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Broadband speed variations

Avatar David Fleetwood
For a while now I have been trying to work out why we have slow internet speeds in most of our house. I certainly need to look at something like a mesh wifi system but first I wanted to check the basic broadband speed coming into the house. Using the Which? broadband speed checker I fairly consistently get a download speed of 21 - 22 mbps and upload of 4+mbps - we have fibre broadband (fibre to exchange then copper wire to house - a distance of about 1 mile) and expected a speed in excess of 30mbps. However when I use the BT speed test as recommended by our b'band provider (John Lewis (=PlusNet), I get considerable variations within a fairly short space of time - 44 mbps is an estimated average but its can range from 4 mbps to 93 mbps. Upload speed is fairly consistent at 4.1 mbps.

I have done all the usual things like an ethernet connection directly to the router, no other devices being used etc but I'm mystified why there is such a speed variation between the different tests. The cynic in me thinks BT might be showing enhanced results!

Does anyone have any thoughts on why there is this variation?

Re: Broadband speed variations

Avatar Derek Wright
If you are about 1 mile from the green street cabinet then I think that is your problem.

Take a look at the ThinkBroadband web site
Think Broadband web site

Re: Broadband speed variations

Avatar Mick Burrell
There are three levels of fibre:

Fibre to the exchange (which you say you have - are you sure?)
Fibre to the (big green) cabinet in the street
Fibre to the house.

Your speed you can expect with a Mac connected to your router by ethernet will be governed by how much copper is between you and the fibre and how many other Plus Net customers are sharing your connection with them at any one time - typically 50 (known as the contention ratio). The less copper, the faster the speed. (You cannot get fibre to the house at your address yet.)

Speed will also vary with the time of day e.g. when kids who live with the other 49 on your connection come home from school and start using it, it will slow down but shouldn't cause you an issue.

My advice would be to always check using ethernet and always at the same time of day using the same checker - they are notoriously inaccurate but should be consistent. mybroadbandspeed.co.uk is (I believe) operated by Plus Net so if you use that and have a problem, you can go back to Plus Net.

Now, wi-fi is a different issue. Beside your router you should get the best speed but if it travels through walls, floors or a long distance this will drop. Similarly, if you use a wi-fi over mains system there's typically a small loss but if you use wi-fi repeaters, they all need to "see" the router directly as if you daisy chain them, each one halves the speed! This does not happen with a mesh system - they can be daisy chained without loss.

I covered all this in my online presentation of networks - which you missed ;-)

Re: Broadband speed variations

Avatar David Fleetwood
Thanks Derek and Mick for their comments. My main reason for asking for comments was the big disparity in results from different speedcheckers. Mick commented that they are 'notoriously inaccurate' which it seems I will have to accept but it does raise the question what is the point if they are all measuring the same thing!

Re: Broadband speed variations

Avatar Trevor Hewson
I get consistent results from Speedtest.net. Whether they are accurate is of course another matter entirely!

Re: Broadband speed variations

Avatar David Fleetwood
I think I have found the reason for the huge variations in reported speeds. With the BT Broadband speed test, the initial test is called a Basic Performance Test - this gave a download speed of 93 mbps at one stage. However if you press a button on the results page for an 'advanced' test you get data which is consistent with the other speed tests that I undertook. In our case the advanced test tells me that the max achievable download speed for our connection is 24.2 mbps, which is also the IP Profile figure for our line. Against this 21/22 mbps is reasonable. I believe BT puts this cap on a line speed so that everyone on the same circuit gets a reasonable share.
I have since been going around our house to see what speeds I get in various areas and generally the wifi gives a figure close to 21 mbps, so I have deduced that spending £200 on a mesh system will probably not be worthwhile! The intermittent slowness is probably due more to variations in the connection speed in turn linked to high demand - frustrating though this can be. I wonder if they would increase my IP profile speed?!

Re: Broadband speed variations

Avatar Derek Wright
The speed reported by the speed checker is a function of the location of the testing machine. So if you do a speed test to your favourite speed tester and then move to the USA and then run the same test to the same test centre the speeds will be very diferent.

You cannot compare speeds obtained from different test centers (apart from interest) as you do not know what the diffrences are in the route and distance.

I find quite a difference between speeds reported by SamKnows and those reported by the Think Broadband tests.

Intelligent TVs that are connected to the net will run a speed test to determine if the network is fast enough to display High Res images, if not they will degrade the image quality to obtain a steady image (from what I have seen)

Re: Broadband speed variations

Avatar Tony Still
There's a lot of marketing confusion around Broadband too. Mick's comments about where the fibre ends are fundamental but it's also worth mentioning that "copper" covers more than one solution.

The final link to the house is often over existing (copper) telephone wires. These impose a fairly fundamental limit on the speed achievable (the phone lines were never designed for this and some are really quite old).

Other networks (notably Virgin Media cable) use copper but rather than two wires in the telephone connection use a coax cable (co-axial, like a TV aerial lead). That is designed for high speed data and there aren't any really old installations so it is a better bet.

So if the salesman says "copper", ask which sort!

Re: Broadband speed variations

Avatar Derek Wright
I was the first user to be connected to a Fibre to the Cabinet connection in May 2012. The cabinet is about 200 metres from the house. Initially the service was good, a speed of about 70mbs was achieved.
Over the years as more users started using the service causing speed slow downs, however due to the constant churn of the wire wound connections the reliability of the service degraded.
There is a wire wound connection at the following places -
leaving the FTTC Cabinet.
At the point the cable leaves the big bundle of cables to go the telegraph pole
At the top of the pole to join to the cable going to the house.
At the point of connecting to the house down cable to the junction box where the telephone master socket is located.
Each of these joints are candidates for noise and failure to enter the system.

Each fault required one to do internal checking of the wires and modem so as to avoid a penalty fee from Openreach, then one has to wait for the Internet provider to answer the phone (so one can report the fault) and then wait while Openreach check the line out and the various cable joints. During holiday periods you have to hope that there is manpower to checkout and fix any faults.

On one occasion the repair was held up as there was a gas leak into the underground ducting.

Eventually the unreliability of the service was so bad I left the service and went over to Virgin. I still get interrupts but not as bad or as frequent as with the FTTC, it costs more but I have greater confidence that will be a service when I need it. And as mentioned above it is still a copper connection but in a co-ax form (fibre not available here) but it is nice to not have to specify the fastest service to get a good connection.
So the science of the FTTC technique might be quite good (for the latter part of the last century) if not very clever however the practicalities of the technique is flawed by the compromises in the execution of the technique.

Re: Broadband speed variations

Avatar David Fleetwood
Thanks Derek and Tony - some very interesting comments which go some way to explaining why our broadband service is probably worsening rather than improving. We have no option to have full fibre where we live - frustratingly the Virgin network comes to about 200m away - we can only hope they extend it one day soon!

Re: Broadband speed variations

Avatar Tony Still
Another thought: Many (I think all) of the 'telephone line' broadband services are actually provided by BT and only sold by whomever (you could check JL/Plusnet).

Friends in a rural area using TalkTalk had repeated problems which TT blamed on BT and BT referred back to TT. Their problems were only solved (well, improved) by moving to BT as the provider. Taking the middleman out of the picture allowed them to use BT support and to press the case, finally getting some problems solved.
 
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