Living in the sticks, our internet has always been a bit shit, but recently it’s been properly horrific.

Though sometimes there’s a brief respite, it often won’t load photos, let alone videos…

Does the broadband (ha ha, as if) industry have standards of service that make them accountable for piss poor performance?

Surveillance uses up a lot of bandwidth. 😉

I had this problem when we moved house out of the city. There were times of day it worked perfectly and others where it slowed to a crawl. Then during the school holidays it was almost unusable. I think it’s mainly kids streaming and playing online games.

We moved provider (to BT but on the same cabling) and that fixed it.

Does the broadband (ha ha, as if) industry have standards of service that make them accountable for piss poor performance?

Sort of, OpenReach made a commitment for ‘super fast’ internet to every home in the UK by April 2016 I think, obviously they missed that.

‘Super Fast’ is vague in the least, most people would assume 38Mbps at least, 78Mbps is the current top end for OpenReach FTTC.

Assume you’ve checked on the OpenReach site for your exchange’s status?

Unless you are on fibre or wireless then your broadband speed will be determined by the length of the wire between your house and the exchange. Doesn’t matter what you are promised: “Ye cannae break the laws of physics Captain!”.

We are about 3Km from our exchange and the maximum we could get was 2.8Mb. Moved to a wide area wireless network and we can have up to 30Mb. (We don’t do much streaming so it’s more than enough for us, the bottleneck will be somewhere else)

We moved provider (to BT but on the same cabling) and that fixed it.

That is quite a common fix for rural locations, the problem is other ISP’s effectively buy their bandwidth from BT and don’t buy enough. Was exactly the same for my parents – went from 0.5Mb to 5Mb by switching.

Go speak to your neighbours – find out who they are on and if its any good.

Nowt much more miserable than having to argue with a shitty ISP.

Surveillance uses up a lot of bandwidth

🙂

seriously – you need to find out if the issue is contention or underlying bandwidth issues. Try testing at 3 in the morning when your neighbours are unlikley to be using their connections – if there’s a dramatic improvement then it’s load on the line rather than an intrinisically low line speed.

http://www.speedtest.net/ see what you get.

Also compare your connection when on wifi and on ethernet cable as interference to your home wifi signal can also kill your speed so you want to rule that out early on.

If you can, log into your router and see what it reports for “line noise”.

Surveillance uses up a lot of bandwidth.

Pff, as if they’d have any interest in lil’ ole me… 😉

I was going to post a speedtest result in the OP, but after about 4 failed attempts to even connect to the website, I gave up…

Just tried again, without much luck, but I’ve logged into the router and though a minute ago it was hovering around 16KBps, it’s now reporting an average of just under 6KBps can’t find any mention of line noise anywhere though. Tried the ethernet cable thing in the past and it offered no improvement.

Should also have mentioned that we’ve already been through many of the steps mentioned above… neighbours reckon their connection is fine, was worried it was the physical line to our house, as it had chafed a bit on a tree, but was taken down by Storm Orphelia and replaced.

Knew that OpenReach own the network, but didn’t realize ISPs effectively buy data off BT

Still, was trying to log in to the forum yesterday, but gave up in the end, as it just wasn’t happening, so you guys should be chuffed that I’m even here at all 😀

was trying to log in to the forum yesterday, but gave up in the end, as it just wasn’t happening

It’s a conspiracy.

Bloke I work with had similar issues for several years, just him affected, neighbours fine, local line replaced to the pole

In the end BT had to dig up the road about 200m from his house to repair a cable.

It took a lot of effort to get it resolved – email the BT MD etc, chasing weekly.

Biggest problem is that BT buy services from open reach and open reach are crap.

How’s your router connected to the phone line? I’ve had problems with the micro-filter. The router should be connected to the master socket not any extension sockets.

Ideally you have a modern NTE5 socket, we had some GPO lozenge made from Bakelite! I replaced it (technically you shouldn’t but it’s not difficult) with an NTE5 with a filtered faceplate (you can replace the faceplate on an existing NTE5 as it’s on the consumer side of the box)

How’s your router connected to the phone line? I’ve had problems with the micro-filter. The router should be connected to the master socket not any extension sockets.

Yep, router is straight into the master socket… have repeatedly removed the filtered faceplate when speaking to ISP tech team (they call back on mobile, so line dedicated to broadband), so they can run line tests and tried multiple different cables and filters.

Appreciate all the help so far, I’m getting to the point where I’m wondering if there’s a legal standards of service framework in place to help escalate issue.

Internet has been too slow to check for last few days

(If you’re wondering how I post videos in other threads, it’s because the links are saved in my search bar)

OK

Are all your router settings correct? I had a weird one where the MTU wasn’t right and I’d get random signal dropouts. Took quite a bit of finding as it’s not something I’d changed or had need to change.

it will almost certainly be the ‘last mile’ of copper cabling from the exchange/cabinet to your house. we had this problem till BT replaced the few miles of wire from the local exchange to/past our house. As above, it took lots of letters, phonecalls etc. its not economic for them to do it so you have to pursue the issue!

Was getting 80mb down and 40mb up, until a few days ago. We have this NBN (National Broadband Network) which is proving to be utter shite, on the whole. I’ve had that speed for three months and last Thursday my sync halved. Now 40/20. Both my RSP and the NBN say there’s no fault and there’s bugger all I can do about it. Just pay the same and accept it’s the speed it is. Frankly it’s a shite state of affairs.

Basically instead of putting the cash into it and giving everyone on fibre to the premises, half way through they decided it was costing too much, so decided fibre to the node was more cost effective. So we have a node and connected by the archaic ageing copper infrastructure. Can you imagine the condition of 30 year old copper will be in Australia? Exactly. Wet string is possibly better.

So at the moment…. 40d/20u and moaning.

OK

Are all your router settings correct? I had a weird one where the MTU wasn’t right and I’d get random signal dropouts. Took quite a bit of finding as it’s not something I’d changed or had need to change.

You certainly know your onions… did update the MTU figure a few weeks back on the advice of the ISP tech team; improved from no internet whatsoever to flow equivalent to a constipated zygotic mosquito.

Sort of, OpenReach made a commitment for ‘super fast’ internet to every home in the UK by April 2016 I think, obviously they missed that.

ahahahahahahaha

I discovered recently that a neighbour must have been on the same channel wifi as us – a swap to ‘auto’ sorted some slowness and dropping connection that started suddenly.

I also got the old BT ‘box’ replaced for free as ours was circa 1970, again a slight increase in speed.

OP – PlusNet’s terms of service are minimum 1Mbps down. Or at least, that’s what their tech support peeps tell me.

I’m on pretty much first name terms with the whole department now and an open issue ticket. As I’ve bleated on here before, about 3/4 mile of overhead cable that runs through every hedge and tree to the house, although I suspect the issue is more to do with the exchange as most of the copper wire has been replaced over the last few years

check its not your adsl filters. I had one go bad and it caused no end of problems.

My parents were struggling until I connected their adsl filter and router into their master socket. Check you haven’t got your router on an extension.