Upload speed poor since upgrade to Bt Halo 3

[clanvalintine]

My Halo2 contract came to an end last December and I renewed to a Halo 3 contract. The setup I have been using and that has been working very well for me for a couple of years is a 3rd Party Mesh router connected to a BT Openreach VDSL modem.

However - since upgrading to Halo3 (still FTTC - not full fibre) although my download speeds are perfect (instantly 61Mb/s), my upload speeds always start very slowly when testing (around 120 Kb/s) before ramping up toward the end of the test to a more respectable speed (usually ending up with an overall speed of aroun 8-10Mb/s). Along with this there is variable packet loss - usually anywhere between 2 and 15%.

Latency and jitter are not overly concerning - typically around 15ms and 40-50ms respectively.

If I plug in my BT Smart hub I get perfect download and upload speeds and 0% packet loss - even if I continue to use my Mesh system in bridge mode attached to the smart hub.

Unfortunately this is not a viable solution because I have so many devices on my home network (35+) the smart hub seems unable to cope and devices randomly lose internet access - one of the reasons I moved to the mesh system in the first place - that and the thickness of the stone walls in our Victorian Pile.

Is there any reason why moving from Halo2 to Halo3 would have this effect ?

I'm considering purchasing a new , better quality (than the BT Smart Hub) VDSL Modem/router - but worried it might not fix the issue

[clanvalintine · Accepted solution]

I ended up purchasing a Billion Bipac 8800nl R2 modem/router which has resolved my issue.

"Billion 8800NL R2 Wireless VDSL/ADSL2+ Modem Router for Phone Line Connections and Fibre"

I've used Billion before to great effect when I was ADSL so I already knew they were quality kit :

Mode	VDSL2
Traffic Type	PTM
Status	Up
Link Power State	L0
	Downstream	Upstream
Line Coding (Trellis)	On	On
SNR Margin (dB)	6.6	16.1
Attenuation (dB)	8.6	0.0
Output Power (dBm)	12.4	-5.9
Attainable Rate (Kbps)	70655	24962
Rate (Kbps)	66999	19999
B (# of bytes in Mux Data Frame)	158	237
M (# of Mux Data Frames in an RS codeword)	1	1
T (# of Mux Data Frames in an OH sub-frame)	0	42
R (# of redundancy bytes in the RS codeword)	8	16
S (# of data symbols over which the RS code word spans)	0.0754	0.3781
L (# of bits transmitted in each data symbol)	17724	5374
D (interleaver depth)	16	1
I (interleaver block size in bytes)	167	127
N (RS codeword size)	167	254
Delay (msec)	0	0
INP (DMT symbol)	49.00	0.00
OH Frames	0	95347764
OH Frame Errors	136	326
RS Words	2822439744	4002836233
RS Correctable Errors	126995	44935
RS Uncorrectable Errors	0	0
HEC Errors	0	0
OCD Errors	0	0
LCD Errors	0	0
Total Cells	1510664872	0
Data Cells	3324204014	0
Bit Errors	0	0
Total ES	5	235
Total SES	2	2
Total UAS	0	0

Still using my Tenda Mesh for WiFi in bridged mode - but with the Billion router providing everything else. Nice because it has a decent DHCP server, DNS proxy and allows local static DNS entries so I can split-brain my Nginx virtual appliance for nextcloud etc. and avoid tromboning that traffic.

Line Syncs at 66999/19999 and speedtest now reporting nicely and consistently:

Speedtest by Ookla

Server: SWS Broadband - Shrewsbury (id = 41923)
ISP: BT
Latency: 13.68 ms (0.20 ms jitter)
Download: 50.28 Mbps (data used: 64.4 MB )
Upload: 16.65 Mbps (data used: 8.7 MB )
Packet Loss: 0.0%

speeds are under reporting because there's at least 1 TV streaming netflix ATM - plus I have an online game running and all the other random stuff going on - but as you can see  latency,  jitter and packet loss are all.

I don't know why this suddenly became a problem - but I can see one or two others complaining of packet loss and jitter issues since around the same time as I did. 

Anyway - problem solved for me - if it helps you then great