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[tommy45]

Looks like they have really outdone their selves tonight  look at the lag on this 

No congestion on our network, really ?

[kitzuser87430]

Just to add a little more info.

My +net adsl was recently reset and was switched to fastpath at about 5PM



You can see the congestion/delays kick in at 8PM, but, if I was still on interleaving I would not have seen the problem at all.

The following day and again if my ping was <>40 ms the increase would not have been seen.



I think that some people complain too much about broadband problems; what do they expect for a few quid/month.

Ian

[tommy45]

Firstly the connection shown is FTTC 80/20 service and currently is interleaved  The base latency during the peak time was 3 times what it should of been,   congestion will still show the same level of increase  regardless of  interleave /fast path
and I pay a lot more than a few quid per month for it, infact some 2 thirds of what some smaller ISP's charge,
Also they advertise that the cheaper price,doesn't mean a compromise is the service they supply  maybe ASA  should be informed that this is incorrect ?
Oh and as to what i expect  for my money , As  the service i pay for is sold as a always on service, then i expect to be able to use that service when ever i want for what i want, and i expect congestion related issues like this to be resolved in a timely manner  3 mths isn't timely i wouldn't consider 3 weeks to be timely either , Then there is their lack of real support , i submitted a ticket some 8 days ago haven't heard a peep from them , a total joke imo

[c6em]

I beg to disagree
If you want full speed service 100% of the time buy a leased line - and my goodness will you pay for it.
If you want better/more timely support, change to somewhere like AAISP as your ISP - and yes you will pay for it.
If you want some sort of better service buy a business line - and again you pay more.

Plusnet is a bargain basement low cost ISP aimed at the lowest common denominator of the populous in getting in the ultra price sensitive punter by the ton-load with wheezes like 6 months cheap, cashback etc. Offerings of "unlimited" when they have not got the capacity to service 100% of the subscriber base 100% of the time. Also as evidenced by its advertising association in the past with Big Brother TV "show" - which shows the level they are aiming at.
The majority of their subscribers will be paying low costs prices, and UK broadband is already one one the cheapest in the world.
When Plusnet raised it prices by £1.5/month  a while back that was good for some 25 pages of outrage on TBB and plusnets forums with some claiming that BB prices were out of control - should give you an idea of the typical customer socio-economic demographic.
Everyone just wants cheap cheap cheap................

Broadband is no longer a techie product from niche ISP's with ever helpful experienced staff just waiting for your call to discuss the ins and out of some issue - this is mass market consumerised product for the "great unwashed". with so called useless call centers - set up precisely because most of the calls are from customers who are total *****.

Consumer grade broadband is not advertised as or ever intended to be 'on' and 'full' speed capable at all time.
Those advertising cheaper prices should expect to have more problems and issues than those advertising at the more expensive end.

The world does not revolve around what you want. If you don't like it then my advise is to leave them pronto.

[tommy45]

well the facts appear to be that some of the other mass market ISP's are not having peak time issues  BT retail customers aren't having these problems neither are TT  and thats saying something ,They really need to stop with their pathetic ads  which amount to lies as the service is clearly compromised because of their race to the bottom  which their networking clearly isn't able to sustain,  and these peak time issues  shouldn't be happening never mind being regarded as acceptable for what you pay  that is BS The service so matter what should be fit for purpose

[Chrysalis]

c6em and kitzuser with all due respect I disagree.

For a few reasons.

1 - the line rental has to be factored in, plusnet subsidise broadband via voice revenue.  The package price as a whole isnt that cheap.
2 - the current market expectation which started when BT retail removed their traffic management is that home broadband runs at full speed all the time, its as simple as that.
3 - your arguments where to not see congestion, 1:1 contention required is nonsense. yes its unreasonable for an isp to garuantuee no congestion, for that a 1:1 is required, however that is very different to expecting good performance "most" of the time, with occasions such as IOS updates congestion may occur.
4 - plusnet themselves have not came out and said our service will slow down at peak periods that is our stance, instead they are saying they have enough capacity and slowdowns are considered a fault.
5 - congestion tends to break things, e.g. if a 80mbit line pulls 40mbit on a speedtest, the assumption is that is still plenty for netflix etc. but it isnt that simple, even things with less than 40mbit of throughput will be affected and as such streaming services will usually break. not to mention gamers and the like who need clean latency will obviously be affected.
6 - business services from plusnet are just as affected.
7 - valid point on the support tho. although I think plusnet can do better, based on their competition. waiting a week for a ticket response is unacceptable at any pricepoint.

Seems some people just have very low standards and accept poor service, not all of us work that way.  Plusnet used to be better, there is no reason they cannot maintain their early 2014 performance.

I pay £38 month for my plusnet service, thats far from bargain basement.

[kitzuser87430]

Woops didn't mean to upset anybody.

