I have a direct exchange connection (no green box so no fibre, ever it seems according to BT)

I’m with EE and my tinternet should be about 8 meg. I get 6.6 on a good day which does ok i guess.

some days i get 0.9, some days its 6.6 or somewhere near. today i was 1.2 and i just did a bt wholesale speedtest and it shows 0.14 with a latency of 328.14.

i call ee and sometimes get a tech wiz, sometimes an uninterested indian lady. they always sort the problem out just there and then by doing randon things it seems. they never go through the same series of things with me each time. sometime they twiddle settings remotely, sometimes its me who has to toggle settings.

they say my line is fine to the house. I had the router (brightbox) plugged in to a cheapo extension cable running under the doormat. I recently (2 mths ago) put in a B&Q extension socket over the doorframe, properly done, very tidy job.

the last time i called ee earlier this week the uninterested indian lady asked if i was plugged in the mastersocket or an extension. I said an extension that i’ve recently put in. She said thats the problem, unplug it and go straight to mastersocket. I waited a while and this seemed to work. thing is, the master socket is right next to the front door between there and the lounge door and has no power nearby or any space to put a shelf or whatever for the router.

I hooked up the extension again and it still worked perfectly, 6.6meg. A week goes past and its back to shi&&y speeds eratically.

its like they make these fixes up but have some dial up there that they keep turning back the speed until you notice and call them and then make up some guff and pretend to do something or blame something you’ve done whilst they turn it back up. “have you recently washed your bike sir? the shiny metal in the shed makes the signal bad sir, can you go out and dirty it? ok, that fine now its dirty again, you’re back up to 6.6meg” i’m running out of things to stop doing, its driving me crazy.

is there anyone else who is better than this? was thinking of ditching and going to John Lewis BB. Surely given their reputation as a retialer they’ll be good to deal with?

Can anyone shed any light on the above for me, i’m going mad…..

I have suffered from huge speed variations, plugging into the master socket was the first step, disconnect everything else. The speed drop could also be due to lots of other people using it round you. In some places there were definite times when it all slowed down. Has anyone checked the line to your house?

ee say its fine. they can test it remotely apparently. my mate recently was talking to someone from sky. they said it cost them £0000’s to get a bt engineer out and this massive charge they have to pay means they really dont ever want to send one to you.

I sort of cant help thinking that staying with bt was a better option for broadband.

I said an extension that i’ve recently put in. She said thats the problem, unplug it and go straight to mastersocket. I waited a while and this seemed to work.

If it works in the master socket then it’s definitely the wiring in the rest of the house, and absolutely nothing to do with EE. Imagine phoning up Volkswagen complaining that you’ve reversed into a tree. Not is it only nothing to do with them they can’t do anything about it either. You can’t really blame them.

Do you have working ADSL filters on everything connected to a phone socket? This means every phone, fax machine, burglar alarm in the house.

Re-check the wiring and connections in all the extension sockets. Sometimes poking the wires into the slots doesn’t cut the insulation properly. Also, when it goes crappy is it raining or wet weather?

If it works in the master socket then it’s definitely the wiring in the rest of the house

No.

If it works in the test socket then it’s definitely the wiring in the rest of the house.

Take the master faceplate off and plug in to the hidden socket behind. Do you still have issues? If yes, it’s a provider problem, if no it’s yours. Once you’ve got a de facto answer there we can look at next options.

No.

If it works in the test socket then it’s definitely the wiring in the rest of the house.

You are quite correct – that’s what I meant. Test socket = master socket with the face plate off.

I’ve tried the test socket before. It is equally as random plugged directly in to it. I haven’t changed anything from last night and now I’m up at 6.68 on ookla. Last night before I went to bed it was 0.14

Is there a better quality extension available? Surely not many routers are plugged directly into a master socket in the uk?

As others have said, does it vary but be slow at the same time in a day – ie when the kids come home, after tea and that kind of thing?

Also, are you rural/city etc – as tbh even in the sticks we get 6mb off a standard BT line.

Oooh, there’s a secret socket? 🙂

Interested in this as ours is also EE and our speeds go from bad to terrible.

I’m in a large village/ small town 5 m from southampton. Connected directly to exchange hence no fibre even though the new fibre cabinet is outside my house, 15 m across the rd.

Speeds are random and will manage a couple of weeks fine then dud until I complain.

Welcome to EE . . .

Same here. It goes from 0.38 Mbps to 4.2 Mbps on a good day. Can’t complain when it’s at 4+ as we’re miles from the non-fibre exchange.

