Hello Everybody,
I have had BT Infinity 2 FTTC together with the latest model BT Hub years since the service became available in our North Yorkshire Village about 3 years ago. All has been well apart from short periods of network down time due to local outages and these have usually been resolved within 24hrs. Over the last weekend 18-19th February I noticed that our connection was slowing right down during peak periods i.e. 18:00hrs until about midnight. This has continued all week and the service has slowed down to between 4 and 5 Mbps. After midnight and all the following day speeds return to a stable 60Mbbps download and 20 Mbps Upload.
I have been using the B.T App to test the speeds and it reports that the speed to the hub is not as expected (understatement).
I have waited all week for an engineer to visit and when he came this morning I explained how the problem was only during peak evening hours and how it was the speed to the hub that was slow, not the Wi-Fi. He was a friendly helpful chap and after running diagnostics on his laptop he told me that Wi-Fi congestion was the problem and that this would be the cause of the poor speeds from cabinet to my hub as it was likely that many of my neighbours where on the same channels. He reset the hub and changed the Wi-Fi channel's to 11 for 2.4ghz and 48 for 5ghz.
I must admit that I do not understand the logic behind this procedure please excuse my ignorance I was under the impression that the speed to hub was over the old copper cables from the cabinet, nothing to do with Wi-Fi channels. I explained my understanding to the engineer but he insisted his diagnosis was correct.
My research has given me the impression that this type of problem is more likely to be caused by congestion at the exchange due to the DSLAM or VSLAM being over populated.
Please could someone with the time and knowledge be kind enough to enlighten me?
I will not know if the channel changes have helped until after 1900hrs this evening, but BT have already closed the fault recording the fact that I have informed them it has been fixed.
Looking forward to any replies or advice that anyone would be kind enough to give, thank you. Confused Silver Surfer.
The 'engineer' was talking total nonsense. It will be congestion in the backhaul network causing the problem.
What device and connection are you using to run the BTApp? For example: PC with Ethernet, Tablet with2.4GHz Wifi, or Phone with 5GHz WiFi.
It might also be worth testing your BB speed against some other sites just for consistency such as broadbandspeedchecker.com or speedtest.net (there are quite a few to chose from). Post the results from different times of day on here after removing any personal identifiers. If you could also post the Hub stats (again remove identifying data) on here taken at as close a time as possible to the above tests that might help.
Many thanks for you prompt reply, unfortunately I suspected that this was the case. I am expecting a call from BT faults tomorrow morning when I will probably be telling them that the fault persists (being polite). Could you recommend a course of action as I seem to be struggling to get some understanding from the BT side?
Using PC on Ethernet, phone,tablet and chromebook, also numerous other speed test sites that confirm the very low speed. Any Wi-Fi tests done in same room as hub and these match ethernet PC tests.
Yep, complete billhooks. Was this Openreach or Qube?
Just keep reporting it online while the fault is present & hopefully, you'll eventually get a visit from someone who knows what they're doing...
@agmsturdy wrote:
Many thanks for you prompt reply, unfortunately I suspected that this was the case. I am expecting a call from BT faults tomorrow morning when I will probably be telling them that the fault persists (being polite). Could you recommend a course of action as I seem to be struggling to get some understanding from the BT side?
Ask them if you are connected to a hot VP. They won't know but insist they raise it with BT wholesale.
That explains a lot!!
Hi @agmsturdy
Welcome to the BT Community and thank you for posting!
I am sorry for the slow broadband speeds. From what you've reported it looks like the VLAN you're connected to is over-utilised. We can pick up from here and help sort this out to get your throughput speeds back to where they should be, during peak times.
I have sent you a private message with instructions on how you can send us over your details and we'll look into this for you. See: Private messages
Thanks,
Robbie