Time to yell at BT again...

[Athena]

And today's winner comes from...

" Download speedachieved during the test was - 1826 Kbps
For your connection, the acceptable range of speeds is 800-2000 Kbps.
Additional Information:
Your DSL Connection Rate :8128 Kbps(DOWN-STREAM), 832 Kbps(UP-STREAM)
IP Profile for your line is - 2000 Kbps"

Spot the glaring issue. I was one of the many many victims of this VP issue that resulted in two days of no net, when it comes back up, all is well, except a few hours later, the engineer which Miriam assured me was cancelled from BT's end appears at my exchange and rips the line card out to do tests on it. Now it seems my bRAS has gone all to pot. It's been like this for the last couple of days.

Trust me, not fun downloading Shogun 2 via steam at 1/4 of the speed you normally get.

I are ~displeased~ at this development.

[Lance]

How long have you had the 2000 profile. If over 3 days then contact support as it should have increased and if it doesn't it is probably a stuck profile.

[Athena]

I'm not sure if it's worth trying until Monday, but first thing I'll be ringing up and arranging for a stuck bras fault I expect, yus.

[Athena]

And so the saga continues.

Reporting the stuck bRAS resolved ONE problem, namely the misconfigured profile, it's back to 7150, however now I'm having new issues, namely that my general speed and latency are way up on what they were before BT's engineer arrived with the rubber mallet. Before the VP issue I had, reliably, maximum download speed at pretty much any point during the day, and with the exception of peak times, no issues with latency, and even during peak times it was fairly tolerable.

Now I'm back in the 200ms mark, and my download speeds are... well, I'll be kind and call them inconsistent. Considering I pay for the top level residential service, and until this last week everything was going swimmingly, I'm not prone to blow fuses at IDNet, this smells like BT ***** up badly somewhere, HOWEVER, this is not the service I pay for. If I wanted shaky download speeds and iffy latency I could get that from talk talk for 25% of the fee I pay IDNet. I pay the premium because I like the service, and right now, I'm not getting it.

Any suggestions on how to get BT to unscrew what they've done?

[Rik]

Can you run a BT speed test and post the results please?

[Athena]

Will do later today, I want to see what happens this evening (peak time) and compare to my usual download window (off peak), I'll also see if the tracert reports come back with anything fishy. Would probably guess at posting at midnight/1am with all the results

[Rik]

I'll be asleep.

[Athena]

Consider the results a pressie for when you wake.

Right - 19:00 ish -

Download speedachieved during the test was - 6537 Kbps
For your connection, the acceptable range of speeds is 1200-7150 Kbps.
Additional Information:
Your DSL Connection Rate :8128 Kbps(DOWN-STREAM), 832 Kbps(UP-STREAM)
IP Profile for your line is - 7150 Kbps

This looks okay. Steam download speeds waver though, it's not consistently iffy, sometimes I'll pull 800 KB/s (capital B as in byte), and sometimes half that, as if there's some hefty contention on the line. It's a new feature since they whacked my line card with the rubber mallet, is it possible I got shunted onto a more contended VP?

Ping responses get a little bit more curious :

Traceroutes to google all come back inside ~50ms, which is absolutely hunkydory. HOWEVER. Tracing to a telia customer got me this rather interesting bit of feedback:

  1     2 ms    <1 ms     2 ms  192.168.0.1
  2    41 ms    41 ms    42 ms  telehouse-gw2-lo1.idnet.net [212.69.63.51]
  3    40 ms    41 ms    40 ms  telehouse-gw5-e4-400.idnet.net [212.69.63.245]
  4    44 ms    41 ms    40 ms  telehouse-gw3-g0-1-400.idnet.net [212.69.63.243]

  5    40 ms    43 ms    49 ms  v225.core1.lon1.he.net [216.66.86.45]
  6     *        *        *     Request timed out.
  7     *        *        *     Request timed out.
  8     *        *        *     Request timed out.

The moment it went out past hop 5, everything wanders into a black hole. Possible routing issues perhaps?

I'll put up a follow up at 21:00 and then a control post at midnight (which is the point usually everything runs at max speed no matter what I do).

[Rik]

It could be a VP issue, or congestion at Steam, difficult to tell. As to the tracert, that's quite normal, some routers are set not to respond to ping requests.