Home Hub throughput dips and freezes (Hub is 1 year old)

[hashida]

Hi all!

So my partner and I work from home 80% of the time. She requires a constant VOIP connection, I require a high upload/download throughput. I work in game development so I'm uploading/downloading multiple versions of a game and 4k recordings of gameplay all day long, totalling a couple 100GB a week.

Everything worked great for the first year, but now, the amount of data being transferred will just hit 0. If I'm not in the middle of a big upload/download, it'll come back up in ~10-15 seconds. 
Everything is wired, so it's not wifi dropping out. The blue light stays on solid on the Home Hub and it also effects internal LAN interactions.

Obvisouly my partners VOIP calls will drop, which isn't good.

Now, if I am in the middle of a big transfer (either FTP, SVN or Dropbox) and I don't pause the transfer during one of those brief dropouts, the Home Hub will not reconnect, it completely freezes. If I leave it 60 seconds or more, all connected hardware will drop their connections. The light will stay blue but there's no network activity at all and I can't even connect to it via it's IP. I have to do a hard reset.

If I pause my transfer during the dropout, it's do the 10-15 seconds dip and then be OK.

My first assumption is overheating and that's why it's only becoming an issue after 12 months but does anyone have any other suggestions?

Thanks in advance!

[Keith_Beddoe]

@hashida 

Welcome to this user forum for BT Retail phone and broadband customers.

As you only have a residential account, you do not have a dedicated line.

Speed will vary as you are sharing a 2.5Gb fibre connection with 31 other users, so you will only get the full speed if less customers are using their connection. I expect that more users have now been added to the PON (Passive Optical Network), so your connection would have deteriorated.

BT Business customers get a much better grade of service, so that may be an option you should look at, as residential accounts are for entertainment usage only. Its not really suitable for what you are using it for.

[hashida]

Hi, thanks for the reply.

That doesn't really make any sense though.

My speed external is a constant 900mb.

This dropping out is effecting my internal LAN too which has absolutely nothing to do with other customers on BT's nextwork.

[Keith_Beddoe]

No, your connection speed does not reflect the throughput on the network. You can have a fast connection, but low throughput due to contention on the backhaul network.

A quick test may show a good speed, but a sustained connection is likely to slow down as you will be allocated a portion of the available bandwidth.

Also bear in mind, your download throughput is going to drop if you are saturating your upload path, as TCP acknowledgements will be delayed. 

VOIP needs upload bandwidth, so that will also suffer, so maybe restricting your upload speed may improve VOIP quality.

[hashida]

@Keith_Beddoe 

Thanks again but that doesn’t explain why, if I unplug the router from the WAN during one of these dips, I can’t transfer over LAN from PC to console.

The Home Hub should still manage local network traffic without any WAN connection.

[Keith_Beddoe]

Not sure about the operation of the home hub, perhaps another forum member who has FTTP can help. Perhaps you are expecting too much from a cheap consumer quality router?

You could try a separate Ethernet switch to link your network together, and just connect one port to the home hub LAN.

Provided you do not use BT Digital Voice, you may consider trying a third party router connected to the ONT instead, as other forum members have done.

This is just a customer to customer help forum, everyone here, including myself, are just customers.
The only BT Employees are the forum moderators.

[hashida]

Yeah, that’s pretty much what I was looking to confirm before I invested £300 in one.

I was wondering if a new home hub was worth trying first though or if I’m really just asking to much of the poor little thing 😂

I did have a decent router when I was with virgin. Never dropped once in 6 years but when moved to BT for fibre and I plugged it into the ONT, it wasn’t not happy. It’s software based PPPoE and runs about 1/5th of what it should.

New router time then?

[Keith_Beddoe]

@hashida 

Have you tried a full factory reset of the home hub, as that clears out any old routing info?

Press the recessed reset button for about 20 seconds, and the hub should then do a full factory reset.