Netomnia and ISP YouFibre Claim to Fix Broadband Speed and Latency Issues UPDATE
Some customers of UK broadband ISP Youfibre, which harnesses Netomnia’s 10Gbps capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband network, have seen their service return to normal after appearing to suffer from a noticeable drop in network latency and upload performance over the past few days. But for others, the issue is ongoing.
The issues started toward the end of last month after customers from a number of different regions, albeit particularly those within the wider NG and PE postcode areas, began reporting higher than normal latency times (i.e. some pings had slowed from c.3ms to 19ms), sharply slower upload speeds (this was not universal) and less responsive customer support. But not everybody will have noticed such changes.
The problems appear to have started on 27th May 2025 after the ISP notified customers about some planned “routine maintenance“, which seems to have gone beyond the usual changes and promptly started generating some complaints via our inbox, the ISPreview Forum and Reddit. We raised this issue with Netomnia on Monday, and the good news is that they finally resolved it on Tuesday.
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Sam Defriez, Director of Networks at Netomnia, told ISPreview:
“We recently performed a necessary network upgrade, which temporarily increased latency for some customers as traffic was routed through a secondary path. This work has now been completed, and all traffic has been restored to the primary BNG, with latency returning to expected levels.”
Put another way, Netomnia temporarily shifted some of their customers to a different Broadband Network Gateway (BNG) during the upgrade and then put them back afterwards. But this process lasted for several days and did cause a deterioration in performance during the transition.
The BNG is essentially an access point for subscribers, through which they connect to the broadband network. The BNG is designed to establish and manage subscriber sessions, which it does by aggregating traffic from multiple subscriber sessions and routing it to the network of the service provider.
Initial feedback indicates that many of those who complained are now seeing a return to normal, although some users have indicated that the issue is ongoing. But the episode is another useful reminder of why Youfibre would perhaps benefit from having a central Service Status page to help keep customers informed, instead of leaving them to clog up support channels.
UPDATE 5th June 2025 @ 7:19am
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We’ve had an update with respect to customers that are still reporting problems, particularly with a decline in latency performance. A spokesperson for Youfibre told ISPreview: “Our team is actively monitoring the network post-upgrade, and any residual issues are being addressed promptly. We encourage any customers experiencing ongoing issues to contact our YouFibre support team so we can investigate further and provide an immediate resolution.”
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 Linkedin.
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Thanks for your investigation on this one. You are absolutely right that some sort of service check / Status page would have stopped us all wondering what was wrong. Hopefully they have learnt something from this.
Jeremy and his team really needs to sort the lack of a status update page out real quick.
It seriously affects people’s trust and faith in an operator by not having one, and pretending nothing is wrong. You can imagine a number of customers are lost through incidents with no information.
I raised this one on the day is started with evidence such as PRTG logs thinkbroadband charts etc.
I can say that the packet loss is still present and something I am still persisting on getting fixed
This article is premature and the headline false. I think you should update it. Myself and many others who are commenting on Reddit are still seeing a degredation of service, with my latency to London (a distance of 50 miles) increased from 3 ms to 19 ms overnight on 20th May. I’m also seeing fairly frequent lag spikes. Some have had fixes come in yesterday but it is clearly not solved across the network, and it has been a huge battle to have tech support and engineers acknowledge the problem. Happy to comment if and when a fix comes in or speak to the author about my experiences.
Did you see the word ‘Claim’ in the headline?
In fairness, I added ‘Claim’ after we got more feedback on this issue today, although the article did already point out that some people were still reporting issues.
Please be patient, it takes time to make changes like this. Check again in the morning before throwing your toys out of the pram.
Thanks Marc for the update. I can confirm the issue is now resolved.
@Fibreman – not toy throwing. Just letting the author know the situation.
Clearly it doesnt take time to make chanhes like this. As is evidenced by the fact they reduced upload speeds by 35% and increased latency by 1000% overnight.
Al they need to do is reverse the “maintenance”, which appears to be simply changing the routing before they have upgrade capacity to deal with it.
This wasn’t a slow degradation of service indicative of capacity issues, it was an instant overnight change.
Any sensible organisation seeing their name banded about on trustpilot and ispreview would have instantly reversed the changes, fixed it for everyone and reviewed their capacity roadmap before implementing the change properly.
Strange, BRSK is a part of netomnia, it has a service status page .. wonder why this isn’t rolled out wider across the group.
Why havent they rolled out mobile yet, why havent they rolled out a joint website, why havent they rolled out bitcoin payments, why havent they rolled out games on their website
the answer is time
I’ve had it directly from a very senior source at youfibre (Jeremy Chealot), that this is a capacity issue in London. The time frame given for resolution was “Summer”.
Those of us in the DE,NG areas that are parented to Manchester are routing througha a co tested route in London.
Absolutely no idea why they cannot revert our connections back to their original routes (perhaps that route doesnt exist, perhaps its all part of the plan to route us all through the large capacity expansion in London, who knows.)
However it appears that the 500-800% increase in latency, and now 500mbps slow down in upload speeds are here to stay for the foreseeable.
The ONLY way youfibre ever respond is to negative trustpilot etc reviews.
It is hugely disrespectful to customers to advise they are performing “maintenance”, when actually what they are doing is knowingly degrading their service and then providing zero in terms of speedy resolution.
Some customers are now having engineer visits arranged, which toufibre will know cannot resolve an issue that has been caused by a deliberate change in routing. It simply seeks to delay and waste everyone’s time while they try to increase capacity.
Another ISP putting customer volume ahead of service levels.
When selling 2gbps and above products to domestic users, surely they appreciate these people are tech savvy and will call out these issues? Apparently not.
How long before we see somebody asking on netmums who provides the best broadband for their gaming teenager, and the answers come back “avoid youfibre, their lag is awful..”
Sounds silly, but that’s the reality of today and social media.
Interesting.
I’m with BRSK (part of netomina) and Ithis article prompted me to check my ping out of curiosity.
Based in Yorkshire, ping to London was around 8ms a couple of weeks back when I last checked, now it’s 15ms I wonder if this is more wide spread than just Youfibre. Getting my usual speeds on the 500 package.
Anyone else with the provider willing to check their latency?