Zen Internet Support Forum

This is the situation.

1. Upgraded to Office 8000 Max about a month ago (20:1 ratio)

2. Downloaded around 300GB in that month

3. Have had a steady sync of 6400+ (ip profile in line with this this) for the period and as now

4. Last couple of weeks I`ve seen the speed during the day  (7am onwards) reduce to around 150-200kb/s when using 1 thread. If I use a multithreaded downloader I will max out the connection.

5. Evening, usually around 7pm+ (sometimes later) that 1 thread download will be able to get to full speed (640kb/s)

6. This occurs on everything from rapidshare, privately owned server (fr), etc.

7. I hosted a 100mb test file the same server for other people to download during these slow times. All managed to pull their full speed from it. (ISP`s : Be, Virgin)

8. Tested this from other computers within the house aswell as trying an old router but still the speeds remain slow.

9. Local Exchange show`s green status from 07 Jul 08 to 4 Aug 08.

This has all started since moving over to Office since I`ve never experienced this on Home 8000 which has a much larger contention ratio. It could well be coincidence that this is happening but for the rate I`m paying per month for this line I`d like to go down every avenue to know what is causing it. Could well be contention on the local exchange but it seems to be ok with green status. Suspicion is pointed towards the single thread download only getting to 200kb but when multithreads used on the same file it can pull 640kb/s.

( I know Zen have a policy of no limiting or shaping traffic within their network but taking into account the price they charge for bandwidth compared to the price of the office package, 300GB in that month may well be making them a loss.)


 

 

 


 

Zen do not do any speed restricting at all.

We are seeing more speed faults than usual at present due to exchange contention - most likely due to increased traffic as people enjoy viewing the Olympics online. The BT speed tester itself is being more problematic than usual - which is most likely indicative of customers of numerous ISPs seeing slower speeds at present. BT's VP status indicators are typically a couple of weeks out-of-date - so given the duration of the Olympic covering it's unlikely to be of any help in determining the contention status at your exchange.

Please note - there is no 20:1 ratio on the Office products - that was scrapped around 18 months ago.  Instead BT perform traffic prioritisation - so while the minimum speed on the IPStream Max services on a 2272kbps sync or above is 600kbps, on IPStream Max Premium services the minimum speed is 1200kbps at 2272 kbps sync or above.  

regards,

Phil. 

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

I have been seeing bad contention during the day.

Schools on holiday

Wet weather

Kids indoors on the net

Saturday connection to Zen went down for an hour and when it came up the system was and is much faster so assume BT have done an exchange upgrade although my exchange was also green.

 

 

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Ken

Zen Active 8000

By the time a family pays off the mortgage for a home in the suburbs, the home isn't home,and the suburbs aren't suburbs.

Hi Ken,

Actually what your describing has 100% nothing to do with Zen. This is a BT symptom, in fact I had a similar experience recently too. This is as you say BT making some kind of changes at local phone exchange level and the effect is to re-set the BRAS profile of the users DSL line. Mine jumped up to 7.616Megs which I've never had before, it lasted a about a week before dropping back down into the mid 6meg area again. And I suspect the same will happen with your connection. The higher down link won't be sustained long term sadly.

Ivan

cyteck:

Hi Ken,

Actually what your describing has 100% nothing to do with Zen. This is a BT symptom, in fact I had a similar experience recently too. This is as you say BT making some kind of changes at local phone exchange level and the effect is to re-set the BRAS profile of the users DSL line. Mine jumped up to 7.616Megs which I've never had before, it lasted a about a week before dropping back down into the mid 6meg area again. And I suspect the same will happen with your connection. The higher down link won't be sustained long term sadly.

Ivan

I never said it did have anything to do with Zen Ivan

I limit the sync speed of my router anyway as if I don't the thing always connects at 8128 but then falls over late at night when the snr falls to 5db. This caused my Bras profile to go down.

By Limiting the minimum snr of my 585 to 10db my router connects at about 6850 but my download speed is 1mbps faster.

Daft but that's Max for you.

I have a very nice Vigor 2600 which I loved but had to change because it did not allow me to limit the snr so became a stand bye for the cheaper 585 V5

 

 

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Ken

Zen Active 8000

By the time a family pays off the mortgage for a home in the suburbs, the home isn't home,and the suburbs aren't suburbs.

My connection as now slowed from 5700mbps this morning to 0.400mbps.

Will be happy when all those kids go back to school where they belong or we get some sun so that they get out and play instead of using all the bandwidth 

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Ken

Zen Active 8000

By the time a family pays off the mortgage for a home in the suburbs, the home isn't home,and the suburbs aren't suburbs.

