Dear all.

We’ve had a rock solid Talk Talk Fibre connection for 18 months 10 metres from the junction box. 72mb download and c18mb upload. In the evening it might drop to 45mb/50 but still plenty for a family of 4.

In the last 8 weeks our standard download has dropped to a pretty consistent 48mb and in the evening can get a lot worse. My upload is still a stable 18mb- nothing changed there, indicating to me that nothing has changed in the house.

In my head, it feels that we must be being throttled, that they are restricting download speeds. I also think its because we’re nearly at the end of our contract and they want to upsell us an increased speed.

When I’ve asked them, they flatly deny any throttling, and insist its in our house. Any thoughts, experiences or guidance on the way these things work?

Many thanks

Could be as simple as congestion on the cabinet. It won’t be explicit throttling but just not enough capacity.

How are you measuring the upload/download speed? Unless it’s with a physical cable into the router the numbers are near useless for talking to the ISP.

I doubt they’re deliberately throttling your download speed due to your contract ending. It’s more likely to be contention.

Thanks very helpful.

If you are already paying for those speeds, there’s probably nothing faster for them to try and upsell you to anyway (unless you can get their 150 product, which hardly anyone can).

“They’re coming to the end of their contract, I’ve got a great idea, lets make their service worse” said no service provider ever.

Ok thanks. Really helpful

First things first.

Is the slowdown on Wired or Wireless? Try and test with Ethernet cable to router.

If it is slower wired move the router so it’s connected to the isolated master socket. If it’s slower then it’s the provider / cabinet. If it’s not it’s something in your house.

Contention, as Scotroutes has pointed out. There’s a bottleneck and too many people using the service.

… a family of 4.

Do you know what the other three are doing at the time? Do you have a gamer in the house?

Because this:

Try and test with Ethernet cable to router.

… is good advice IF you also switch off the Wi-Fi for the duration of the test.

I had this a couple of weeks ago. Our usual steady 30-40 Mb dropped to about 2.5Mb and stayed there.

After a couple of days (It was playing havoc with Teams meetings as I’m working from home) I logged a complaint with my provider PlusNet. They sent me instructions as above to run speed tests with the laptop plugged directly into the router.

They also said they would send an engineer and for me to book a time, but if it wasn’t their fault I would be charged (£80 I think!!).

However before I had a chance to try any of the above it miraculously resolved itself and has been fine since.

TL:DR – log issue with ISP, they may fix before you have to do anything.

Thanks all. Lots of good and sensible advice as ever