Unstable Speeds BT Fibre

[LowFi]

Hi,

Is anyone else on this forum having trouble with undiagnosed speed issues with their BT Fibre?

My speeds are barely functional at times over both ethernet and WiFi. I'm paying for a 500 Mbps service, but often getting a paultry 6-16 Mbps. My Ookla speed test log is a scattered mess. The most "demanding" devices on my network are the kids iPads.

Remote testing often shows my connection is fine, but every engineer has confirmed I have a serious connection/speed issue.

I've had three engineers....

1 x home team visit

Engineer connected his laptop via ethernet, saw very low speeds, ran a diagnostic receiving an "undiagnosed" error code. Gave me a new router, speeds briefly jumped, the moment he left the speeds dropped again.

2 x OpenReach visits

Visit 1: Engineer re-spliced the CSP, still saw low speeds (60 Mpbs), but kept hitting re-test until he saw a result over 400 Mbps then left. Blamed the low speeds on defective devices connecting to the router.

Visit 2: Saw low speeds on his laptop via ethernet. Provided a new ONT, and said light levels were OK (16.4). Still no improvement, and called the BT line for OpenReach engineers. There was a standoff - OpenReach said they have done their job and blamed the BT equipment. The BT person on the line (loudspeaker) said "looks fine from my tests"... and said to the engineer "so what do you want to do?".

I've a 3rd router on the way..... not hopeful this will fix anything.

To be fair to the BT customer facing team they've been polite, still tried to help despite unreliable remote connectivity tests and sent engineers as soon as they could, but nobody can work out what's wrong with my line.

Does BT have a senior engineering team I can ask to be put through to? The vanilla technical support workflows just aren't working.

[caravanj]

@LowFi 

Have you tried a different Ethernet cable between your ONT & router.

We're currently on FTTC and our house is fully wired with Ethernet ports in most rooms & my laptop always got speeds of around 50 Mbps until yesterday when the internet kept dropping & the speed went down to around 2 Mbps.

I checked the Ethernet cable between the room Ethernet port & my laptop & found a wiring fault that had obviously been caused, over a couple of years, by me cable tying the cable too tightly.

Anyway I cut it back to where I thought the problem was & crimped on a new RJ45 plug & this solved the problem.

P.S. Anyone crimping an RJ 45 plug use the pass-through snap plug, it makes the job a 2 minute doddle.

[LowFi]

Thanks @caravanj  for reading my post.

Yep the engineers tried that also, they went through three new Ethernet cables between the (new) ONT and the Router but that didn’t improve the speed or stability coming from the router.

The engineers also tried using different Ethernet cables from the router to their laptops with no joy.

My uploads are really stable on wired and Wi-Fi (see below)  bizarre this mystery problem is only impacting downloads.

[JohnC2]

Hi @LowFi, sorry that you're having a problem with your broadband connection and it's still not resolved after engineering visits.

I've sent you a Private Message so you can get in touch with the Mod team and we'll be happy to help you with this.

Cheers

John

[LowFi]

Many thanks John, I’ve just done that now.

[JohnC2]

Hi @LowFi, we'll be in touch to help you with this when you reach the top of the queue. It will be a few days as we are quite busy at the moment.

Cheers

John

[LowFi · Accepted solution]

Hi,

An update on this thread. Randomly my connection has gone back to normal on Friday afternoon.

There were more than the the usual number of BT Openreach vans in my neighbourhood that day so I can only guess other neighbours were reporting issues with their line too and there was a fault diagnosed on the open reach network.

Sadly we’ll never really know what was the issue actually was since openreach were protesting innocence for my line (line is fine, no faults, etc etc).

My third router remains unboxed and will be sent back to BT.

[DanielS]

Hi @LowFi,

Thanks for getting back to us and for letting me know that everything is working as it should be now.

It's great to see that everything's working but it is frustrating trying to work out what the cause was since Openreach appear to have done something to the network.

If this ever returns, drop us a line here and we'll look into it for you. Hopefully you won't need to but at least we have that option open to you.

Thank you

DanielS