Broadband speed has decreased (rapid) recently

Question

Heya,
I have been having speed troubles recently and this seems to be the place to go.
Unfortunatly the customer support I have received has not been the most helpful. I think engineers will be carrying out tests on my exhange over the next couple of days but it was tough to tell as the phone call was rather confusing... I wont go into why but it was not due technical content of the call!
I used to connect at around 8mb and get download speeds that matched this (700-800KB/sec depending on prime time use etc). Over the last couple of weeks I noticed I could no longer stream iPlayer HD and now at times I am struggling with youtube at 280p! Its only the last few days that I have been getting VERY low performance.
Below are some stats that may be helpful.
HH3 ADSL status:
Connection Information
Line state:
Connected
Connection time:
0 days, 23:46:49
Downstream:
7.938 Mbps
Upstream:
448 Kbps
ADSL Settings
VPI/VCI:
0/38
Type:
PPPoA
Modulation:
G.992.1 Annex A
Latency type:
Fast
Noise margin (Down/Up):
12.0 dB / 22.0 dB
Line attenuation (Down/Up):
22.0 dB / 13.0 dB
Output power (Down/Up):
19.8 dBm / 11.9 dBm
FEC Events (Down/Up):
0 / 0
CRC Events (Down/Up):
3 / 1
Loss of Framing (Local/Remote):
0 / 0
Loss of Signal (Local/Remote):
0 / 0
Loss of Power (Local/Remote):
0 / 0
HEC Events (Down/Up):
1 / 0
Error Seconds (Local/Remote):
14 / 3
 (Note connection time is ~24 hours due to reboots yesterday during phonecall with BT customer support. As far as I am aware, the connection does not drop itself).
BT Speed Test:
 Download speedachieved during the test was - 831 Kbps
 For your connection, the acceptable range of speeds is 600-7150 Kbps.
 Additional Information:
 Your DSL Connection Rate :8128 Kbps(DOWN-STREAM), 448 Kbps(UP-STREAM)
 IP Profile for your line is - 7150 Kbps
Hopefully I don't need to mention it here (as I have had to many, many times to customer support :/) There are no other devices using the bandwidth. I have tested on multiple platforms (main PC, work laptop, mobile phone speed test etc). I use a wired connection (apart from when testing with phone!).
The connection is like this from 6pm (possibly earlier, tough to tell as Im at work) to about midnight. At midnight yesterday I managed to get around 6mb/sec on speedtest.net. This does seem to be a prime time issue but it has come on so suddenly! Also dropping this much during prime time cannot be normal!
I have tried a few things I have read such as connected directly to the test socket, changing filters, doing a line... quietness? test (07 number, option 2 is all I remember at this point ). All seemed ok/made no difference.
Any help is greatly appreciated.
Thanks,
Kai.
Solved!
Go to Solution.

Answer 1

Slight change of plan, had to do test earlier than I was going to. Shows improvement though. The first test I posted in this thread was done at about 9pm. This one was done at 23:15.
 Download speedachieved during the test was - 3268 Kbps
 For your connection, the acceptable range of speeds is 600-7150 Kbps.
 Additional Information:
 Your DSL Connection Rate :8128 Kbps(DOWN-STREAM), 448 Kbps(UP-STREAM)
 IP Profile for your line is - 7150 Kbps
Speedtest.net shows a history of tests. This looks like the following:
The times are out by an hour (just carried out the last test at 11:13pm GMT).
Think this confirms its congestion. What are the options I have here? Is it something BT can fix or am I stuck with these speeds (or in other words am I forced to change ISP). Its worth noting that the latest bt and speedtest tests were carried out one after the other and showed a fair difference, I dont know if this points to anything? I made sure that nothing else was using bandwidth.
Thanks once again for the fast responses and help.