Speeds.

[Bob Williams]

When I cancelled Sky and moved to Plusnet, PN gave me (in writing) a promised 13.2 Mbps Download speed. Initially I received 6.5 Mbps, which eventually vaccillated between 7 and around 10 Mbps. 2 engineer visits from Openreach came up with no solution, so they made an offer. I had already paid upfront for 12 months’ Line Rental and 2 months’ BB payments, so they offered me a full refund and cancellation with no penalties, or carry on with them and pay only £13 a month for BB. That was a healthy reduction, and I could not find any other supplier who could approach that price. We are at the end of a long FTTC line, which means we cannot get anything better.

Or so I believed. Lately there has been a burst of activity in the outskirts of the village, as several new homes have been built, are being built, or are planned. These are all expensive homes and Openreach engineers have been observed installing thin black Fibre cable in various spots.

At the start of service in October ’17, it was fine:

By December:

April ’18:                  Today:           

I carry out regular speedtests, every few days. Between tests, speeds yo-yo’d like mad. Lately, though, they have become stable at around 12.30 to 12.40Mbps, which is only slightly below the promised 13.2Mbps back at the start of PN service. For what was almost a 50% price reduction, I’ll take that. For 18 months, or until they decide to increase it. Not often I win one, but this counts as a win I think.

When the Thought Police arrive at your door, think -
I'm out.

[D-Dan]

I guess you are somewhat rural. I have BT Infinity, and would not taunt you with my speeds, but in a rural area, 12Mbs is not bad (given that the governments promised improvements have failed to materialise, and it seems you have to rely on the upper crust moving in to the area to get improvement, instead).

Having said that, despite the speed I get, I doubt in practice it’s all that noticeable other than perhaps wget or git downloads.

Arch Linux, on a Ryzen 7 1800X, 32 GB, 5 (yes -5) HDs inc 5 SSDs, 4 RPi 3Bs + 1 RPi 4B - one as an NFS server with two more drives, PiHole (shut yours), Plex server, cloud server, and other random Pi stuff. Nice CoolerMaster case, 2 x NV GTX 1070 8GB, and a whopping 32" AOC 1440P monitor.

[Bob Williams]

Yes Dan, I am rural: East Lindsey, Lincolnshire, but just 2½ miles down the A157 from Louth. When the government gave BT the Rural Broadband initiative, they chose our village as one of the first to get it. Turns out it was the only one to get it: my son and daughter live just 6 miles further down the A157 from us and they get ADSL at miserable speeds. About 8 miles down the same road is Mablethorpe and they have FTTC – even FTTP in places, it came down the Coast Road from Grimsby as another project, the Lincolnshire Coastal Broadband Initiative.

Louth began to cable up to FTTC and FTTP by BT Openreach, when BT learned that Virgin was coming down the A16 from Grimsby. Virgin have now almost taken the whole town, having created months of conditions in an old Georgian town, like the trench warfare of WWI. I spoke to a Virgin engineer in Louth about 6 months ago, who checked my postcode and informed me that they would be in our village and moving down the A157, within 18 months. Bring it on, the competition is what is needed here. BT have suddenly woken up to the fact that Virgin are on their heels, a lot of expensive housing is going into the village, and are visiting our cabinet. The initial fitting of a “Superfast” cabinet, at least a mile down the road from us, was cabled up to a couple of hamlets of very expensive houses. Then around the rear of our village, back into the far end of the village, into underground cable and then copper. That’s why we get lower speeds than the wealthy people in the hamlets.

BT do not have a clue. How long can they hold their monopoly?

When the Thought Police arrive at your door, think -
I'm out.

[Tippon]

We’re relatively ‘rural’ here (almost a metropolis for Wales 😉 ). BT and their associated line checkers all told us that we could get 26mb+ fibre, but we later found out that they measured the distance to the cabinet in a straight line, rather than where they laid the cable…

Spot the built up areas 😛

[The Duke]

12meg isn’t a bad speed at all. As long as your ping is half decent too, 12meg should be more than enough to play 3 HD Netflix videos before it slows Down.

