Slower speeds, and a weird drop in minimum latency

[Reya]

I'm scratching my head here. I usually leave the PC on overnight, since I get up before 4am and don't want to bother with remembering passwords and whatnot at that hour. This morning I noticed that AIM had been disconnected sometime overnight, but thought nothing of it.

Now that I'm home from work, two things are puzzling me. The first is much slower speeds than I usually get from IDnet. This is the test I performed a few minutes ago:



Think Broadband Speed Checker gave me pretty much the same result. Upstream is the same as usual, but downstream is definitely reduced. My normal downstream is about 6.5MB. And then there's this really odd disconnect on my TBBQM at about 02:20am this morning, followed by a drastic drop in minimum latency from a long-term steady 30-ish ms down to 10ms:



(Incidentally, the spikes there are pretty normal for my connection. It's always been that way.)

I'm going to assume the two are connected somehow, but I'm flummoxed as to why. I've checked my exchange and it's showing green, so that seems to be okay, and the last maintenance work I can find that would have affected my area code was on Wednesday. Can anyone enlighten me as to what's going on? 

[Lance]

I'm wondering if your connection has moved to a ADSL2+ connection, but I wouldnt expect it at that time of night.

I wonder if there was some other maintainence which has caused your profile to drop as well as latency. Could you run a BT speediest please to get your profile (assuming you're not on a LLU connection).

[pctech]

Put your number in this page http://status.zen.co.uk/broadband/  and it'll tell you if there have been any faults.

[Reya]

@Lance: I just ran a BT speed test and got the following:

Download speed (Mbps): 1.92
Upload speed (Mbps): 0.67
Ping latency (ms): 29.75

Pretty similar to the other two. Looking again at my BBQM it's showing insane spikes now. I'm not doing anything different than I normally do in the evening, but whereas I might have got some spiking before it's gone a bit loopy tonight 

This is a typical day for me (snapshot of Tuesday this week) -



This is tonight so far -



Something's gone screwy and I don't know what it is!

@pctech: I've checked that and the last thing on there was the following maintenance:

Start:    02/05/2012 01:05
Cleared:    02/05/2012 03:00
Duration:    1 Hour 55 Minutes
Message:    A CONTROLLED LOSS OF SERVICE TO ALL UNPROTECTED CCTS ALL OTHERS WILL BE AT RISK

[Steve]

It looks to me like a busy active connection and I wouldn't complain about the reduction in latency.  Sorry I  missed the earlier post of your normal 6.5 Mb down , you should have got an IP profile from the full BT speedtest , I guess you used the beta instead?  So we need to know your current IP profile and your current downstream sync.

[Reya]

It looks to me like a busy active connection and I wouldn't complain about the reduction in latency.  Sorry I  missed the earlier post of your normal 6.5 Mb down , you should have got an IP profile from the full BT speedtest , I guess you used the beta instead?  So we need to know your current IP profile and your current downstream sync.

I did use the beta, yes. I couldn't find any other link on the site; it automatically sent me to the beta page. Anyone know how I can get to the full test, please?

I'm not complaining about the latency reduction; more the slower speeds. I'm now on my fourth day of these speeds (just ran another test and it's down 1735 Kbps, up 665 Kbps) and it's driving me crazy. I'm in Second Life a lot, and it's practically unplayable right now, as I'm having to stand around in areas for five minutes before anything loads. 

EDIT: OK, I found the main test page, and it seems that my IP profile has suddenly dropped to 2MB. I'm on the Home Supermax (ADSL Max Premium) service and should be getting up to 8MB. The BT test results are as follows:

Download speedachieved during the test was - 1.59 Mbps
For your connection, the acceptable range of speeds is 0.8 Mbps-2 Mbps.
Additional Information:
Your DSL Connection Rate :8.13 Mbps(DOWN-STREAM), 0.83 Mbps(UP-STREAM)
IP Profile for your line is - 2 Mbps

[jameshurrell]

You may have a stuck profile, particularly as it's stuck at 2MB... http://www.kitz.co.uk/adsl/IPprofile.htm#stuck_bRAS_profile

Contact support if I were you.

[Reya]

Thanks, James. I'll give them a call tomorrow. Trust this to happen on the weekend, when I actually have time for gaming!