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BT Wholesale Retires UK Broadband ISP Speed Tester Service

Wednesday, Jan 22nd, 2025 (12:01 am) - Score 6,520
BT-Wholesale-Broadband-Performance-Tester-UK-Screenshot-210125

Network services provider BT Wholesale has confirmed to ISPreview that they’ve taken the decision to “retire” their long-running BroadBand Performance Test (speed tester), which is a change that was formally introduced at the start of this month. But BT has yet to post a notice about this on the service page, which may cause some confusion for those trying to run a test.

The tester itself was more intended for BTW’s ISP customers to use as part of their customer connectivity diagnostics, although it was also accessible to end users. But today the online world seems to be chocked full of free connection speed tests and very few now use the service provided by BTW.

A spokesperson for the operator confirmed to ISPreview that “limited usage” of the Broadband Performance Tester and the “availability of numerous free alternatives” was the reason behind their “decision to retire the platform earlier this month.” The change has already been communication to ISPs, although for some reason BTW has yet put a note about it on the tester itself.

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Mark-Jackson
By Mark Jackson
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook, BlueSky, Threads.net and .
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12 Responses

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  1. Avatar photo WhooshBoy says:

    My favourite is proof.ovh.net, always gives me higher results that Ookla and they’re usually near what my speeds should be.

    1. Avatar photo Jason says:

      Yeah – that’s one of the servers on NPerf – also gives me the highest speeds. Sadly, it’s the only speedtest that gives me the highest speeds.

    2. Avatar photo SaltyW says:

      My favourite is https://speed.cloudflare.com
      It gives a lot of good stats

  2. Avatar photo purleigh says:

    So … how do I find out what my BTW “IP Profile” numbers are now ?
    The only reason I used the BTW Broadband Performance Test, was for the “Additional Diagnostic” to get the IP Profiles.

    For more than I decade I’ve had issues with Plusnet’s “Current Line Speed” profile getting out of step with the BTW IP Profile, frequently causing my broadband download speed to be incorrectly speed limited. The easiest way to get Plusnet support to correct the “Current Line Speed” limiter was to send them a screenshot of the BTW test result as proof of what my connection’s profile should be.

    I also regularly ran the BTW test for both the upload and download IP Profiles, to accurately set my router’s anti-bufferbloat traffic shaping limiters, as having low latency broadband is important to me. Calculating the bufferbloat limiter values from the BTW IP Profiles is more reliable than using the variable results from doing other speed tests, and much less time consuming than tweaking the limiter values up and down until the balance of optimum low latency and highest usable bandwidth (up and down) is achieved.

    1. Avatar photo Phil says:

      You don’t need it anymore. The ISP got the profile reading from their end test and matched it. BTw Additional Diagnostic are pretty useless and never work.

    2. Avatar photo purleigh says:

      @Phil
      That is how it SHOULD work, but Plusnet’s “Current Line Speed” profile seemed to update when the “IP Profile” dropped to temporarily lower line speeds, perhaps during short term poor weather conditions etc, but the Plusnet profile then rarely recovered when the BTW IP Profile went back up – often leaving my connection with a throughput up to 10Mbps lower than the current line conditions allow, until Plusnet support forced a “Current Line Speed” update.

      When you say the “BTW “Additional Diagnostic” “never work”, a lot of people say that, but until sometime within the last few weeks, I would run the “Additional Diagnostic” about once a month and only saw issues maybe on 5% of attempts. In my opinion, whether the “Additional Diagnostic” would run, seemed to be very web browser dependant, for example it wouldn’t run for me on recent versions of Firefox but would on older Firefox, and would always work perfectly on Chromium when in “Incognito” mode. So I can understand why many people thought that it didn’t work !.

      You also say “You don’t need it anymore”, well in addition to my previously explanation about still using the BTW IP Profile to set my router’s anti-bufferbloat feature to optimise latency, I also looked at the BTW IP Profile to determine whether my DrayTek VDSL modem was running FASTPATH or Interleaved, as the modem’s web console sometimes seems to get it’s reporting wrong and tells me that it is FASTPATH and at the same time showing a significant interleaver depth value – so knowing the BTW IP Profile value and the modem’s sync rate, it is possible to determine which path mode is true, and perform a reboot to get it back to FASTPATH when needed.

  3. Avatar photo Phil says:

    Plusnet don’t have “Current Line Speed” anymore.

    1. Avatar photo purleigh says:

      @Phil
      You said – “Plusnet don’t have “Current Line Speed” anymore.” – WRONG !.
      It is not available on new customer accounts, or most existing accounts that use a dynamic IP address.
      Plusnet do still have “Current Line Speed” profile applied to legacy customer connections that are routed via their so called “high touch” network – typically those that have a static IP address, or other legacy account features.

  4. Avatar photo Webber says:

    Speed test accuracy is what matters, some think the best speed test site is the one that reports the fastest speed to them but if its not accurate its not the best!!

  5. Avatar photo Ad47uk says:

    I think it is getting to the stage now where most people don;lt really need to check the speed unless they have a problem.
    With more people going onto FTTP, which is supposed to be more reliable, then your speed will stay constant.

    When I do a test I normally use Think broadband, for a start it goes onto a map and gives a bit of info to people around here, I normally get around 540Mb/s up and down.

    I did use it yesterday as I am sorting pout a laptop and the person who owns it is looking at getting FTTP, but since the laptop is the only thing she has connected to the net, I don’t think it is worth going for high speeds. So I tested what the laptop could do via Wi-Fi, 60Mb/s and that was it.

    So speed checks are useful for that sort of thing

  6. Avatar photo Red Click says:

    Haven’t used it for years, didn’t work correctly on FTTP, reporting upstream speeds impossible to achieve.

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