Exchange congestion?

[zappaDPJ]

I suspect my exchange is suffering from a degree of congestion due to line upgrades and home working. Openreach have been buzzing around our exchange all day, every day for a number of weeks now and my 80/20 fibre connection which started life at 58/18 is now down to 35/5 overnight at best but significantly lower during the day e.g. iPlayer will not even start.

Since I've lost all my bookings and therefore income until next summer, we now have three people including myself permanently working from home, all fighting for bandwidth. I thought it possible to get data on an exchange but it seems not. I do know that our fibre unit is full to capacity but does that actually equate to congestion or does it just mean there's a waiting list for those without fibre?

[nowster]

Usually the "capacity" in a vDSL cabinet refers to the number of telephone lines that can be passed through it, not the bandwidth.

[zappaDPJ]

Thanks, that certainly aligns with what I've read. Our upstream today is a consistently low 0.7 Mpbs which is a concern and my BMQ is showing a few outages. In fact looking back the line drops at exactly 10am everyday. Perhaps that's down to Openreach poking around in the exchange. There are three vans parked by it today.

As we are currently saving somewhere in the region of £17,500 a year in travel expenses by working from home I think the answer might be to get a second line put in. I think we can afford it!