This might be useful to other trying to track down the cause of gradual speed loss, and perhaps someone might point out something that I haven't thought of.
BT Infinity Option 1 Hi Speed Fibre Broadband installed July 2012.
Initial speed estimate 25.5 Mb/s - Speed when installed 19 Mb/s
Repeated gradual speed loss and BT remote resets
Five visits by BT Openreach to find cause. All BT cable from cabinet to house tests passed with minimal faults found.
Latest visit of 6-Feb-2013
BT Openreach engineers visited and placed a REIN detector antenna next to everything with a power supply.
My Canon MX870 printer has a “built in” power supply and was generating interference when plugged in, even if not actually switched on. The R.E.I.N. detector generated mid to low frequency noise when it found the interference.
We unplugged the printer and the remote BT person the engineer was on the phone to said that the line was now showing no faults, thus indicating that there is a high possibility that the printer power supply was at fault.
The Canon MX870 printer will be left unplugged for a week or two to see if the speed remains constant, and if it does, they say it is almost certainly the cause of the fault.
The only other possibility that they identified on this visit was a power supply to a NeoSafe USB external USB hard drive which was causing the REIN detector give out a much higher frequency sound than the printer did, so they don’t expect that to be the cause but unplugged it just in case.
Tracking the fault by a process of elimination has been made more difficult by the fact that I have a slightly complicated home office network.
Broadband comes into a BT HomeHub3 and out into a high speed Dell PowerConnect 2716 network switch (set to default unmanaged).
The switch then distributes network connection & internet via Ethernet cable to:
Dell desktop computer
HPMicroServer where all my files are stored
Canon MX870 multi function printer
Western Digital backup device
Sky HD box
PlayStation3 (to stream music and photographs)
Dell Laptop in docking station.
I have also counted at least 9 other separate power supplies to various chargers, speakers, phones etc, all of which must be emitting some RF interference