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Previously excellent FTTC broadband dipping speed

Rotarua674 — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 16:59:52 GMT

I have fibre to the cabinet broadband with a contract minimum speed of 29 Mbps. It’s been excellent for years. Suddenly in the last week it’s dipped as low as 300 kbps at times and been below 15 Mbps for hours on end measured on an ethernet connected computer. BT and Openreach say they can see speed dips and “congestion” but say there is no problem with our connection. Sometimes the dips are for 10 minutes and at other times half a day or more. The set up inside the house has been given the OK by a BT engineer. For weeks now I have seen Openreach vans at the end of my street setting up a new cabinet and about half a mile away near the old cabinet. There is a new housing development of 140 houses right next to where I live but not yet occupied. I presume underground telecom cables or fibre have been laid as the developer is now landscaping and there are no overhead poles.

My question is, given this level of activity and eventually a new load on the system, could my speed drops be related to the whatever Openreach is doing to connect the new houses? BT and Openreach saying they can see dips (which show red on their “Customer Report”) but in the next breath saying everything is OK makes no sense to me. Short dips we can live with but 300 - 600 kbps for 10 hours just makes it unusable.

Thanks

Re: Previously excellent FTTC broadband dipping speed

iniltous — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 17:32:50 GMT

New builds for quite a few years now , get FTTP as ‘standard’ , especially as a development of that size doesn’t even need a developer contribution so it’s not likely work at or near your FTTC ‘cabinet’ or copper cabinet is related to that new development, FTTP doesn’t ’run’ from a cabinet.

It possible but not likely the aggregation node for the new development may be close to the copper FTTC cabinet in an underground chamber , but even in that case the FTTP for the new build isn’t ‘connected’ to your FTTC , they are totally separate.

As a first step ( on here ) to possibly identifying the issue , post your router connection statistics.

Re: Previously excellent FTTC broadband dipping speed

Rotarua674 — Sat, 31 Jan 2026 08:39:06 GMT

Thanks - will find out how to do that.