What Speed Checker should I believe?

[Alan_in_Hemel]

I upgraded to Full Fibre last Friday and the Openreach engineer logged onto www.fast.com and demonstrated I was getting 900Mbps.  Later that day out of curiosity I checked again and it was only showing 400Mbps. I decided to stick with it and let the installation settle down. On Monday afternoon I was watching a programme on iPlayer on my TV and found myself staring at a circling wheel periodically.  I never experienced that with the old copper cable. I joined the BT Technical Chat  and they ran a number of tests and suggested I use the BT speed checker: https://speedtest.btwholesale.com/details  This gave the same results in the 400's. Then they got me to restart the Hub and Fibre box, still no improvement. They then suggested using Ookla: https://www.speedtest.net/ but similar results came back. Then they said they would do a factory reset of my hub remotely, they managed to cut me off in the process. The results afterwards were also poor. 

All tests are on PC's connected by Ethernet to the hub as is my TV.  They were conducted while I was home alone and at off peak periods.

Messing around with the three tests today on three different computers revealed varying results none of which were at the level I should be getting. Then Ookla suggested I download their checker free of charge to my PC. This I did, ran it and a speed of 960Mbps came up. Further tests show the same results.

So who do I believe and why would BT recommend a speed checker that would show their Full Fibre in a bad light? What would they gain from this? Any advice appreciated.

[NeilO]

Hi, @Alan_in_Hemel the only speed test that our customer support teams should be recommending is the test within the MyBT app as that measures the network speed that your hub is receiving.

Thanks

Neil

[Alan_in_Hemel]

The Speed Checker in the My BT App on my iPhone does not work. It just tells me it has failed and I should restart my hub, I have done that five times. I cannot find a Speed Checker on the My BT website and I have searched all the help topics. Am I missing soemthing?

[VeteranISPUser · Accepted solution]

Hi @Alan_in_Hemel   Have you deleted and reinstalled the My BT App? Without doubt, it is the best speed checker because it isolates your local network and gives you a speed to your hub. Are you using a Smart Hub 2. Is the iPhone IOS 17.0.2 or 17.1.

[iniltous]

900Mb or 400Mb is massively more bandwidth than required to watch a video on demand, at HD resolution 5-6 Mb , UHD -25Mb , so if you are getting buffering it’s not going to be because you are ‘only’ getting 400Mb , the reason for that must be something else.

[Alan_in_Hemel]

Thanks, that has sorted it and my speed is showing as 949Mbps. Quite why BT Technical Help Chat sent me down a cul-de-sac is a question for another day.

[Alan_in_Hemel]

Thanks, I will look into that one further.

[Alan_in_Hemel]

So having slept on this there is a re-occurring theme here with BT.

1. Why do their products give misleading error messages?

I have had this issue with BT before and sent down rabbit holes I did not want to go down. Why did the speed checker not tell me to try restarting the Hub and if that failed reinstall the App. That would have solved my issues straight away. 

1. Why is the BT Help so unhelpful?

Many times, I have used BT Help to end up with no solution and a lot of wasted time. Do they not employ people who know what they are doing! I wrote very clearly on the chat that the BT App Speed Checker was repeatedly failing but no one suggested re-installing it. Instead, they got me to try various on-line speed checkers that just showed their product in a bad light. Why would they do that?

I should have come to this forum first as it seems to be the only place to get solid advice on BT products and services.  I have little confidence left in BT itself.