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[tickmike]

Using a spare Linux laptop> Ethernet cable to the ONT> PPPoE Connection, Do speed tests over a 24hr period.

My package = 115/15 Business fixed IP.

I have never seen 115 download !.

I have seen more than 15 upload !.


Download has varied from some low 65Mbps to 88 (last week ) and after telling 'Trunk Networks' have improved to 101 / 103 & odd 106 but fairly constant through the day and night .

Upload has always been from 16Mbps to 18 (last week), and now 19 or 20 constant through the day and night.

Even at 2, 5 & 7 am the the speeds were 102/20Mbps, so does that rule out congestion in the exchange ?


With only a few people on our 'PONs' in our village I would have thought I would have seen the Full down and up speeds.

The only other neighbor down our lane with FTTP with 'Sky' gets the full down & up speeds on his package all the time.


I can think of three things that could be causing me some problems.


1..Remember that my 'M J Quinn' cowboy installer Never cleaned the fibre plugs before installing them has they should do.

2.. I have a unique situation were he fitted the Wrong Nokia ONT as the exchange OLT is a Huawei, so he should have fitted a Huawei ONT, The Nokia ONT had to reconfigured by the BT Openreach chap the cowboy installer had to phone up to make the Nokia ONT work with the Huawei OLT (he could tell he had done something wrong as the PON light was flashing on the ONT).

3. Has he made a bad Splice Joint ?.

I my eyes the anyone of the above 3 could affect the speeds.


Had no feedback from my email to BT Openreach CEO's office yet.

[burakkucat]

Using a spare Linux laptop> Ethernet cable to the ONT> . . .

Does the laptop computer have an Ethernet port capable of 1 Gbps? If the Ethernet port is only rated at 100 Mbps, then your tests with that laptop computer are invalid.

Is the Ethernet cable, used for the tests, of CAT5e specification?

[niemand]

No, you don't get full speed on FTTP.

Your wholesale product is 115/20. You lose overheads from that both on Ethernet framing and PPPoE. You will never see 115.

The other punter already has overheads baked into the product Sky sold them - they sell 129-150/23-25 over a 160/30 Openreach product, 470-515/58-60 over 550/75. They have fewer overheads, no PPPoE, and as noted have accounted for 10% overheads.

What you are seeing is about right. A bad install would cause packet loss.

[Alex Atkin UK]

I always assumed they were basically doing what Virgin do, they over-provision except in this case they are telling you that number whereas Virgin seem to tell you what they expect in real-world usage.

It was always an odd number 115 unless it was to basically provide 100 real-world, which presumably is EXACTLY the idea?

In fact, Zen do advertise FTTP in that way:

[j0hn]

I'm on 550/75 and get around 500/75.

The maximum you can expect on the 115Mb package would be roughly 108Mb.
The maximum I've seen on the downstream on OpenReach FTTP is around 94% of the provisioned downstream rate

It's common to slightly exceed the product limit on the upstream on OpenReach FTTP.

I received 149/31 on my BT 160/30

In fact, Zen do advertise FTTP in that way:

Pretty much everyone advertises their broadband like that now.

BT show similar packages as Zen (100, 500 and 900Mb) but BT provision their Fibre 100 as 160/30 and Zen do theirs as 120/20.

The headline rate needs to be some kind of average achieved by a certain percentage of customers (real world throughput).
I'm not 100% on the details.

[stevebrass]

BT Full Fibre 100 - 150 down, 30 up.

[Ixel]

With the overhead of PPPoE and then Ethernet it's not possible to fully get 1000/115. From what I recall, I can usually get around 90% of that at most.

[meritez]

With the overhead of PPPoE and then Ethernet it's not possible to fully get 1000/115. From what I recall, I can usually get around 90% of that at most.

Max I've seen is 940 down

BT Full Fibre 100 - 150 down, 30 up.

basically 94% as mentioned above

[tickmike]

Ok I see. 

Ethernet port capable of 1 Gbps? = yes
CAT5e specification = yes 

 The latest speeds seem a lot better, With 'Fast.com' speed tester.

it was mainly 110Mbps down most of the day  at two hour intervals approx, there were two times at 13.50 and 08.50am it was 100Mbps.
The upload varied from 17Mbps, 18, 19 and one 20Mbps though the day.

even at 2.10 am it was 110/18
           5.20 am           110/19

So it looks about right. 

[Alex Atkin UK]

Max I've seen is 940 down

That's a pretty common point that Gigabit network cards max out.

I can only get 940Mbit out of my Intel adapters in my pfSense box.  Realtek cards were even worse averaging below 900Mbit, and that's just plain LAN to LAN traffic.

So there's a good reason to advertise the service as 900Mbit.

[bogof]

Zen market the service I'm on as "Full Fibre 900", what I can find on the speed marketing from Zen is "900mbps average download, 450mbps guaranteed download, 100mbps average upload".

This reliably speed tests via Ookla Speedtest at 910+mbps down, 110mbps up.  7ms ping times (I'm in Norwich, ping speed tests to London sites).  I'm using a non-Zen supplied router (Ubiquiti USG 4 Pro).  My ONT is a single port Nokia device. I'm the only user I can see in the vicinity (most of the ports around here are above ground), so I don't think there is any contention at all currently on my OLT port GPON.

So as far as the published speeds go, I'm getting them.

When I first got FTTP I saw that some of the smart queue settings in my router could not cope with full throughput (CPU bound) and so disabled them - they seem very unlikely to be needed anyway on FTTP 900 services.  Also, I found that Hamachi VPN software was causing a slowdown of networking on all my Windows PCs as it made some changes to internal Windows settings (very naughty).  All non-Windows devices that were suitably equipped could achieve the above speeds once the router bottlenecks were lifted.  As far as consumer devices you can just buy that seem to always measure well, the AppleTV4k via its wired port seems to reliably get high results from the Ookla Speedtest app.

I note that is seems there is some equipment capability and / or equipment / ISP configuration difference that seems to give two different top speeds, and I'm not sure what that is.  Some FTTP users report ~940mbps, and others are around the 910mbps mark like me (I think it's something like 913mbps).  I'm not really complaining though, it makes little odds to me at that level. 

[Chrysalis]

Did BT wholesale ever reveal why they decided to keep PPPoE? I remember in a video the head of BT Wholesale said he hated PPPoE and it would be gone in their FTTP products but as we know that didn't happen so there must be a reason for it.

[burakkucat]

Did BT wholesale ever reveal why they decided to keep PPPoE? I remember in a video the head of BT Wholesale said he hated PPPoE and it would be gone in their FTTP products but as we know that didn't happen so there must be a reason for it.

I wonder if anyone with an appropriate FTTP service has tested the use of IPoE in place of PPPoE.

[Edited to fix typo.]

[Ixel]

When I first got FTTP I saw that some of the smart queue settings in my router could not cope with full throughput (CPU bound) and so disabled them - they seem very unlikely to be needed anyway on FTTP 900 services.

Certainly not on the downstream, but for the upstream I can understand the desire for something like fq_codel or sfq still if you have a busy upstream at times and want to be able to still use services that are latency sensitive (such as gaming or VoIP). It's not until you get to around 200Mbit and beyond that QoS starts to become increasingly unnecessary in my opinion. Of course, if you have a light to moderately used upstream a majority of the time then QoS probably isn't necessary.

[bogof]

I'm not sure many boxes support the use of smart queues in only one direction though, so if your box is CPU constrained you probably have to choose between a constraint on downstream, or an upstream that is vulnerable to being overwhelmed in some cases.  I'm yet to see any upstream issues here, so for now the queues are staying off.