BT Broadband Support

[johndon]

I wonder if anyone has had a similar experience with BT Broadband Support...

My broadband is, by today's standards, rather slow with a max of 20mbps and BT quoting a minimum guaranteed speed of 14mbps and I accept that this will not improve until they offer fibre to the home where I live.

Over the last couple of weeks, the speed has been all over the place, often going below the minimum, example below from the last 24 hours:

So, I contacted them yesterday and explained the situation and their response was that the issue was nothing to do with them, that I have too many devices connected to my network (both wired and wireless) so they essentially refused to help at all. Now, I do appreciate that, if I'm streaming from Amazon on one TV and Netflix on another for example then the speed will slow down although some of the higher speeds in the graph above were registered while I was streaming from Disney+.

They did suggest that I disconnect everything from the network, connect a single PC to the router and run a speed test - I did this, got a speed of 17.80, reconnected everything, tested again and got a speed of 17.79 so, clearly, the devices connected to the network are having no impact, certainly while idle.

Any one else had a similar response from BT?

 

[ChuckMountain]

Seems to be getting a quite common response unfortunately. It’s always seems to be the cop out excuse.

Are you connecting via wireless or wired though?

 

[johndon]

Seems to be getting a quite common response unfortunately. It’s always seems to be the cop out excuse.

Are you connecting via wireless or wired though?

The vast majority of devices are wired, the only ones that are not are those than physically cannot be such as Nest Cameras (2), Google Home Hubs (2) and Amazon Echos (2).

The speed tests are run from a machine with a wired connection.

 

[ChuckMountain]

Are people streaming at that time, it looks like a common pattern in the evening it drops because the network is doing stuff.

 

[johndon]

Are people streaming at that time, it looks like a common pattern in the evening it drops because the network is doing stuff.

Not all the time, as I mentioned, some of the highest recorded speeds on that graph were measured while I was streaming.

Whilst not in the last 24 hours, the speed, on more than on occassion has dropped to less than 5mbps late at night when there is almost zero activity on the network.

 

[psychopomp1]

OP, can you post some router stats pls? I assume you're on ADSL2+?

 

[johndon]

What sort of stats, I'm not sure what is available from the Hub admin...

 

[johndon]

After the conversation with BT yesterday and my test that appeared to reveal that all the network connections made no difference to the speed, I also installed Glasswire to monitor the network traffic.

I've just run it while, at the same time, I ran a speed check. Having logged in to my router, it tells me that my Downstream speed should be 19.03mbps but here is the result of the speed test where I'm seeing just over 5mbps:

Glasswire is showing negligible network traffic immediately prior to the test and you can see that it then peaks during the download test and you can also see the traffic for the upload part of the test:

As I sit here now typing, there is almost zero traffic on the network but somehow, my download speed is almost 14mbps less than it should be...

Note, I'm open to any sort of advice, whilst I'm quite happy setting up a basic network, the monitoring of it is completely new to me. I'm also happy enough to accept that the issue may well be mine rather than BTs but, so far at least, the stats don't seem to support that.

John

 

[Heartstone]

OP, can you post some router stats pls? I assume you're on ADSL2+?

What sort of stats, I'm not sure what is available from the Hub admin...

Probably wanting these kind of statistics.

 

[johndon]

Thanks for that. In that section for my Hub, I don't see the ADSL settings, all I see is the connection information:

Connection Information​

Line state:​	Connected​
Connection time:​	1 days, 01:59:54​
Downstream:​	19.03 Mbps​
Upstream:​	3.367 Mbps​

 

[wormvortex]

With a speed of 3mbps for upload your are on FTTC and not adsl. BT and all providers guarantee sync speed which is the connection to the router as shown in your screenshot. They do not guarantee throughout speed which is what you see when you run speed tests.

Bare in mind as well if you fully saturate your upload connection by backing stuff up to the cloud etc... then this will also effect your download speed. You notice it a lot with people who have very low upload speeds.

 

[johndon]

Whilst I do back up to the cloud, it is done manually and I'd certainly never run a speed test while that is running.

My connection is FTTC and I am a long way from that cabinet hence the relatively low download speed. What concerns me is the massive swing in speeds from around 17mbps to less than 4 and then backup up again and the fact that happens with little to no other network traffic.

From the stats I have I spend a lot of time below the guaranteed minimum of 14mbps but BT won't even acknowledge that...

Just to add, up till a few weeks ago, my reported download speed when running tests was consistently 19-20mbps and had been for years.

 

[ChuckMountain]

Doesn’t glass wire only tell you what your pc is up to? It doesn’t tell you what other devices are using on the network.

So in this case it’s not your PC that is the culprit.

What changed two weeks ago?

Have you given somebody else the WiFi password?

 

[johndon]

Doesn’t glass wire only tell you what your pc is up to? It doesn’t tell you what other devices are using on the network.

So in this case it’s not your PC that is the culprit.

What changed two weeks ago?

Have you given somebody else the WiFi password?

It may well do, I only installed it yesterday and I did think it monitored all network traffic but perhaps I'm wrong.

Nothing in the setup changed two weeks ago, no additional devices have been added and I can account for every device connected to the network, no one has been given the password. In fact, today, I've not even connected my phone to the wifi so that's one less device.

 

[ChuckMountain]

Glasswire only monitors your local PC and what devices it can see on the network. It doesn't monitor what those devices are doing unless they are interacting with your PC. They wouldn't for example be able to determine how much bandwidth is being used by them. (Unless you routed all traffic through the PC)

How are you accounting for all the devices? Don't rely on just what's in the router list.

I have used a couple of apps like Fing for example which is pretty good at detecting stuff on the network. However, there are still some devices that I know don't appear to it for a variety of reasons.

 

[johndon]

Glasswire only monitors your local PC and what devices it can see on the network. It doesn't monitor what those devices are doing unless they are interacting with your PC. They wouldn't for example be able to determine how much bandwidth is being used by them. (Unless you routed all traffic through the PC)

How are you accounting for all the devices? Don't rely on just what's in the router list.

I have used a couple of apps like Fing for example which is pretty good at detecting stuff on the network. However, there are still some devices that I know don't appear to it for a variety of reasons.

Thanks for that, I misunderstood what Glasswire would do.

With regards to the devices on the Network, I've checked the router list, Glasswire (which does, at least have an option to list networked items) and a combination of 'ipconfig' and 'arp -a' at a DOS prompt and none of them show any devices that I cannot account for.

Another example of the fluctuations in the broadband speed test, there was definitely no streaming happening at 00:49 this morning and none of the computers in the house were on so no possibility of an update being downloaded on them either.

What I should probably do is disconnect everything from the network with the exception of the main PC from the network for a period of 24 hours or so and see what happens but that's not particularly practical...

 

[ChuckMountain]

Have you got a Broadband Quality Monitor running against your connection. If not check out thinkbroadband.com and enable one, you might need to enable WAN Ping on your router too though.

What this does is ping your router and see what the ping time is like. This typically shows when your upload speed is slow\busy

Here is mine and you can see a jump at 2am when some cloud backups start and suck most of my upstream traffic. On a slow connection as others have noted then if your upstream connection is in use it will impact download speeds

My Broadband Ping

Worth checking to see if the peaks match your BB speedtest as that would suggest something is doing something upstream. If not it eliminates another bit of the troubleshooting issue.

 

[johndon]

Thanks for that, I'll give it a try.