Ive always said 20meg is all any normal  homes really need atm.

Ive have 80 (get 76), and once I dropped down to 40,and never noticed the drop. The only reason I went back up is because the 40 meg deal come with 1meg up and not the 10meg that the sales guy thought it did (in his defence TT had just changed the 40/10 to 40/1. So I went back to 80/20. 1 up just isn’t enough

To make you feel better bob, my MiL can only get 3meg down on a good day. Last week I was downloading here maps for her, which was about 1gb. In the end I tethered her phone to mine and used my 4g, which is 20meg at her house. As I couldn’t be bothered waiting around for the 2 hours it was predicting it would take. Over 4g it took about 2 mins.

I told her to complain to TT, as I think she must have a fault somewhere. But she won’t.

[D-Dan]

TT seem to do a lot of heavy marketing, though personally I can place no faith in them. I’m with BT directly, and whilst they get a lot of bad press, I can honestly say that (even across three different addresses) they have always got there.

I do hanker for Virgin to turn up with their 200Mb/s or whatever they’re offering now, but if I’m honest, until the underlying infrastructure of the net catches up,I still don’t see how the difference between 12MB/s and 200MB/s would be that noticeable for day to day usage.

Arch Linux, on a Ryzen 7 1800X, 32 GB, 5 (yes -5) HDs inc 5 SSDs, 4 RPi 3Bs + 1 RPi 4B - one as an NFS server with two more drives, PiHole (shut yours), Plex server, cloud server, and other random Pi stuff. Nice CoolerMaster case, 2 x NV GTX 1070 8GB, and a whopping 32" AOC 1440P monitor.

[Bob Williams]

Ryan, I once visited Tredegar with an Army mate on 3 weeks’ leave: we visited his home for a week, went back to mine for a week, then on to Venlo camping site on the Dutch/German border. I had a great time once we got over the Welsh/English thing, mostly after mate (can’t recall first name) Morgan informed them that I was of Welsh descent, although North Welsh, which it seemed, was not counted as significantly Welsh. We were posted away shortly after that and i lost touch, learned that he had left the Army. This would have been around early ’65.

Steve, I am not really complaining, 12Mbps is fine for my purposes and my Ping is usually very low: grandson tells me that anything below 60 is OK and I am usually well below that. I am happy that I get almost what Plusnet initially promised, for much less than the original price.

Dan, my grandson in Louth has Plusnet Business Broadband, paid for by his company. He gets 80 down, 40 up and runs a system that has a Server Rack in the next room, cooled by a large water cooled setup of his own design. He carries out a lot of work from home and in September is spending time at Lincoln Uni on a Microsoft course, also paid for by his company. Apparently he will be the first engineer in the UK to attend this course, don’t ask me what it entails: all I know is that it has some bearing on Network Security, but more involved than current stuff. He almost gave me a headache trying to explain it to me. Siemens have built this new campus at Lincoln Uni: they have done a lot of work in Lincolnshire.

See what we could have lost and may still lose, Brexiteers? Hate to start another pogrom, but I voted Remain because of jobs for the young.

When the Thought Police arrive at your door, think -
I'm out.

[Ed P]

I personally hope we get another referendum, at least people will know WHAT they are going to get and not some ‘ Bulldozer laying’ Bojo git’s broken promises. Then if that says Brexit – so be it, I still won’t like it but I’d not continue carping about broken promises, or saying ‘told you so’ when Eire/Ulster is used as a soft unpoliced border for economic migrants.

[Bob Williams]

The problem with another Referendum, Ed, is that the same politicians and fellow-travelers will be telling us the same half-truths and feeding us inflated ‘statistics’ from both sides of the issue. Some of course will have been forced into changing sides, as a result of their words and actions since the vote came out. The PM is one: a fervent Remainer, altered her stance to remain as PM and currently butting heads with EU leaders as I write this.