My recent experience on my market 1 exchange, after leaving plusnet in 2010, I have spent the intervening years wondering around the adsl marketplace

vivacity,post office,zen, back to post office all with poor throughput during peak times.

It was resolved in Nov 2014 by returning to plusnet.

I can now stream in HD during peak times on my 5-6 Mbps adsl connection for a few quid/month (<£30 inc line rental and calls)

Ian

[jelv]

http://www.plus.net/support/broadband/speed_guide/broadband_speeds.shtml shows the speeds to be expected for various types of traffic at particular times on the current Unlimited accounts. There is a link to this page from the FAQs on the main sales pages. If they are not meeting that (e.g. speeds are always slower on a Monday evening) then they are guilty of miss-selling!

Perhaps someone needs to contact the ASA.

[Chrysalis]

not to mention congestion can be seen as a form of traffic management which the ASA dont allow on unlimited products.

[boost]

[Customer router]  1--->  [FTTC modem]  2--->  [FTTC MSAN]  3--->  [BT Layer 2 Switch]  4--->  [GEA Cablelink(s) into the...]  5--->  [21CN cloud via MSIL?]  6--->  [Host link(s) to CP Infrastructure]  7---> [CP transit to Internet] 8--->1  CP Return Paths to FTTC modem (presumably a reverse of the above but may jump onto CP owned backhaul at certain points to save moola?)

So where might congestion present?

1. The infamous 'customer domain' [Responsibility=Customer]
 a. Customer router/PC e.g. high processor usage = reduced throughput and erratic latency
 b. Intermittent/pervasive copper faults can look a lot like congestion and should be investigated before anything else. (A recent example is where a HG612 was running  over 90% CPU, presumably correcting FECs)
 c. Misconfigured PPPoE clients, possible blackholing of frames with MTU between 1492 and 1500? (Mentioned in a BT SIN somewhere)
 d. Loads of other stuff we can add later...


2. The TP/copper line/metallic path [Responsibility=Openreach]
 a. A copper line fault, disturber or interferer could fire up within the classic peak utilisation period; disruption akin to congestion in some cases, perhaps.


3. Uplinks from street cabinet MSAN to Exchange/Metro node [Responsibility=Openreach]
 a. MSAN uplinks to Exchange/Metro node oversubscribed? (Found documentation to suggest the Huawei 5600 supports 10GE uplinks but no proof these are actually used; do they take up a shelf that could otherwise be used for subscriber ports? Also no indication 10GE is supported on *all* FTTC MSANs... ECI? Information for this aspect of the network appears to be extremely thin, hopefully I've just overlooked it somewhere?)
 b. MSAN high processor usage contributing to erratic pings/reduced throughput. Software vectoring (which I just made up) or any other intensive calculation could contribute to it; this is ultimately congestion.
 c. MSAN not informing BRAS of correct synch speed, wrong policer applied... somewhere/everywhere?


4. Uplinks from L2S to CP handover/aggregator [Responsibility=CP & Openreach]
 a. GEA Cablelink is oversubcribed, CP needs to order more [Responsibility=CP]
 b. FTTC traffic unevenly distributed over Cablelinks? Worst case... no port aggregation and EUs are staticly assigned per port [Responsibility=Openreach]
 c. Some other scenario?


5. MSIL entry point at exchange/Metro node[Responsibility=CP]
 a. MSIL bursting above contracted bandwidth excess traffic policed either by BT on upper limit or CP on lower limit to avoid charges.
 b. Congestion within the bowels of 21CN (surely not?!)
 c. Others...?

6. MSIL exit point at core node / Host links to CP (gleaned from a comment on the PN forum) [Responsibility=CP/Wholesale]
 a. Poor traffic distribution across Host links back to CP [Responsibility=Wholesale]
 b. Poor traffic distribution across Host links back into 21CN [Responsibility=CP]
 c. Host link(s) generally congested/oversubcribed. Presumably 1 and 10Gb. The latter representing significant capex if not opex too? [Responsibility=CP]

7. CP transit to Internet [Responsibility=CP]
 a. The transit link
 b. The xconnect to get to the transit link

8. Return paths to FTTC modem

As you can tell, I am clutching at straws for some of this but it seems like we may all benefit from understanding this stuff a bit better?

Please offer a correction if you spot an error on this and I will update.
I think the CP handover has to happen at a core node, for example? One of 20~ in the UK? Plusnet have around 20 gateways... seems to fit?


My assumptions:
---------------------
I have found it extremely difficult to understand the BT nomenclature. I have almost zero practical experience of service provider networks so perhaps it's just me.

