Very slow broadband

Cottage_Economy

Can anyone help me brainstorm some ideas as to why my broadband speed may be so slow.

At the beginning of September hubby and I were able to watch an hour iplayer documentary from beginning to end with no buffering. Fast foward to today and we can't watch more than 10 seconds at a time without buffering. I should add we are not big users of streaming media or online games so I would be very surprised if we had gone over our limit in September and been throttled in October for it.

At basic speed test shows our download speed fluctuates between 211-231kbps.

On Thursday we had an Openreach engineer in to reconnect our phoneline to the pole properly, as it had corroded so badly we couldn't hear anyone calling due to static. I spoke to him about it, he tested with his equipment from the socket and told us we had a speed of 6.5Mb coming in, then suggested we look at the equipment we are using before speaking to anyone at BT, as that is the first thing they will suggest.

So we've replaced the router and all the cables etc and plugged into the test socket we get....235kbps and that's through the test socket.

I've changed the channel several times in case it is interference on the router's channel and that's done nothing.

The only new thing we have that could cause interference is a wireless printer which we bought in August but that sits switched off for the majority of the time so I don't think it is that. There may be something on my neighbour's side of the wall but he's not around at the moment to ask.

I spoke to BT last night (a lovely lady based in the UK) because when I was trying to connect my new router I had no internet. She was going off shift a few minutes later, and advised me to wait an hour and then reboot the router and she would ring me back this morning to see how it went.

So I now have a connection, all new equipment but still very slow speeds.

Any ideas?

If it is the exchange it wouldn't be the first time. In March we were cut off for weeks because an engineer disconnected us while upgrading lines at the exchange and never reconnected us, but it took us weeks to prove this with BT and in the end had to get IT support from my firm to come in and sort BT out. An Indian call centre adviser was persistently insisting that an 18 month contract and a homehub would fix the problem and I couldn't get past the sales pitch without my techie friend's help.

EDITED TO ADD: PROBLEM SOLVED. It was BT. Our IP profile had been reduced for no apparent reason.

penrhyn

Log on to your router and post your full router line statistics.

Couple of questions
Who is your ISP?
What is the make and model of your router?
Do you have speed issues when connected via Ethernet?

Cottage_Economy

Hi Penryn

Sorry for deleting my post above but for some reason I didn't notice the Internet access board and realised this was the wrong board to post on.

Spoke to BT this morning - it transpires that I was speaking to somone in the priority care team and they have checked my profile and realised it is wrong. It is set very low and they are going to change it and get my speeds up, hopefully by Monday or Tuesday.

debitcardmayhem

penrhyn wrote: »

Log on to your router and post your full router line statistics.

Couple of questions
Who is your ISP?
What is the make and model of your router?
Do you have speed issues when connected via Ethernet?

Looks like you will have to find where it's gone to

Im_just_careful

I assume your figures are from the BT speed tester or Speedtest.net or similar.

It may sort itself out as it takes some days to reach a stable speed after a fault and the sort of fault which upset your phone will also impact broadband.

What are the two routers you have tried ?

Is the phone line as quiet as it was or do you still have noise ?

Who is your Internet provider ?

Cottage_Economy

Would it be helpful if I put my post back again?

I assumed as I was in the wrong place I wouldn't get a response and intended to move it, but now I'm thinking it might be useful to someone else having similar problems to see what I originally posted?

penrhyn

debitcardmayhem wrote: »

Looks like you will have to find where it's gone to

Some people are more difficult to help than others.

OP If you are still there do what you were advised!

agrinnall

Cottage_Economy wrote: »

Would it be helpful if I put my post back again?

I assumed as I was in the wrong place I wouldn't get a response and intended to move it, but now I'm thinking it might be useful to someone else having similar problems to see what I originally posted?

Yes, given that there are responses from posters who obviously saw what you asked that now don't make a lot of sense, it would seem like a good idea to re-edit your first post to put the question back in.

penrhyn

You have a techy problem and posted on the techy board, nowt wrong with that.
The internet access board tends, but not exclusively, to concentrate on best buys and stuff.

Cottage_Economy

Thanks all of your replies everyone. It's much appreciated.

I was really surprised at the speed this has been resolved after the 5 week fiasco in the spring, but I think part of it was a stroke of luck that I got through to the priority care team in the UK last night, who I assume were covering the phones for the broadband technical dept last night.

They don't run off script like the Indian call centre does and she was able to do whatever was necessary in whatever order she wanted to and get the problem solved.

Granted I did read up and tried different things to eliminate as many of the obvious possibles in a logical way before I rang them, but I know if I spoke to the Indian call centre they would have had me running through the whole thing all over again for an hour at a time like they did before.

Cottage_Economy

GUESS WHAT MY SPEED IS NOW!!!!!!

5441kbps

It's less than 45 minutes since I spoke to the UK team this morning. How fast was that resolved!

I'm such a happy camper - a letter will be winging it's way to the chief exec of BT praising the Priority Care team for the speed at which they sorted the problem.