I know sometimes the issues are to do with the line into the house, but I do wonder if EE throttle it back at their end for some reason? Server capacity?

Marko

The peak/quite time variations can be huge, in Paris they don’t have satellite tv it’s all delivered by internet and some evenings you cannot watch an HD channel. When you run a speed test on the line you can really see the difference. I suspect the variations are due to usage locally, you may be going to bed but others may be streaming movies / torrent upload-downloads etc

I’m on the phone to the service provider iff it’s anything under 12,then again I’m in a good area so there’s no excuse.
Ee wanted me to switch to them when I got my mobile contract,deal was quite good actually.

I’ve tried the test socket before.
…
Is there a better quality extension available?

It’s a troubleshooting step, not a solution. If it’s the same in the test socket then changing the extension isn’t going to change anything. If however it’s better in the test socket then the difference is down to your home wiring.

Best thing you can do with extensions is disconnect the bell wire (orange, pin 3). It’s not needed on modern phones and can cause interference.

I sort of cant help thinking that staying with bt was a better option for broadband.

I live fairly rural and have always stuck with BT. Before that we were with Demon Internet and weren’t getting anywhere.

In our last house BT were sending out 2 teams of engineers in Land Rovers and a cherry picker to replace the local telegraph pole (or what ever it’s called these days) as we couldn’t get broadband.

In our current house a BT engineer replaced 100m of wire running from our house to the lane to give us broadband. He climbed several poles to do this, cut back foliage from the tops of trees and called in a cherry picker for the last pole as he wasn’t allowed to climb that type.

Since then BT (Openreach) have upgraded our green cabinet and we’ve gone from 1.3m broadband to 34m infinity.

Have you tried another router to rule out a hardware issue?

I’ve got Virgin media cable broadband – some days it’s perfect, other days or at certain times it slows down to what is effectively dial-up speed, when I can’t even load google. Had no internet or phone at all the other morning so I phoned them up only to find out they were doing “maintenance”, with no prior warning. Had a proper moan and got £6 off a month for 12mo.

Are you getting the slow speeds when using Ethernet cable, or just on wireless? If just wireless then all your neighbours could be using the same channel on their router too.

Also our old Sky router couldnt cope with having many devices attached to it, so they sent a new one which improved things.

However we also have had no end of trouble with speed. Our Max is supposed to be about 8, but we never get more than 3 and avg 1.5

Sky admit that the best anyone gets on our street is 3.5 because we are far away from the exchange and lots of folk are in between.

Ours gets slower at peak times.

Ask them to see what other EE customers are getting in your area.

Oh and also another issue we have had is undetected errors on the line, both BT and Sky have been unable to detect errors on the line, yet the broadband had dropped out. We got very persistant and after probably > 5 visits from BT they eventually found an error between the excahnge and the green box. Since we have received steady 3.5 reducing to 1 ish at peak times

Today though we are going to fibre, and its costing less than we were paying before 🙂

Have you read EE’s policy on network management?

http://ee.co.uk/help/mobile-and-home-connections/checking-and-improving-your-network-coverage/our-network/network-management

(follow it through to get the list of rules that apply to your package)

Look up ‘contention ratio’, too (how much bandwith the ISP purchases compared to the number of customers).

We’re currently with BT after fleeing talk-talk, EE and Sky. Not the cheapest, but the internet speeds are at least twice as fast as before and much more consistent. It also avoids the debate about whose responsibility it is in the event of problems.

We only get 3.4Mbps with EE, because of our line, but we always get exactly the same, any time of day or night. It’s very reliable indeed…

.. unless it rains. Something gets damp across the 4km or so to the exchange, and it can drop from time to time. And it only costs us £5.

One thing you can do to check the line is dial 17070 and press I think it’s 2 to get a quiet line test. You can then listen for noise on the line. It should be pretty quiet.

My guess would be contention, if it’s variable. I’d have thought most ISPs would traffic shape to make the common speed test sites look fast, but there is generally little correlation between them (try a few in one session).

Would be worth seeing if your connection is provided at 50:1 or more – even rurally, with a few people in a few houses, phones, tablets, TV streamers etc. all contribute to kicking performance in the nuts at peak times.

I’m about 300 m from the exchange and connected directly rather than through a cabinet hence no fibre ever for me as the wont upgrade the exchange as it’s not commercially viable as so few of us are connected to it this way.

I tried a new net gear router but that was as temperamental. I even pruned a tree that May have been affecting our cable to the house.

6.8 this morning 5.9 this evening.

Just go to plusnet.

Do they throttle? What’s the customer service like?

Has everyone’s connection dropped out?

That’s a yes then……