The MSIL/AP/EP riddle:

MSIL = "Multi Service Interconnect Link" = EVC Trunk? (Metro ethernet forum:An EVC is a conceptual service pipe within the service provider network.)
EP = "Extension Path" = Still not entirely sure. Possibly EFP/Ethernet Flow Point/Service Instance or some accounting instance
AP = "Aggregation Point" = Port+VRF on the BEA (An Aggregation Point (AP). The AP is a logical CP-specific virtual router, in which the CP’s
traffic is managed.)
I've been wondering if AP bandwidth is synonomous with traffic conform rate and the EP is the burst rate? I seem to have made up a few scenarios where they both fit can't be sure of any!

SVLAN = this word has spread like wildfire across various forums but noone seems to know what it specifically applies to. In my mind, this is simply a double tagging scenario. Inner (c) tag is customer, outer tag (s) is service provider/CP. With that in mind, it could apply to almost anywhere in the network, FMSAN to L2S, L2S to CP or elsewhere?

SVLAN upgrades? How one upgrades the outer tag on a frame I'm not sure. Surely the actual upgrade is better allocation to trunk ports? Perhaps this is implied in SVLAN but it's not obvious to me.



General thoughts which may help/hinder the above:
------------------------------------------------------------------
CPs can only order in 1Gb/s chunks from the FTTC (L2S) terminating switch:

From http://www.sinet.bt.com/sinet/SINs/pdf/498v6p0_C.pdf
1.3 GEA Cablelink
The GEA Cablelink product will be offered for the CP to order connectivity to the
L2S in the same Point of Handover building.
This will comprise:
• A 1 Gbit/s Ethernet port into the L2S. The Gigabit Ethernet interface will be
set to auto-negotiate, 1000Base-LX (SingleMode only); and
• Fibre connection from the port on the L2S to the location within the same
Point of Handover specified by the CP.

I've no idea which of the two below Plusnet use. Gut says they relieve as much responsibility from BT as possible and terminate their own PPP sessions?

WBC can be run in two customer handover modes from the AP:
• PPP Termination and Aggregation (PTA), whereby the End User PPP Session is terminated
on the WBC BRAS and Routed IP is used to handover the End User traffic to the CP;
• Layer 2 Tunnelling Protocol (L2TP) handover, whereby the End User PPP session is
tunnelled to a CP-owned L2TP Network Server (LNS) where the PPP session is terminated.

[jelv]

I'm seeing issues on a 20CN Max Premium connection. Here's my error counts from nearly 12 days up time:

Error Seconds (Local/Remote):   73 / -
FEC Errors (Up/Down):   0 / 0
CRC Errors (Up/Down):   51 / 76
HEC Errors (Up/Down):   - / 67

It isn't customer domain and it isn't TP/copper line/metallic path!

[boost]

I'm seeing issues on a 20CN Max Premium connection. Here's my error counts from nearly 12 days up time:

Error Seconds (Local/Remote):   73 / -
FEC Errors (Up/Down):   0 / 0
CRC Errors (Up/Down):   51 / 76
HEC Errors (Up/Down):   - / 67

It isn't customer domain and it isn't TP/copper line/metallic path!

I did have a quick look at this actually but couldn't make head or tail of it at the time. What I did manage to find out, is that Max Premium traffic should be marked as AF31 through the BT (Colossus?) network. Whether PN honour that with a similar marking, I've no idea. Did you mention what exchange you're on? Trace route to BBC yield any info?

[Chrysalis]

boost its agreed there is many parts within BTw where congestion can occur, but its still plusnet's job to investigate those things on behalf of the end user.  Plusnet seem only capable of checking the svlan status, I also dont think its right to mislead customers by telling them there is amber/red svlan's at their exchange but not mentioning the customer's actual svlan is not affected.

Luckily I havent seen congestion for some weeks now, there is a slight increase of latency at peak on my tbb, but by plusnet's standards thats very low and I have no affect on throughput.

[tommy45]

Also One point that i want to make on this which imo points at plusnet or their interconnects with BTWholesale, my point is that is that possibly lots of customers all from different geographic locations around the uk are experiencing the same underlying issues, but differing in severity i say this because it's happening in a simultaneous or near simultaneous manner the collection of plusnet customers  tbb ping graphs demonstrate this  i have some that i have copied to my pc , i can upload to a file host and post here if you want , as all are live in the collection so are continuously recording events, this evidence indicates this is not eu connection specific or down to their equipment inc PC , and as there is a distict lack of similar reports from customers with other isp's who use BTW WBMC in particular  customers of AAISP ,ZEN ,AQUISS ,ect If it was down to a general BTW issue, then all isp's would be affected by it, Again points to plusnet imo
Looks like yet another night of pish poor throughput and lag

 

[jelv]

My VPs have been checked:

Right. There are 8 VPs I can see at your exchange from the report on the 4th Feb.

5 AMBER, 1 GREEN and 2 BLUE.

You're on the GREEN one, so in the date range used to compile the report there was no capacity issues.

I'm going to ask someone more faulty than me to have a look and see what they suggest.

Chris Parr
Plusnet Customer Relations Team