Customers connected to nearly 50% of BT exchanges in the country could be suffering very poor speeds due to capacity on the exchange network being at an all time low. The Customer Support Centre have been noticing an unusual number of faults being returned as rejected from BT over the last few weeks, so we did some digging! BT will reject a fault if it's a speed fault and the customer is on a congested exchange. Exchange status information is publicly accessible and can be searched on various websites including our own Usertools site (http://usertools.plus.net/exchanges). The database feeding Usertools was updated last week, and it was noted that nearly 50% of exchanges are RED for capacity. This can result in poor speeds at off-peak time, and even more so at peak times, and means that the BT exchange is under-capacity. This is something that could affect all customers on the exchange, regardless of who their ISP is. My own exchange in Sheffield is currently on Red status, and has been for some time. BT keep pushing back the date to upgrade capacity - but I do hope they do it sometime soon! It can result in peak-time performance for an 8Mb connection being around 400kbps for me, and there's nothing I, nor my ISP (us), can do about it. This graph shows the impact of the issues over the last few weeks : 
So, next time you're getting slow speeds at random or peak times - do check your exchange status at http://usertools.plus.net/exchanges before raising a fault to us!
Nearly 50% of BT Exchanges at RED for capacity!