Renewal Speeds

[#1]

There are similar threads in the past. Approaching end of contract the speed Plusnet now guarentee is a lame 20mbps (it was 21 a couple of weeks ago), last renewal it was 31. Curiously in the summer I was getting a solid 38, then it fell to 31, then 26. This happens every year once wet weather sets in, I'm only just outside the M25 on an estate but the infrastructure from the cabinet is 60 years old now and I suspect the length of buried cable from box to pole gets wet, in other words OpenReach aren't maintaining the system. When BT fibre first came along my speed was always in the 40's. Seems we keep paying more (increase of RPI plus) for a reducing quality of service. Perhaps it is time to consider the 100 mbps from the Virgin cable outside the door, my father with BT in a remote Cotswold village gets 65 and the performance difference between him and me is astounding.

[#2]

Moderators Note
This topic has been moved from ADSL Broadband to Fibre Broadband.

[#3]

@SurreyAlan 

Maybe it’s time to accept that it’s not worth renewing cable on cranky obsolete infrastructure. The future is fibre, wireless or cable. 
Embrace the future technology if it’s available to you, you can’t ignore it for ever.

[#4]

You could be right, new people moving in either go for Virgin (the vans turn up) or the newest are using EE wireless though I doubt that's any better than copper as 4G signal not amazing here. I've had the engineers in a few times and speed improves for a while but I've lived here so long I know the problem is rain so either the short length of cable from box to pole or the ancient connections at the top of the poles, heavy rain the speed drops, improves after a period of dry. Think I might go on the knock and check what speeds everyone else gets and their provider, also people the other side of the box as OpenReach did replace a length of underground cable last year. It's curious that some providers reckon they'll give you an amazing speed over the same bit of copper which I doubt though last time the engineer did mention the speed the line was capable of but said it was capped at what I paid for (or what the ISP allow me to have?).

[#5]

@SurreyAlan 

Up to the limit of the service for which you pay, that's 40 or 80 Mbps there is no restriction on speed imposed by Plusnet.

Other ISPs might promise faster speeds but in truth unless you go for cable or FTTP the speed will be determined by exactly the same cable between your premises and the local cabinet.

Some neighbours' cable might be in better condition than yours but unless you are failing to get the minimum guaranteed speed I doubt that you will  persuade Plusnet to ask, or Openreach to swap, you to a different pair of lines.

[#6]

Chatted to one neighbour, slightly further away from box than me and they get speeds in the 50's, with Vodafone but still OpenReach. I suspect their pole has a different underground cable back to the box than us. The problem for me is that all providers using OpenReach only offer whatever speed the line gives and zero interest in fixing the problem.

[#7]

Thanks for your post @SurreyAlan and welcome to our Community Forums.

I'm really sorry to see you're having speed issues.

I've tested your line today and the tests are definitely showing your download speed's below where we'd expect from looking at the broadband availability checker Here I can see the supplier estimated speed range is between 44mbps to 59.7mbps.

Our tests aren't showing a definitive cause for the speed drop, but I can see it's artificially restricted at 27.4mbps by the automated dynamic line management (or DLM for short) software at the cabinet, so I've arranged for your line to be reset now, which should go through within the next 3 working days & improve your speeds. 

If your speed doesn't increase to where we'd expect or there are further issues then I'd suggest we arrange an Openreach engineer visit with you to investigate further. I've created a support ticket on your account Here we'll use to monitor and provide an update as soon as we know more, but feel free to post back to let me know how it goes. 

[#8 · Accepted solution]

Many thanks for the reset, it's gone up to 38 again which is where it was all summer, I'd expect it to come back down to around the previously guarenteed speed of 31 and I was always happy with around that, even slightly lower but when the guarentee drops to 20 was when I seriously thought about Virgin. I see the renewal now offers a guarentee of 29 ish which I'm happy enough with so will renew.

I still think there are maintenance issues with the line as the speed always drops after heavy rain, I've lived here for over 35 years and have years of experience of this. A few years ago the OpenReach engineer replaced my internal socket and ran new cable to the connection with the overhead cable where it attaches to the property, the modem is straight into the socket and there are no telephone extensions so pretty certain it's nothing in my property that causes the drop. 

[#9]

Thanks for getting back to me @SurreyAlan and thanks for renewing!

I'm glad to see your speed's gone back up.

If you do have further issues, let me know and I can arrange an engineer with you to take a closer look.