I had been away for a couple of weeks, but when I got home on Sunday evening I noticed my BT broadband has become much more erratic. It is very variable, with download speed varying from 0.1 Mb/s to 7 Mb/s, and surprisingly upload varying too (this week I have recorded speeds between 0.4 and 4 Mb/s).
In part this must relate to the number of households on line as it is slower in the evening. So far, Tuesday afternoon and evening have been the worst, when it was at its slowest with repeated breaks in connection. It was for a while on Tuesday unusable. However, since starting with BT in April, I had previously had a very consistent service.
BT had increased the capacity in the Parwich exchange in April, and attempted to upgrade the service in June, though this failed and left at least one household without any broadband. Is this current blip just effecting BT customers?
I have no wish to go back to my experiences with AOL TalkTalk when I was getting a daily fluctuations in download between 7 Mb/s and 0.001 Mb/s. Was I wrong not to have gone with W3Z?
Peter T
Other Blog Team members report their broadband has slowed recently too. What has been your experience on the Parwich exchange recently? Do we need to contact the BT Press Office to ask for an explaination? Is this effecting only BT customers or are other suppliers involved too? Please let us know about your recent experiences.
I am with Plusnet, a subsidiary of BT. At some point over the last week, download speeds fell to below 2MB but this morning it is back to where it is usually is at 6.56MB. I am told by Plusnet that in a matter of weeks we will gets speeds approaching 20MB.
Great news that OpenReach are still working on the upgrade, but surely it is not beyond the wit of man or BT to warn customers of up coming service disruptions.
Our BT service has been unusable this week, very slow and intermittent.
We have been using W3Z and Vonage for the last couple of months for business while we run out our poor BT service contract. We are high usage (100GB) per month, W3Z is a consistent reliable service. Vonage is brilliant £16 per month for all our UK and international calls and a few hours included to mobile numbers, most worldwide destinations are covered.
Possible explanation is that the kids have broken up
I’ve just run tests with speedtest.net and broadbandspeedcheck.co.uk which gave me download speeds of 19.54Mbps and 20.16Mbps and upload speeds of 0.88Mbps and 0.77Mbps respectively. This is in line with the results I was getting a few weeks ago after the break in service. Earlier in the week it felt sluggish and I was experiencing a lot of failures moving data but didn’t run a speed test at the time.
Seeing this I have also run the tests. Normally our download was between 6 and 7 mbps but it is now between 16 and 17 mbps. We have never had this speed before! I wonder if it is too early to open the champagne?!
One tip we were given was to restart the router each day. This can stop sluggish connections. We ditched the BT Router for a better one and it has a setting so that it auto restarts at night when we aren’t using it. Might be of help to some people. 🙂
20 meg down thats eye wateringly slow
Our BT connection hasn’t been too bad this week, but since we moved here last July we have blips of erratic connection speeds. We are quite a way from the exchange (bottom of Creamery Lane) which doesn’t help I suppose, but with so many locals working from home and relying on the internet when will BT sort this out?
4.40pm and I am just getting download of 6.8 and upload of 1.8, so it may be worth waiting a bit before either complaining or getting out the champagne.
Solid 18 to 20 down and 0.8 bursting to 1.8 up on BT since the upgrade by Open reach with no service interruptions as far as I know.
Now 0.1 to 0 down and 4.6 up with BT, but varying a lot. Have tried rebooting my router, but makes no difference. (Added five minutes later – 6.8 down 1.9 up)
why not use W3z? constant speed of 20Mb/s! I think its great