topic I upgradaed to full fibre 900 and the speed is very inconsistent over Ethernet in Broadband & Landline

I upgradaed to full fibre 900 and the speed is very inconsistent over Ethernet

mrhuk — Sun, 15 Feb 2026 20:14:06 GMT

I had full fibre installed on the 3rd of Feb, and for the first week or so I was getting 930Mbps solid, but for the past few days it has been varying between 700-850Mbps. I know the "stay fast guarantee" is only 700Mbps, but losing at times 230Mbps doesn't seem right to me.

I've tried 3 different CAT8 cables, from 3 different brands (overkill, I know) and it's the same. The strange thing is I'm getting almost the same speed via wireless on my iPhone 16, whereas when it was originally installed Ethernet was about 200Mbps faster than wireless. I have installed the latest drivers for my network card, and disabled all energy saving features.

I had to unplug the ONT once and I'm wondering if that could have caused the drop? I know there's a line training period of about a week or so, and I hope I didn't hurt myself by having to unplug the ONT during that period. My line has been rock solid stable.

I've also been having an issue where it will say the Ethernet cable is not plugged in, when it is. So either the Ethernet port on my motherboard is failing, or it's a fault with the Pro router. I have a very high-end motherboard that's less than a year old, so I doubt it's that.

Re: I upgradaed to full fibre 900 and the speed is very inconsistent over Ethernet

JimM11 — Sun, 15 Feb 2026 21:24:38 GMT

@mrhuk There is virtually no line training period, you are on a FF Full Fibre connection, when you have NO connection on the pc check to see what the sync properties of the NIC is at, are you connecting at 2.5Gb/s with the nic to the Pro hub or 1Gb/s by default, the EE app or a fast.com speed test should show you the split to the Router and to the device?

The line is all shared so test a few times and at different periods off the day so you can see the average, and ideally with ONLY one device on the connection unless you are aware how good all your wireless devices are and not causing any background activity!

Re: I upgradaed to full fibre 900 and the speed is very inconsistent over Ethernet

mrhuk — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 17:37:18 GMT

Ah, the engineer said there was a training period. I haven't dropped connection since I made the post, but it's still not as fast as it was, again it's not slow, but dropping 100Mbps seems odd to me (that's more than my old connection, which was 80Mbps).

I've found Speedtest.net to be the most accurate, Fast.com is too fast so it never reaches its peak. I've tried testing in the morning, afternoon, evening and even at like 2-3am, and it's always the same. I've tried disabling wireless entirely from the hubs page and it made no difference to the Ethernet speed.

Re: I upgradaed to full fibre 900 and the speed is very inconsistent over Ethernet

JimM11 — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 17:59:19 GMT

@mrhuk Link up one off your test, here is a FF500 on a speedtest.net

https://www.speedtest.net/my-result/d/34b41020-ed0f-4e84-ab1e-03d979742afc

Re: I upgradaed to full fibre 900 and the speed is very inconsistent over Ethernet

JimM11 — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 18:01:32 GMT

@mrhuk Also for you from OR pubs!

1. FTTP is a contended service, up to 32 users can be sharing the 2.5Gb backhaul, so you can never expect the full speed all the time, you may get 900mb when there are fewer people using it. I expect that you are sharing the backhaul with many users. If everyone was using it fully, you may only get 78mbs. Its called statistical multiplexing, which relies on the fact that all users are not utilising their connection fully, all of the time.

BT quote up to 900mb, so you are likely to get much less than that during peak times.

Speed tests pass very little data, so normally give a much higher speed.

2. The max OR connect to a splitter is 30 ( 32 is the splitter maximum but policy is 30 ) not every CBT port provided is likely to have a customer using it , so unless on a ‘new site’ that has no alternatives to OR FTTP the actual number on a splitter is likely to be way less , OR currently have about a 30% take up, so maybe 10 users per splitter , plus the majority don’t take 900Mb but slower profiles , and the chances of those ‘on line ‘ at any one time all and doing something intensive, rather than browsing / Netflix that may be consuming less than 30-100Mb , is slim , that’s why there is a 700Mb minimum speed guarantee on 900Mb …..the 2.4Gb will be plenty ,you would have to be incredibly unlucky to have any consistent congestion.

If you suspect PON congestion, try at a time when there won’t be much activity, late evening or early morning .

Although you have tried somethings to ‘ isolate’ the problem , the most obvious thing to do ( that you haven’t apparently tried ) is use the BT router , without doing that , you haven’t really proved anything , your third party router may great , but even great routers can be mis configured or faulty

Re: I upgradaed to full fibre 900 and the speed is very inconsistent over Ethernet

mrhuk — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 20:41:04 GMT

I'm using the EE Pro router.

Re: I upgradaed to full fibre 900 and the speed is very inconsistent over Ethernet

JimM11 — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 20:59:47 GMT

@mrhuk In reference to what, the EE Pro is still on a FF900 feed delivered by OR to you?

Re: I upgradaed to full fibre 900 and the speed is very inconsistent over Ethernet

mrhuk — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 21:01:16 GMT

You said I'm using a 3rd party router, which I'm not, I'm using the EE Pro, which is what they give you.

Re: I upgradaed to full fibre 900 and the speed is very inconsistent over Ethernet

JimM11 — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 21:06:17 GMT

@mrhuk I never mentioned anything about any third party router! If it's all about the OR Pubs that is the complete document from them explaining 900Mb/s is NOT to be expected all off the time, you have NO idea what the uptake on your Fibre is like!

