Fibre broadband suddenly very slow & intermittent

[#1]

I am suddenly experiencing super slow download speeds on fibre broadband. Seems intermittent, whilst mostly very slow < 2mbs it occasionally jumps back to full speed for a short time. 

Has been doing this for a few days. Nothing obvious - have checked all physical connections, rebooted router etc (BT homehub).

Any ideas on what else to check. Have attached image of the bt speed test.

thanks

[#2]

@haynesy Looking at that BTW speed test, something hit me straight away - the ping time of 702ms is horrendous. However, that doesn't help to determine the issue.

For Community members to be able to help, information from this site:-

BT Broadband(obscuring your phone number) , and sight of the Help Desk tab would be a start.

It may also be a good idea to report the results of a Quiet Line Test - dial 17070 option 2 from a (preferably corded) phone. After the confirmation of you phone number, there should be total silence apart from the regular 'Quiet Line Test' announcement. Any other noise - report a PHONE fault first.

[#3]

So this is a result of that test - image attached. 

I tried the Quiet Line Test too - and couldn't hear any noise on the line at all.

How do i see the help desk tab btw?

many thanks!

Ian

[#4]

Hi Ian.

Thanks for that. What speed do you usually get, out of interest?

For the Help Desk , log into your Hub (I am assuming you are using a PN Hub1) and this picture should help - if it doesn't - shout. 😉

[#5]

Normally get ~ 50 Mbps download speeds. To complicate things I upgraded to a BT Home Hub - so not using the PN Hub1. Upgraded to that a while ago with no problems,

[#6]

OK - sadly I'm not familiar with that Hub, but that screenshot leaves me asking a couple more questions. You only have ~6 hours uptime on there, presumably you don't switch the hub off at any time? If not, does it have any activity log, in case that gives us any further information? You are connected at 58.36Mb/s which should give you an actual speed a little higher than 50, but in the absence of detail of your SNR figures and attenuation, it is difficult to gauge exactly where your problem may lie.

Don't suppose you still have the Hub1 - a poor performer it may be, but at least it gives useful information all on one page. 🙂

[#7]

Not got the original Hub1 unfourtunatly. I managed to get an activity log from the BT HUB - see attached. 

I turned it off and on again earlier in the day - would that account for the 6 hrs uptime I wonder?

Never normally turn the router off - unless its being rebooted.

Ian

[#8]

You turning it off and on would account (possibly) for the short uptime, although if I am reading that rather confusing log correctly, you have been losing PPP connection more than once - we really need PN staff help here - ideally with a Radius log and checks only they can provide.

No need to provide a screenshot, but can you do another speed test and see what you get - I don't expect miracles, but you current connection looks OK.

[#9]

Many thanks for your time & input. Got a PN engineer booked in for Tuesday to take look. Hoping it might magically fix itself before then!!

[#10]

Let us know how it goes - I'm (slightly 😉 ) intrigued. And it will be a BT/OR engineer, not PN.

[#11]

So after removing all the leads from the router and putting them back in it seemed that as soon as one particular computer was plugged into the router the speeds plummitted. Removing it and everything fine. Turns out it was the backup uploading a load of enormous files to google drive that was hogging the bandwidth! I never imagined that would be able to hog so much of the network. Have throttled the google drive backup speed and all is good once again..

[#12]

Good to know it is sorted, @haynesy . Backups, especially to places like Google Drive, don't play nice with your bandwidth, and don't announce that they want to hog all your space.