Title says it all really. I pay for an 8 mbps Office 8000 Business connection, which I rather hoped would mean favourable contention ratios and solid speeds. During the evenings I get around 5 mbps but during the day my speeds drop to 1.5 mbps and the upstream speed drops to around 50 kbps, instead of the 74 kbps I get in the evening. As we run 4 PCs and 3 Voip phones from the home office, I am now suffering call drops and poor quality calls as well as a pretty cruddy internet experience. After complaining to Zen support a couple of months ago and then performing various tests for them, I was informed that the performance of my line and service weren't bad enough to warrant further investigation.

I suppose my question is this -  is anyone else suffering from similar problems, or are Zen throttling peoples connections back because of a lack of bandwidth during peak times in the working day?

I'm pretty hacked off with the whole Zen experience so far and am seriously considering migrating to another provider as Zen didn't seem at all interested in fixing whatever the fault is. Any feedback welcomed.

 

Can't say I've had any problems. My speed is more consistent at about 4Mb/s. This is about as good as I can expect given the distance from the exchange.

I had practically the same problem not that long ago, it turned out to be a BT problem and nothing that Zen had control over, I know it can be VERY annoying and I called zen a couple of times, but all their tests and whatnot showed my profile as still 7150.

I can only assume that BT were doing work on my exchange and had to cut back on some of their spare bandwidth until the work was done, lots of BT exchanges are having work done on them atm due to the huge upgrade to the 21CN network.

After 1 month the line went back to normal without Zen doing anything.

 

Zen DONT, throttle traffic, traffic shape, block ports etc, you pay for an exclusive service that only one or 2 other expensive isps provide, so your low speeds isnt due to zen throttling your internet, if anything its BT doing it or you have a genuinely bad line aka fault on your line.

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

Well the chances of me getting any sense from BT are practically nil, based on experience, so it looks like I'm stuck paying for a premium service whilst getting a poor one.  Speeds this morning are yo-yoing between 2.5 and 5 meg down while upstream its 20-30 kbps, which as far as my business phones are concerned is dire.

 These problems have been going on for more than a month, but I don't see how I can get BT to look into things as whenever tests are performed, no fault apparently exists. I find the fact that Zen can't/won't do anything about this problem perplexing, but I suppose its more effort than its worth, as far as they are concerned.

If you do the speedtests on the BT speedtester website, if you speeds are below a certain threshold BT will accept it as a fault.

Thats all Zen will probably tell you to do anyway, goto the bt speedtester website, test numerous times aday for a few days and see if your speeds fall below the fault threshold, if they dont and your profile is still set to what it was previously, then chances are you will have to wait for A, bt to upgrade your exchange to deal with contention if that is the problem or B, if BT are doing work to upgrade to 21CN then once thats done your line should go back to normal.

If you went with any other isp that uses BT's network chances are your speeds would be exactly the same if its an exchange level problem, so changing isps, although you havent mentioned that, but if you were thinking of doing so, then it would probably suffer from the same problems and I would advise against it.

You could have an actual fault in your line somewhere ? get zen and bt to check for phone and broadband faults if you havent already done so and also replace your adsl filters with new ones if you have any spare as I have seen many of them give up for no reason.

Thats about it, I mean, unless zen can pinpoint a problem or unless BT can say that your phoneline has a fault which will also affect your internet, then their is little you can do except check everything at your end is working as it should.

It took nearly 2 months for my line to go back to normal, it was well over the 1 month mark but just under 2 before mines sorted itself out.

Bad internet drives me mad as the net has become part of our everyday lives, and when something happens to it it is really frustrating.

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

I've done all the speedtests, I've had the line checked by Zen and BT and I've had my house connections rewired with a new master socket. No filters as the system has been wired so that the filter on the master socket handles it all. Don't ask me how, my mate is a BT engineer and he assured me it was the best way to do it.I've had a new router (Zyxel 662 HW), new cables, and god alone knows what else.