Re: I upgradaed to full fibre 900 and the speed is very inconsistent over Ethernet

mrhuk — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 21:13:58 GMT

@JimM11 wrote:

1. FTTP is a contended service, up to 32 users can be sharing the 2.5Gb backhaul, so you can never expect the full speed all the time, you may get 900mb when there are fewer people using it. I expect that you are sharing the backhaul with many users. If everyone was using it fully, you may only get 78mbs. Its called statistical multiplexing, which relies on the fact that all users are not utilising their connection fully, all of the time.
BT quote up to 900mb, so you are likely to get much less than that during peak times.
Speed tests pass very little data, so normally give a much higher speed.
2. The max OR connect to a splitter is 30 ( 32 is the splitter maximum but policy is 30 ) not every CBT port provided is likely to have a customer using it , so unless on a ‘new site’ that has no alternatives to OR FTTP the actual number on a splitter is likely to be way less , OR currently have about a 30% take up, so maybe 10 users per splitter , plus the majority don’t take 900Mb but slower profiles , and the chances of those ‘on line ‘ at any one time all and doing something intensive, rather than browsing / Netflix that may be consuming less than 30-100Mb , is slim , that’s why there is a 700Mb minimum speed guarantee on 900Mb …..the 2.4Gb will be plenty ,you would have to be incredibly unlucky to have any consistent congestion.
If you suspect PON congestion, try at a time when there won’t be much activity, late evening or early morning .

Although you have tried somethings to ‘ isolate’ the problem , the most obvious thing to do ( that you haven’t apparently tried ) is use the BT router , without doing that , you haven’t really proved anything , your third party router may great , but even great routers can be mis configured or faulty

???

Re: I upgradaed to full fibre 900 and the speed is very inconsistent over Ethernet

JimM11 — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 21:09:11 GMT

@mrhuk That is all an Openreach publication lock stock and two smoking barrel's....

Re: I upgradaed to full fibre 900 and the speed is very inconsistent over Ethernet

bobpullen — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 09:52:53 GMT

@mrhuk - have you tried running a speedtest using the EE App (found under the 'WiFi Controls'/'Broadband' section)? Does that return similar results?

Don't suppose you have the 'WiFi Optimiser' feature enabled in the App? If you do, have you tried running the 'Ping Optimiser' feature again?

Re: I upgradaed to full fibre 900 and the speed is very inconsistent over Ethernet

mrhuk — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 11:53:47 GMT

The speedtest on the app is much slower as that's wifi. I have wifi optimiser enabled for streaming as I use wireless for streaming on the Fire Stick in the bedroom. I ran ping optimiser again and it went from 6ms to 3ms. I mostly use the PC via Ethernet so that's my main concern, the wifi has been fine for what I use it for.

Re: I upgradaed to full fibre 900 and the speed is very inconsistent over Ethernet

JimM11 — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 12:05:20 GMT

@mrhuk The app speed test shows you TWO values, the speed to the ROUTER, and the speed to the DEVICES!

Re: I upgradaed to full fibre 900 and the speed is very inconsistent over Ethernet

XRaySpeX — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 12:20:14 GMT

That speedtest confirms your BB is running at 927 Meg, well above your 700 Meg guaranteed.

The app is running on a WiFi connected device & would be expected to be lower.

Try a speedtest, preferably wired using an Ethernet cable supplied with the router, here http://www.thinkbroadband.com/speedtest.html . Click on the "Results Page" button at the bottom of the graph you first see and then copy to here just the "Link to this result:" link that you see below the next main graph.

Re: I upgradaed to full fibre 900 and the speed is very inconsistent over Ethernet

frustrated28 — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 19:50:17 GMT

Same problem here and I've just spent some time troubleshooting it (I am a former network engineer). We have 900mbps fibre and WiFi works at full speed consistently, but the Ethernet connections will only perform at 80mbps to 90mbps no matter what. This includes the Ethernet ports on the BOTH the Smart Hub 7 Pro and (believe it or not) the WiFi Extender 7 Pro.

Tried different cables, plugging computers directly in to the Hub and Extender's Ethernet ports, etc etc. I even connected a couple of TP-Link mesh devices via the Hub's Ethernet.

The results were, under all conditions, that WiFi speeds maintained circa 900mbps and every Ethernet test only reached 80-90mbps. (there is also occasional Jitter on the Ethernet tests too)

Both are on the latest firmware (Feb 2026): r3.8.24-R-1531355-PROD-1

So it has to be a firmware bug causing the problem for both the Hub and Extender to develop the same problem at the same time. I will open a support ticket with EE and see how long it takes them to fix it!

Re: I upgradaed to full fibre 900 and the speed is very inconsistent over Ethernet

Leanne_T — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 09:19:38 GMT

Morning @frustrated28

Thanks for coming back to the community.

If you can get in touch with our broadband tech guides, they will run checks at our end to see what’s happening with the ethernet connection to see what is needed to get this resolved.

Let us know how you get on.

Leanne.

Re: I upgradaed to full fibre 900 and the speed is very inconsistent over Ethernet

JimM11 — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 13:01:12 GMT

@frustrated28 As your wan connection is up there at the 900Mb/s that is well good, so nothing wrong with the connection from your Hub/ONT that way, the lan is way different and should be no reason to be clamped down at the 100Mb/s sync speed on every connection Hub/Smart Wireless devices, and with multiple connections, could see that if you were using the same device for connecting with a bad cable or bad network profile on the device....

The 7 Pro did suffer slightly with the Ethernet connection so may be worth trying a Gigabyte switch buffer if you have one lying around to test with! Also reported earlier that the 2.5Gb/s ports were cable sensitive, never used so cannot comment with that!