TW Blog :: Archives for January 2009

BT Broadband Very Slow Bandwidth

Relates to Blogging

When trying to download a large file from a client yesterday afternoon I couldn't help but get impatient at the slow bandwidth and shockingly poor internet connection I was getting. In fact it was so slow that the download speed was rarely exceeding 10Kbps (that is bits not bytes)! A disgraceful level of performance from my BT Total Broadband upto 8Mbps. Now everyone knows the spiel these ISPs dish out about their upto claims but I had previously been reaching speeds of 3Mbps and the hub software had always shown my connection to be 3,520 Kbps. When I hoped over to the hub (at http://192.168.1.254) I was appalled to see the downstream speed now being reported at 1024Kbps! What is going on with BT service - do they just arbitrarily cap users service or something…

Fortunately I have been forgiven the anguish of dealing with an inept and robotic support team over the telephone since a reboot of the hub has restored the reported speed to 3Mbps and I am getting accepatable download speeds once again. Not sure what this says about service capping on an IP basis and exactly what information BT are extracting and storing from our web usage.

But, before you waste your breath (and money) try a reset - just switch the hub off and back on again. It worked for me!

Posted on Tuesday, Jan 27, 2009 at 12:44:26.