My speeds vary throughout the day, with the afternoon (3 till 4.30 roughly)  being the worst. I'm thoroughly fed up of this now, as it isn't a recent issue. I was originally with Nildram for years, their speeds were superb (7 meg down 800k up)  with very low pings, but we had so much trouble with the phones that I went to Entanet. That seemed to cure the VOIP phone problems, but thats where my bandwidth problems started (this was around December of last year). I dumped Entanet to go with Zen and the problems persist. I'm tempted to go back to Nildram, but I could end up with *** speeds AND poor VOIP quality.

BT always say that there is no problem with the line, even though Nildram at one point did pick up an intermittent fault. After a week or so though, they changed their mind and said that the line was fine. I can't help feeling that there IS a fault in the system somewhere but no-one wants to do anything about it.

No-one in support wish to comment? I'd love to know why its acceptable that a business broadband connection which I'm paying for and which is rated at 8 meg down and 800k up can deliver as little as 1.2 mbps down and 200k up  and not warrant investigation.

I've been having similar issues, I'm on Zen's 8000 Active, and have had a rock solid connection at 2.8Mbps for the past few years, up until April this year, since then it's been up and down more than a yoyo!

I now seem to get a max d/l speed of 1.2Mbps, which has peaked for 4 days last week at 2.3Mbps, and back down again this week, My router (Cisco 837) tells me my sync is currenty 3552Kbps, BT's Speedtester again tellls me my BRAS is 2500k, and the test gives me 1.9Mbps, yet general usage of the internet be it web browsing; ftp; email; vpn etc, is absolutely diabolical!

I've had calls to Zen, who have been their usual highly competent selves, they've tested everything they can and can't find a problem anywhere, though they do admit my throughput is very bad. For the past 2 weeks I have been monitoring the phone line via BT's quiet line test, this is fine, no line problems.

I have some customers who are running via the same BT exchange as myself, and they are all noticing varying throughput speeds (i.e slow). Some of these customers are with Zen, others are with BT; O2; Talk Talk.

Zen Support checked when my exchange was modified for 21CN, and that was at the end of March.

My diagnosis of this whole scenario, is that BT are purposely feeding less bandwidth through ADSLv1 on 21CN enabled exchanges while they test 21CN. Getting them to admit this, I can bet will be impossible, but I have been logging my broadband speeds on my Thinkbroadband account since 2007, and they clearly show that since the end of March my "rock solid" Zen connection is now close to a pathetic connection.

As for what I'm going to do about it, I'm not sure yet, but what I do know is I am not moving away from Zen, they are superb, and the problems I'm experiencing now like many others it appears, are in my opinion all down to BT and their rollout of 21CN.

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Mark - Rossendale I.T.
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http://www.rossendale-it.co.uk

Well in a strange way I'm glad you're having similar issues, as it seems to point to BT being the source of the problems. Lets hope that it gets sorted fairly quickly, but I hasten to add that this poor-speed-in-the-afternoons issue is not a recent occurrence. This has been going on for some months, but given BT's level of competence I suppose we shouldn't be surprised.

I had a very slow service this afternoon. Speedtests showed an overall throughput around half of the usual. My line sync speed is the same as ever, so there's no local line issue. HTTP was slow - also NNTP - so it doesn't look like protocol selective throttling.

I am not on a 21CN exchange - so it's not that. The curious bit is that traceroutes to various sites showed no more than the usual response times, and pings to various machines show OK. Back to normal this evening, and pings etc show no change from the afternoon.

I don't think Zen are at fault here - I'd put my money firmly on the BT core network as the source of the problem. But getting them to admit it ......

 

Hi

Can you post your routerstats to see what is going on .

the link below might be of help to get stats ,also lots of valuable information.

 http://www.kitz.co.uk/adsl/frogstats.php

quote:  upstream speed drops to around 50 kbps, instead of the 74 kbps

is 74Kbps (Kilobits/sec ) your usual ? upload speed .  Or is that a typo?

btw this afternoon it seems that there was some event in wimbledon that caused some internet slowdowns 

regards Jeff

Ahh - streaming video. That could well be the cause of this.

QOS (Quality Of Service) enabled video streams hogging the bandwidth over the core network, perhaps ?