This morning the Broadband Max speed tests were 566 kbps, 516 kbps and 556  kbps

I then tried the BT speed tester (which actually worked - the first time in two days) and it read 855 kbps. Totally dismal but amazingly enough above the 600kbs limit that would have allowed me to phone in a fault (of course it's pure coincidence that the BT test always records over 600kbps and all the others frequently report under)

And the status of my exchange as of last week (after the problems started) is GREEN. Green my ass. What does it take for it to become red? Obliteration by meteorite? Nuclear holocaust?

Phil,

Thanks for your reply in this post, however my speed drop only started yesterday at around 11:30 am, its like somebody flicked a switch and it went into go-slow!

For the last 2 years I have had a solid connection and speedtest.net reports around 6500kb/s whatever time of the day I run the test, with pings at <50ms (Interleaved) I know I'm lucky but I live <100m from the exchange.

Yesterday at 11:30 I ran the speedtest several times and it had dropped to <600kb/s and pings sometimes >500ms, today I'm getting around 1100kb/s and still some pings >500ms. As I said, its like somebody flicked a switch at 11:30am yesterday. Please can I have my speed back

Edit: BT Speedtest reports:

Test1 comprises of Best Effort Test: -provides background information.
    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 - 1342 kbps

Actual reported before on this test was always around 6700kbps

 

Hi there,

The timing does co-incide with what we see as the busiest time on our network - I suspect a lot of people are catching up with the Olympics at lunch times at work.  Whether what we see is typical of usage across all ISPs I can't tell you - in our case most of our users are businesses. 

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

regards,
Phil.
 

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

I've noticed my speed getting slower and slower for about a week now.

Did the BT speed test today (ensuring no other applications were using bandwidth), and got 522 Kbps, which is awful...  I normally get around the 5,000 Kbps mark.  I can understand that you're going to get greater contention when the kids are on school holidays, but I've been with Zen for 3 years now, and I've not noticed my broadband speed slowing by a factor of 10 during the school holidays before.

I've reported a fault to the technical support team, who are now forwarding the problem to BT (God help us!)...

The tech guy that I spoke to looked at the results from the BT Speed tests, and he said that he could see that there were a lot of people with apparent contention issues on looking at the results from the tests, and not from any one particular geographic area.

Looks like we're in the hands of BT

We'll soon be back to narrowband speeds at this rate!

 

tommo999:

I've reported a fault to the technical support team, who are now forwarding the problem to BT

 

Lucky you ;) I can't get round the bit of code in the BT Speed Tester that says

if speedResult<600 then

 speedResult=600+random(200)

 

My average speed for the past few minutes browsing sites such as National Lottery and About pages was... 13K/s

Looks like were all in the same boat hasn't happened to me till this week probably because we are winning more gold's my traces have gone berserk so I'm trying different gateways to see if it improves as it did when this happened before, maybe I'm fighting a losing battle me thinks, got on gamiel now and pings and traces are better was on gauthier traces were timing out and ping was 117ms

I just ran a speed test and I am getting a magic 650kbps download, even my upload speed is faster than that, I sync at 8128, i get normally anything from 850 minimum to 900 Kbytes not bits download which is my line maxed out, but all of a sudden I am getting 1/2mbit ( half ) speeds and I pay the guts of £100 a month for this.

This has to be because of the olympics or bt arsing about at the exchange because normally all my speed tests before were always in the 6900-7000kbps range and for me to suddenly get just 1 tenth of that speed is crazy.

The kids in Scotland went back to school today so I cannot blame contention issues on them and since I am on an office product I should be getting traffic prioritisation at this time of day, so I cannot understand WTF is happening but I dont like paying loads to only get 1 tenth of my previous speeds, ok granted it may not and probably isnt anything to do with zen, I am quite positive about that, but it sure is a sickener at any rate and if office products are guaranteed a minimum of 1200kbps then why is it I am only getting 650kbps or thereabouts ?.

even this site is uber slow lately compared to its usual lightning fast response times.

 

rant over

 

My line speed has also dropped by 1/10 th today and has stayed like it.

Another person in my village reports download speed of 5.0 Mb/s through the same exchange and at a greater distance (with BT Internet)

Confused? Is BT prioritising their own traffic? 

Stuart 

Hi,

It's not as simple as contention being exchange-wide.  BT Wholesale will operate a number of paths from each exchange (Virtual Paths, or VPs) - with a number of users on each.  It can be the case that one VP in an exchange is contended (due to individual user habits) while others are not - and they may experience the contention at different times of day, again down to individual habits.

regards,
Phil.

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