremely stable. It's annoying not having control over Fastpath (Bethere allows the customer to switch between Fastpath and Interleaving themselves at the click of a button) but I can live with it.



Upload

Perfect! Fast and consistent. If I upload a large file to my website it reaches maximum upload speed and stays there rock solid until the file has been uploaded.

(Red obviously denotes upload)



Download

I think abysmal is the right word it use here. My download speeds are all over the place with absolutely no consistency whatsoever.

If I download a large file, 1GB, from a known good source, http://www.thinkbroadband.com/download.html , my speed fluctuates massively and there's no stability at all.

With Bethere, even though my download sync/speed was less at 16mbps, it actually downloaded at that speed with little to no fluctuation at all. With my current IDNet connection my download speed can be 36mbps one second and 2mbps the next.

This afternoon -



Late last night -



Download from Rapidshare (Premium account) using Rapidshare DL manager -



Download from Newsgroups/Usenet, European server, 20 connections -



Download from Microsoft Download Center (Office 2010 trial) -



Obviously when downloading large files I expect the speed to fluctuate slightly but this can't be normal can it?

Do any other IDNet "Fibre" customers experience the same? Is this considered normal for a BT Wholesale product? Is it poor peering?

Any help and/or suggestions would be appreciated.

For the record the Openreach/Huawei modem is connected to a Netgear WGR614 which in turn is connected to this PC via CAT6 cable. No other devices are attached to the router and wireless has been disabled)

[Rik]

I'm not fortunate enough to have any experience. Have you spoken to support.

[.Griff.]

I'm not fortunate enough to have any experience. Have you spoken to support.

Not yet. I'm hoping someone from (or connected to) support will see this and comment.

Obviously it's a lot easier to explain/demonstrate my concern in this format rather than over a telephone.

[Simon]

You could email them. 

[Rik]

Call them and point them to this thread. They do read the boards when they have time, but I can't guarantee they'll see this...

[.Griff.]

You could email them. 

That's the plan tomorrow. In the meantime I'm hoping some other IDNet FTTC customers can confirm or deny they experience the same.

[Bill]

Do any other IDNet "Fibre" customers experience the same? Is this considered normal for a BT Wholesale product? Is it poor peering?

It's not greatly dissimilar to what I'm getting, though mine has stayed on fastpath and you've had one more day than I have.

Speed is (mostly) a hell of a lot faster than it was on ADSL2+ but consistent? No way. About the only time I can get a "flat topped" trace on a download is between 11pm and midnight, and maybe after about 1:30am but haven't tried that yet.

Haven't done any serious uploading yet so can't really comment, but the speedtests are consistent (at about 8Mbps) on those.

Router is an Apple Airport Extreme via Cat5, various other devices and wireless g and n, but there's no correlation with what's happening on the rest of the LAN.

It's very odd...

[Steve]

Perhaps this example just shows the state of BTs backhaul  I don't see it, as the effects are dampened on adslmax.

[.Griff.]

Speed is (mostly) a hell of a lot faster than it was on ADSL2+ but consistent? No way.

That's my concern. My max speed on this connection is clearly way above what I could achieve with my previous LLU ADSL2+ connection. However taking into consideration the massive fluctuation in download speed my actual download speed (as an average across the download) is slower than my previous connection.

[Rik]

I'm glad you're testing it for me.

[Bill]

my actual download speed (as an average across the download) is slower than my previous connection.

Not seeing that, my slowest is still about twice what I was getting before.

I think you said you were about 400 metres from the cabinet? I'm less than 200 metres from mine, I wonder if that matters? Though I'm damned if I see how, you going on to interleaved should have sorted that out.

[sof2er]

I saw the same thing a while ago (and it still is the same), contacted IDNet support which advised to run tests for 24 hours, so I did and logged them.

An engineer got sent and he did identify some fault on the line which he said was somewhere between the cabinet and my house, he spent 4-5 hours fixing it to no luck and then left. Next day I saw an engineer fixing at the same place and left after 2 hours but I didn't speak to him. I'm not sure exactly what the fault was or if it got fixed. Support told me to advice if the speeds stay low consistently as they can't raise a fault without me getting speeds below 12 meg on bt speedtests.