Ireland is just another club for the EU to beat the UK with. Barnier is a joke and the perfect Brussels bureaucrat, positioned and instructed by Paris and Berlin to blockade any and every UK move. Migration is becoming the EU’s own blockade, and an issue that Brussels, Paris and Berlin all want to go away, whilst other EU member states are demanding action to resolve the mess created by Merkel, who is battling her own support in the Bundestag to stay in power. They are now proposing detention centres and resettlement of migrants, by offering Turkey and other countries €millions to build and fill these centres, but the plans are all just that atm: plans, pies in the sky. Another “ignore it and it will go away” scheme.

The future does not look good for either a UK outside the EU, but does the future of the EU look any better? I think not.

Apropos the old curse: we re living in Interesting Times. Our descendants may look back and curse these times.

When the Thought Police arrive at your door, think -
I'm out.

[Les.]

Getting back to speeds, mine varies tremendously here. I just did a test, latency 141ms, D/L 8.4Mb/s, U/L nil

Repeat, 142, 10.6 and 0.37Mb/s. That is typical. Quite often it will not register any U/L speed. Frequently my PC loses its connection to router, I click the “off” button, then the “on” button, and it reconnects. The other night I was just about to go to bed when I noticed the bottom indicator (internet) on the router was red. I decided to leave it until morning to see if it reconnected. No reconnection, so I did a 10sec wait and re-boot, and normal (not very) service was resumed.

Some time ago I changed the router for a spare that MT had given me when I complained previously, but it got no better nor any worse. Page loading is very slow, unsurprisingly.

Every so often I get a shout from Tamara saying her connection is terrible. Not sure what I should do.

Les.

[Dave Rice]

This may be of interest Les https://www.broadbandspeedchecker.co.uk/isp-directory/Isle-of-Man.html

[Wheels-Of-Fire]

Ed

We voted out of the EU get over it

[Les.]

The MT average of 12 down and 0.3 up would be OK if it was all the time.

My location, Kirk Michael is not shown on that map.

The fact that I frequently get a 0 for upload says something amiss. I have been confused by many disconnects (for which I initially rebooted router), then realising it was between my PC and router, but also from Tamara’s PC to router added to the uncertainty, followed by last week’s router to MT drop out. If I reboot the router, the printer looses connection, but I can now get that back by putting my router password back in at the printer. Just to make things difficult, one router re-boot lost me the scanning function of the HP 8500A printer/scanner, which refuses to reconnect. That is not helped by the fact there does not appear a scanner in Mint’s “hardware” section. Not much hair left, but steadily tearing it out. I should just go out for a ride on one of the ‘bikes!

C’est la vie!

Les.

[Ed P]

Wheels-Of-Fire wrote:

Ed We voted out of the EU get over it

The country was lied to and voted on a lie. So no, I’ll not get over it.

[Wheels-Of-Fire]

Ed

We were lied to in the 70’s

Ment to be the EEC not the EU

And how can anyone not know what they were voting on after that leflet our gov sent out ?

I got a stamp and sent it back

 

[Ed P]

Wheels I could reply but it will get too far off topic, and into deep politics.

[Dave Rice]

Les, the symptoms sound like a dodgy router. That’s not to say your broadband is something wonderful though.

Perfect weather for a ride.

[Wheels-Of-Fire]

<p style=”text-align: left;”>Sorry you are right Ed ?</p>
I may post elsewhere though ?

[Bob Williams]

Wheels-Of-Fire wrote:

<p style=”text-align: left;”>Sorry you are right Ed ?</p> I may post elsewhere though ?

Yes please do WoF: preferably in another Forum. I apologise to all Forumites for bringing this contentious issue back up, a dumb move on my part.

Please remember that everyone is entitled to their own POV: that’s another facet of democracy, or at least it should be.

When the Thought Police arrive at your door, think -
I'm out.

[The Duke]

Let’s keep brexit out of the thread. It’s been flogged to death and it ends in the same stale mate every time.

I’ll delete any pro or negative brexit posts. Unless they are relevant to the thread.

Whatever happens will happen, us bickering won’t change that.

[Author]

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