Phil Long:

Has the speed recovered at any point during the past 48 hours, or has it remained consistently low since reducing yesterday?

 Hi Phil,

The speed did recover a little late last night, but only to around 2200kb/s and the pings back to normal, then dropped again this morning at around 9:30 and back to 500ms pings.

Maybe it is the Olympics, but the problem only started for me yesterday...

 

Hi,

Seems the Athletics are the big driver of viewers of streaming content at the moment - they began on Friday, but the really popular stuff began yesterday.

regards,
Phil.

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Phil Long
Performance and Process Improvement Manager - Zen Internet Ltd.

Speed staring to climb now that main events are over

So the exchange can handle a certain number of users, and at any one time about 45% of those users are using it, so they add more users, UNTIL a major event brings us all online  and the network hits 150%. Is that how it works?

I wouldn't mind just the slower speeds, but mine starts at say 230kbps and drops overtime to nothing, often not finishing the file I was downloading. I'm being throttled on single thread downloads also, I can use all of my networks speed if I open up multiple downloads, but I only want one file that is 2.7gb, after a few attempts I have given up.

OK, something happened 20 minutes ago, suddenly it all burst back into life again and I had the highest speed I ever recorded on speedtest.net (7012 kbps) and 5 further tests in the last 10 minutes averaged 6742 kbps. It's just like somebody switched the internet back on again!!! Hope it lasts

 BT Speedtest reported this:

Your DSL connection rate: 8128 kbps(DOWN-STREAM),  448 kbps(UP-STREAM)
    IP profile for your line is - 7150 kbps
    Actual IP throughput achieved during the test was - 6398 kbps

A lot better than its been for the last 2 days!

 

yup, back to normal here also, hitting around the 7k mark on speedtests, thank f00k the olympics is only once every 4 years :)

Download Speed: 6963 kbps (870.4 KB/sec )   Upload Speed: 693 kbps (86.6 KB/sec )

I cant complain, just cant wait til either the Olympics are over or if it isnt caused by people going online to watch the Olympics then I just hope BT finish what they are doing sharpish, cause it has to be one or the other.

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I Just Dropped In To See What Condition My Condition Was In.

An hour or so ago I got several 3.5mbs results on speedtest.net (still way below what it should be) but now it's back to naff all again - 500, 1500, 1200 etc.

It's been like that for two weeks, up and down like a prozzie's knickers. Sick of it -  given up hope.

I switched my modem off for 30 minutes and now my speeds appear to be back to normal.

Something odd has definitely gone on today. I'm not convinced that the peak demand this afternoon due to the Olympics would necessarily be any greater than at the weekend or yesterday. Especially by a factor of 10

Stuart 

 

 

This morning my connection is back to it's normal 5760mbps download speed from 0.45 yesterday afternoon. This does make you think that if the Olympic games in China can have such a "devastating" effect on broadband speeds in the UK then what use would one of our main modern communication  systems be in a national emergency?

 

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Ken

My cheap Zen 8000 Active connection has never dropped below its sync limit (4500kbit, 470kB/s) at any time of the day during the last few weeks. I live in a fairly busy residential area in greater London.

Just sayin', in case people get the idea this is a network-wide thing.

Strokes router lovingly, using Fixed 2 Meg service that never slows down at any time of the day/year.

Well not so far anyway.

Today has been even worse than before. Testing the download rate from Zen host test files (http://fuller.zen.co.uk/test/), it`s jumping from 50kb/s to 90kb/s.

Can you clarify where this prioritisation of traffic happens ? Within the local exchange or BT`s central pipe`s ? Surely being on office max I get higher prioritised than others. But still my speeds at the moment arel lower than 1200kbps stated as the minimum for Max Premium.

 If this continues I might aswell transfer over to another provider which offers an unlimited service who does traffic shape during peak times since there would be no difference apart from the monthly fee.
 

 

The prioritisation occurs over BT's network - and at Virtual Path level.  Under normal circumstances you would see a difference, but due to the extensive use of iPlayer for live streaming there is an exceptionally high amount of usage all occurring at exactly the same time - i.e. during the athletics events and particularly finals (and events with British competitors).  Users on the IPStream Max service will likely be seeing significantly lower speeds than you - as you will still be receiving a higher priority than them.

kind regards,

Phil Long 

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Phil Long
Performance and Process Improvement Manager - Zen Internet Ltd.

Way I see it is, everyone is in the same boat, whats the point of complaining about it, it only happens once every 4 years and by monday or by the middle to end of next week everything will probably be back to normal or thereabouts.

Roll on Monday is what I say 

 

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I Just Dropped In To See What Condition My Condition Was In.

Indeed Phil many of my ex colelagues in other ISP's are seeing similar spikes due to Olympics within the BT VP's.

Interesting report here today also http://www.ispreview.co.uk/news/EkEAkFulupLZINQjDG.html

Gary

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"The Internet is a global collection of single points of failure"