FTTC Low Bandwidth on Long-term Connection

[#1]

I have had FTTC for I would think around 8 years. This was installed by BT with very good bandwidth. (I was one of the first on this newly installed cabinet.) The cabinet is around 100 metres from me or as the BT engineer put it "just around the corner. When measured this had a download speed of 69 meg. Over a few years this reduced to around 66. In recent months I have seen what maybe bandwidth issues so decided to measure the bandwidth several times over several days at various times of the day, evening and night using both the BT Wholesale tester and MyBroadband tester. The other day I was getting just between 53 an 54 meg download results and earlier today between 48 and 49 meg. uploads are currently between 14 and 15 meg.
I have tested using a Fire HD tablet less than 300 metres from the router as well as a wired computer running Linux. The only thing connected to the Internet at the test time was the device being undertaking the test. I usually use Firefox but used Vivaldi and Brave with the wired test to make sure that FF extensions weren't effecting the results. I also had VPN disabled
The router being used for around 12 months or so is an Asus DSL-AC55U with the latest firmware. I have also rebooted it during some of these tests to ensure no issues there.
Today's latest resul from cable connected computer.
BT Wholesale: ping 15ms Download 52.2Mbps Upload 15.63 Mbps
My jBroadband Speed: ping 15ms Download 53.2 Mbps Upload 15.7 Mbps

[#2]

That should read less than 300 mm not 300 metres between the Fire HD and the router, though I assume most will have guessed that.  It is still poor when even on my account page it states expected 67 Mbps download bandwidth.

[#3]

Hi @Total_Chaos, can you send me a PM with your username please so I can have a look into it for you? - Adam

[#4]

Hi Adam,
Eventually as I had not had any response here or to a Twitter PM I spoke to Mark in Support earlier He has checked it and said there's a definite issue and is contacting OR. He said he will email me with any updates or if OR need to visit me.
It's a long time since I've been in touch with Support and the phone was answered almost immediately. I don't know if I was lucky but over the years I've got used to it taking 20-30 minutes at least and I have given up when the wait time was 45 minutes or longer. I miss those times when you could log support issues on the website. Though the community is good you do need to wait sometimes.
I

[#5]

Hi there,

I'm glad to see you had got straight through when ringing us! Sorry for how long we've taken to pick up your messages both here and via Twitter. We're incredibly busy on the Social Media/Forum department atm, but we're expanding the team so that should help with our response times soon once the new people are all trained up. 

[#6 · Accepted solution]

OR were here last Thursday the 1st. Interestingly the technician had all the stats on his phone going back weeks and could see that there were issues. Asked me about complete drops though I stated they were probably when I have restarted the router. The FTTC cabinet to me is officially 120 metres and was good at the cabinet, but by the time it reached the access duct about 30 metres from me it was poor. He tried to find an adjacent cable but there wasn't one available so used another pair, and that corrected the issue at the duct. However, he thought that the issue may reappear as there maybe an issue with the cable or what's it is laying against is causing the issue. Though the master socket was installed at the same time that OR installed the FTTC he said it was old as it had BT Openreach on it and replaced with a 5C and Mk4 faceplate, probably to ensure no issues there in the future. Far less expensive than a return visit. And the end result was good download and upload bandwidth. Well done PN for getting it sorted promptly.

[#7]

Glad to see the engineer's efforts have sorted this!

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