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FTTP - Technical Reasons for Speed Limitations

BT93

Member
Hi,

I am very used to the headline speed not being the speed that you get to your router. I was on an FTTC 80 Mbps connection before I moved to my new home, and I would get about 66Mbps in that situation.

Here though I have FTTP. I was therefore expecting the speed that is advertised to be the speed that I actually get.

I was initially on the 300Mbps tier, and was getting 280-290Mbps which I thought was correct, and has no issues with the 10Mbps difference - I just put it down to overhead.

When it became available, I upgraded to the Full Fibre 900 package, and have been active for just over a week. The speeds I get however are in the region of 640-700Mbps, quite a substantial distance from the advertised 900-900 range given on the website (the minimum threshold speed is ~450Mbps).

While I would obviously love to get the full 900Mbps, I am content with these speeds. I am merely curious why on a FTTP line I do not get the full quoted speed? The gigabit capability is the major selling point of the technology to me.

I assumed that the minimum speed is so that they have some leeway to throttle if the core network becomes heavily loaded, and they can artificially throttle the connection for a while?

Is that the case or are there other technical reasons why the speeds are variable on an FTTP connection and not the headline speed?

Thanks!
 
With FTTP we can rule out the cable and length of cable as a cause of performance problems (copper was notorious for this), but the faster a connection becomes the more susceptible it is to other issues that you might not have previously had to consider so much.

Capacity problems via your ISP to the local area will suddenly becoming much more noticeable (consumer broadband is a shared service between many users), as too will any flaws in web-based speed tests or other internet services (most online servers restrict their speeds to manage load).

Even your own local network setup can become an issue. Testing via WiFi is largely pointless, but you also won't get the full 1Gbps via a 1 Gigabit Ethernet port on your router either.
 
Plus depending on how you are testing it (as Mark said, it should be hard wired), you may find your equipment struggles depending on it’s age, software running in the background, what it’s doing and how many other things are connected (games consoles, Hive systems, video cctv cameras, TV’s etc), plus most testing sites get more inaccurate the faster the speed you are getting or how busy their servers are.
 
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When troubleshooting speed issues, I tend to do two tests. A regular speed test through a website like speedtest or thinkbroadband but also do a throughput test by downloading a game or something via anything other than steam (unless your CPU can handle it.)

You could try downloading a large game and see where your line caps out.

My Fibre900 caps out at around 105-110MB/s which is close enough to 900Mbps down.
 
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