My distance to cabinet is about 150 meters

[BT Speedtests]

(4 August 2010)

Test1 @ 16:30

DL: 34960
UL: 8229

Test2 @ 17:36

DL: 21771
UL: 7880

Test3 @ 18:49

DL: 27317
UL: 8070

Test4 @ 19:57

DL: 13918
UL: 8215

Test5 @ 21:00

DL: 9751
UL: 8205

Test5EXTENDED @ 21:03

DL: 19063
UL: 8190

Test6 @ 22:10

DL: 31489
UL: 7707

Test7 @ 23:32

DL: 28133   
UL: 8072

(5 August 2010)

Test8 @ 00:35

DL: 16585
UL: 8235

Test9 @ 01:41

DL: 33261
UL: 8233

Test10 @ 02:47

DL: 35284
UL: 8228

Test11 @ 10:15

DL: 34498
UL: 7100

Test12 @ 12:13

DL: 35700
UL: 8269

Test13 @ 13:17

DL: 20650
UL: 8101

Test14 @ 14:19

DL: 33716
UL: 7699

As you can see speeds are all over the shop but after 01:30-02:00 midnight they are consistent at maximum speeds until 10:00-12:00 morning.

There's also one thing I noticed which was using modem -> router -> pc (wired) gives me 2 ms more latency and about 2-4 meg less speed than going from modem -> pc through PC PPPoE connection. WGR614 is somehow slowing it a bit, but as I have no other cable routers I can't check if it's the same with all routers.

[Bill]

some fault on the line which he said was somewhere between the cabinet and my house

So three of us have got the same line fault... methinks I detect a whiff of bovine excrement somewhere.

I'll give mine a few days to see what happens, in particular how it behaves over a weekend. On my exchange it seems to be businesses that cause the biggest slowdowns, if the weekends show a different pattern then it pretty well has to be an exchange or backhaul problem.

There's also one thing I noticed which was using modem -> router -> pc (wired) gives me 2 ms more latency and about 2-4 meg less speed than going from modem -> pc through PC PPPoE connection. WGR614 is somehow slowing it a bit, but as I have no other cable routers I can't check if it's the same with all routers.

Someone else reported that over on tbb... don't think it was the same router, but like the WGR614 it only had 10/100 Ethernet ports, implying a slower internal processor that maybe couldn't keep up with fibre speeds? Mine's got gigabit ports, I'll give that a try sometime. Though it won't really matter either way, I need that router in there!

[zappaDPJ]

I'll be watching this thread with interest as I'm due for a BT visit to hook me up next week.

[Bill]

And we'll be looking forward with interest to see how your connection behaves

[Steve]

We already know like a Ferrari on the M25 in rush hour

[zappaDPJ]

  and 

As my upgrade to WBC went completely pear shaped I'm somewhat concerned about what might happen 

[Steve]

Glutton for punishment I think is the phrase

[sof2er]

The engineer did say the fault was on all lines in our area or something, might not be related to the case perhaps. He was talking over the phone about some db level being too high or low, I can't recall.

[Bill]

The engineer did say the fault was on all lines in our area or something

Yeah- too many people using them to download data

The BT speedtester seems to be playing up for me, it fails and when I try again says I have to wait an hour after a successful run. Usual way of reducing the complaint level

[Rik]

They're picking on you, Bill.

[Bill]

That BT speedtester never has liked me, now it's giving me "Access Denied" errors when the download starts


(I knew it would be a post about BT when I used that smiley )

[Rik]

 

[Bill]

That speedtester really is rubbish... it just gave me:

The Performance Tester is now testing Broadband connection. Your configured download throughput speed for this service is 750 k

Please do not move away from this page and do not start any other download activity on your computer.

and hung, so (slightly alarmed!!) I ran speedtest.net:



IT HATES ME!!!!

[Rik]

What did you say to it to upset it so much, Bill?