There is also the small matter that BT has been agitating about the disproportionate network load (in their view) imposed by  TV on the Net. A general slow down during peak TV viewing events might be seen by some in the company as supporting their case ?

 

 

Rossendale I.T.:

I've been having similar issues, I'm on Zen's 8000 Active, and have had a rock solid connection at 2.8Mbps for the past few years, up until April this year, since then it's been up and down more than a yoyo!

I now seem to get a max d/l speed of 1.2Mbps, which has peaked for 4 days last week at 2.3Mbps, and back down again this week, My router (Cisco 837) tells me my sync is currenty 3552Kbps, BT's Speedtester again tellls me my BRAS is 2500k, and the test gives me 1.9Mbps, yet general usage of the internet be it web browsing; ftp; email; vpn etc, is absolutely diabolical!

I've had calls to Zen, who have been their usual highly competent selves, they've tested everything they can and can't find a problem anywhere, though they do admit my throughput is very bad. For the past 2 weeks I have been monitoring the phone line via BT's quiet line test, this is fine, no line problems.

I have some customers who are running via the same BT exchange as myself, and they are all noticing varying throughput speeds (i.e slow). Some of these customers are with Zen, others are with BT; O2; Talk Talk.

Zen Support checked when my exchange was modified for 21CN, and that was at the end of March.

My diagnosis of this whole scenario, is that BT are purposely feeding less bandwidth through ADSLv1 on 21CN enabled exchanges while they test 21CN. Getting them to admit this, I can bet will be impossible, but I have been logging my broadband speeds on my Thinkbroadband account since 2007, and they clearly show that since the end of March my "rock solid" Zen connection is now close to a pathetic connection.

As for what I'm going to do about it, I'm not sure yet, but what I do know is I am not moving away from Zen, they are superb, and the problems I'm experiencing now like many others it appears, are in my opinion all down to BT and their rollout of 21CN.

 

Thats what I was thinking when suddenly my stable 8meg which is capable of maxing out at anytime day or night suddenly dropped to just over 1400kbps down compared to 6800kbps down at the begining of the year, and that lasted for 2 months give or take and that was right about the time that 21CN was marked down as being implemented at my exchange.
But the implementation date seemed to shift to further on this year so that samknows site said, so I dont know when my line was playing up if 21CN actually did get enabled ? because sams had one date that would concur with my line acting up, then my line fixed itself and then sams changed their 21CN implementation date for my exchange to later this year, so I only presumed that BT were messing about with bandwidth at the exchange level and although slowed everyone down, it didnt breach the fault threshold, because on the premium products anything lower than 1200kbps is classed as a fault, I never got lower than 1400kbps.

So I still have no idea.

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

Would I see any difference if I dumped BT and went with Talk Talk or Tiscali for my phone and broadband package? I'm really confused about the way the phone system works (or doesn't) in this country and any advice regarding options right now would be most welcome. It seems to me that getting away from BT completely might eliminate the problems I've been having. A friend of mine has his phone and broadband from Tiscali and he says his speeds are rock steady and hasn't any problems at all.

 The main reason I haven't gone with Talk Talk or Tiscali till now, is that their gaming pings in the past have been pretty poor, and I play a lot of online shooters etc..

jeffbb:

Hi

Can you post your routerstats to see what is going on .

the link below might be of help to get stats ,also lots of valuable information.

 http://www.kitz.co.uk/adsl/frogstats.php

quote:  upstream speed drops to around 50 kbps, instead of the 74 kbps

is 74Kbps (Kilobits/sec ) your usual ? upload speed .  Or is that a typo?

btw this afternoon it seems that there was some event in wimbledon that caused some internet slowdowns 

regards Jeff

Sorry, I meant 500 kbps and 740 kbps. Hope that is clearer.

 

Are these the figures you're looking for?

noise margin upstream: 14 db
output power downstream: 19 db
attenuation upstream: 14 db

noise margin downstream: 11 db
output power upstream: 12 db
attenuation downstream: 27 db

DSL

Up

5760 kbps / 832 kbps