Dropping Line speed - is this normal?

[Bryan]

Hello,

Been apart of the Cuckoo family for a few over 4 months and must say been really happy so far. I was just curious though, I had to restart the router the other day and had noticed a rather large dip in line speed.

From what I can remember the line speed was at 79.99 Down / 19.9 Up mbps for a while even throughout December (last checked Christmas Eve), can’t speak for when the. dip happened exactly or if it had in fact been gradual, but it seems stuck at a solid 60.6 and an upload of 16. Average speed in this area is apparently greater than 71.9 and I believe my minimum speed is 57

thought I would post this to the wider community to see if others had any experience with this and also to see if there were other factors that play into this. Is there anything I can do to help remedy this?

I know the speeds are still relatively high, but when you’ve been used to the higher bandwidth and quite a rather. large drop, you tend to notice a little when trying to stream a couple of things simultaneously and add a 4k HDR stream on top or game downloads

TIA, Bryan

[PhantomR1982]

Welcome to the Cuckoo Community @Bryan and also for being part of the Flock.

From Time to Time the Network that all providers use can sometimes have glitches this includes the Cuckoo Network however a 20mb loss is quite a big error in my eyes compared to the 4mb upload loss which is minimal.

First point of call is to send in a ticket to hello@cuckoo.co and the team can run some line tests for you which will in turn let them know if theres any line errors.

im tagging @jake into this post as hes got access outside of normal working hours to start these tests and it is normally quicker to help via the community especially on a weekend.

Second Point you can try is to shut down the Cuckoo Technicolor Router for 5 minutes or so and while I know this is like an eternity for most customers it can also be worth it sometimes when you plug it back in to resync the connection.

Treat this like getting rid of a “memory effect” in a battery that thinks its fully charged when its actually only half charged.

After the 5 minute power down the router will go back up online in the normal way by finding the strongest local connection it can to your exchange so make a note or screenshot of the speed you get.

I like using the fast.com & speedtest.net websites when a router goes back online to check the speed its actually receiving/sending to what the router is actually showing that its synced at. (Fast.com even shows you where your connected to)

After doing this let the community know how its syncing back up and if its improved or not as this will help the team determine if they need to despatch an engineer to take a look or not.

Also you can check to see if theres any damage to the filter (if using the supplied one).

There are loads of things to check but im just covering the basics first.

[jake]

Thanks @PhantomR1982 - beaten me to it as always

@Bryan could you send over an email to hello@cuckoo.co from your registered email? - I can’t seem to locate your account to assist you here.

Cheers!

[PhantomR1982]

Thats why I get paid in Creme Eggs @jake for monitoring the community and you get the Big Bucks for fixing the line issues lol.

Hopefully when @Bryan see’s this an email will be on the way to you or a reply here.

[jake]

So - I’ve managed to reply to @Bryan’s request in our support platform which is great. Thanks to @PhantomR1982 for being quick to the gun and providing some immediate tips.

This was an issue on the line that caused his line speed to attenuate.

I just thought I’d like to go through the process of elimination I went through to get to this - it’s always fun to do a step-by-step thing. (I did also send this to you @Bryan).

Router checks

So - first of all I did some router checks. We have the ability to connect into the routers that come with your connection - it’s bog standard for stuff like this that it may be wireless or throughput speeds rather than sync.

The screenshot that was put in the post says broadband speed… so it’s got to be the sync speed… right?

Correct. The attenuation of the line was above the threshold we usually see with FTTC connections - ideally we’d like to see 0.0, but a region between 0 and 1 is acceptable when we’re testing this.

Line tests

With the information that the speed was fluctuating, and the proof directly from our router information, I ran a copper line test. Usually when line speed attenuates, it is the copper wires that are usually affected - as the fibre wire is more robust.

If fibre wire breaks - you’re gonna have nothing. Copper wires however… there’s about 500 different reasons these can go wrong.

aaaaand… It’s a boy!.. NO! Wait! It’s a copper line fault!

The wires were earthed - meaning a piece of copper wire somewhere - from the distribution pole that connects tons of houses at once, or even the junction boxes that connect the pole to the green cabinet, is being shorted out.

This works exactly the same as if you try making grilled cheese in a toaster… not that I’ve done that, aged 10, and shorted out the electrics at my house…

So what did we do about it?
We got onto our suppliers Openreach and they’re currently confirming when they’re coming out to resolve it. This usually will take about a few hours to confirm, and a day or two to fix.

[PhantomR1982]

Only thing from the above images thats thrown me is the ADSL handback when Fibre (FTTC) is VDSL.

The Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR) generally being higher is also
another trigger.

Hopefully OpenReach will agree
and will be on there merry way to fix the issue.

Thanks @Bryan for letting the cuckoo community know of this issue with your service & for @jake to delve into the issue.

I may share some of my creme eggs on this occasion.

[Alex]

I like these pics @jake