Broadband Speed Miles Off Minimum Guaranteed

[TreborMint]

Hello There!

Does anyone have any advice for contacting ee in regards to my broadband speed being a long way off the minimum guaranteed? We commenced the service in our new rented home two weeks ago so have given plenty of time for everything to settle down but we are only getting between 18-20Mbps download against a minimum guarantee of 66.8Mpbs. Furthermore even now after the bedding in period the connection seems to drop / router restarts quite often.

Connection to the Smarthub is by ethernet, which is then in turn connected to the mastersocket. I think this is quite an old version, which has "ADSL v1.0" printed in the bottom right corner:

Next to this is  a smaller socket just for the phone. There is no connection from the front of the master socket to this. There are a lot of other sockets for phones around the house which appear to be fed from a splitter that plugs into the front of this additional phone only socket. No devices are plugged into any of the sockets around the property apart from the Smarthub into the master socket.

Our Smarthub stats are:

Our speedtest is on this link: https://www.thinkbroadband.com/speedtest/1623140660394579255

The BT availability for our property is:

Whilst the £5 off per month for not meeting the guaranteed speed would be welcome I would much rather be getting a quicker and more reliable service. Before I contact Customer Services any advice as to how best for me to encourage ee to improve the speeds rather than just offering me the money off would be much appreciated!

Many thanks for your help!

Rob

[TreborMint]

Thanks again for your replies!

This afternoon I connected the Smarthub to the filter supplied with it and then plugged it into the test socket like this:

Stats I just pulled are:

and speed test results are here: https://www.thinkbroadband.com/speedtest/1623184590130371555 

Still no improvement 😞

Any thoughts or final words of advice as to how to handle the call to customer service  so I end up getting an engineer to attend FOC and get it all fettled up to the 60Mbps with the minimum of hassle?

Again - thank you for your help! 🙂

[XRaySpeX]

As you have no live phone extension sockets you might as well remove those wires on the back of the faceplate, tape them  & bend them back. They could will act like aerials & inject noise into your line.

[IT-4BusyPeople]

>Still no improvement

However, it looks like you have confirmed it is the line that is underperforming.

I suspect the line is still attached to the ADSL cabinet and hasn't been linked to the newer FTTC cabinet that Fibre Plus requires.

Call EE Customer Services, preferably at a time when you have a hour or so spare as they will want to look at the line data from their end and may ask you to repeat some connection tests whilst they are monitoring the line.

Can't guarantee you won't get charged, but don't see how from the evidence you've given here EE would charge you.

[XRaySpeX]

@IT-4BusyPeople : Whilst 22.4 Meg downstream is just about possible for ADSL2+, 19 Meg upstream never is.

@TreborMint : To confirm you are on Fibre (FTTC), please post the Home / Status page's "Connection Type".

[TreborMint]

Thank you once again for the advice 🙏

Is this the info you mean? -

[XRaySpeX]

Yes, that confirms you are indeed on Fibre, not ADSL as @IT-4BusyPeople supposes.

[mikeliuk]

Providing a reference that ADSL2+ upstream tops out at 3.3 Mbps.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asymmetric_digital_subscriber_line

On the other hand, the upstream rate also rules out VDSL. And the numbers are pretty terrible for VDSL2.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/VDSL

Looks like there's a problem with at least the noise margin: https://help.keenetic.com/hc/en-us/articles/360015810899-VDSL-line-parameters

[XRaySpeX]

@TreborMint : Ignore that! There no problem with the NM. The standard target NM is 6 dB. Yours is just slightly above that. There is no value at all in that post. Somebody is foolishly believing every word they read on Google. 

[mikeliuk]

Agreed that it's within the parameters of a poor quality line. Edit: I believe the meaning of this is a little subtle, the cabinet is actually targeting 6 dB but in order to meet that, the link speed and measured bandwidths are poor. There are also references suggesting there is experimentation to target 3 dB instead for higher bandwidths (not applicable to this thread but may impact others).

The thing to watch for is whether there is much change during bad periods compared to good periods. It won't fluctuate as much as parameters for 4G mobile but I would be surprised if it doesn't change at all given the problems reported.

If all hardware, the physical link, and signal parameters check out, and the distance from the cabinet is considered, the only thing left would be a QoS cap erroneously applied to limit the bandwidth on the line (more likely on a switch-port somewhere).

The only hint of a QoS cap might be the suspicious evenness of the upstream vs downstream link and the VDSL2 max figures suggest downstream should be perhaps higher than the current difference.

Edit2: actually 7.7 dB noise margin down is even less of a concern (it may even settle to a possible lower target of 6 dB to give some increase in link speed and measured bandwidth down). Was reading the up number but there's probably less of a concern with upstream bandwidth performance.

Edit3: here's another example where the upstream link is something terrible: https://community.ee.co.uk/t5/Broadband-home-phone/can-ee-do-a-DLM-remote-reset/td-p/788117

Edit4: I see one reference https://community.plus.net/t5/Library/FTTC-DLM-What-it-is-How-it-works/ba-p/1322799 that profile changes are made overnight so 7 hours is far too early to come to any conclusions at all, potentially observations need to be made over multiple days up to a week to understand what is going on. I don't think anyone will claim that the situation is optimal as compared to the guaranteed bandwidth.

[XRaySpeX]

@mikeliuk : Nonsense, there is no subtlety about it. it is plumb wrong.

"The higher the noise margin, the better the line quality.".

It is quite the opposite. The higher the noise margin, the more noise & errors have been detected on the line necessitating increasing the noise margin to accommodate the noise with the consequent lowering of the sync speed.

This is a margin not the Signal to Noise Ratio itself where it is true to say the higher the better & faster.