ADSL2+ or VDSL

[Silverage]

My partner often complains about her broadband speed and talks of switching provider. She lives in a small apartment block and is adamant she does not have and cannot get fibre

When I run a speed test on fast.com in comes in at about 60mbps which rather gives the lie to this as ADSL2+ seems to top out in the low 20's. Her service is coming in to her flat via a conventional BT master socket with a micro-filter fitted, so to me that says she has either FTTC or FTTP and it's being shared out throughout the building somehow. Does this sound right?

[GuyW]

That'll be FTTC. In the best conditons it'll top out at 70/20. No way is that FTTP, especially not with microfilters in use.
ADSL2+ wasn't particularly common in the UK, nor would it reach those speeds.

It's not great, but certainly usable for most tasks. Easily enough bandwidth to stream 4K content, downloading large files is a pain.

[Harpoon]

BT line with microfilters also suggests it's unlikely to be shared with the rest of the building.

How is she connecting to the router? If it's WiFi, the spectrum (2.4Ghz and/or 5Ghz) could be saturated within an apartment building and be impacting performance at times.

[Mr Pointy]

If she is using Wi-Fi download something like InSSIDer to show which channels are being used:

https://www.metageek.com/inssider/

Moving up to a 5GHz channel (if possible) may help.

[Griffith4ever]

GuyW said:

That'll be FTTC. In the best conditons it'll top out at 70/20. No way is that FTTP, especially not with microfilters in use.
ADSL2+ wasn't particularly common in the UK, nor would it reach those speeds.

It's not great, but certainly usable for most tasks. Easily enough bandwidth to stream 4K content, downloading large files is a pain.

I've got around 24Mb and downloading large files is fine. I gan grab (torrent) a several Gb movie in an hour or so and big (50+Gb) downloads are ready by the morning. All a matter of what you are used to I guess. Never lived anywhere with more than 26Mb

[Mr Pointy]

Silverage said:

My partner often complains about her broadband speed and talks of switching provider. She lives in a small apartment block and is adamant she does not have and cannot get fibre

When I run a speed test on fast.com in comes in at about 60mbps which rather gives the lie to this as ADSL2+ seems to top out in the low 20's. Her service is coming in to her flat via a conventional BT master socket with a micro-filter fitted, so to me that says she has either FTTC or FTTP and it's being shared out throughout the building somehow. Does this sound right?

60meg is perfectly adequate unless she's uploading huge files: is it just a speed issue of is there something else like latency & disconnections? Maybe set up a Broadband Monitor to see if there are any line issues:

https://www.thinkbroadband.com/broadband/monitorin...

[Silverage]

Thanks guys - many useful suggestions there.

All her devices are connected via wi-fi and it's latency that's her issue really I think. She thinks jumping ship to another provider (currently with Sky) will sort things out, but I'm not so sure.

[Harpoon]

Definitely get inSSIDer on a device then. Even a WiFi channel change on the router might improve things. I've seen the standard 2.4Ghz WiFi frequency unusable in shared buildings.

Another quick fix could be to run an network cable to a device if it has an Ethernet port and see if that helps.

[GuyW]

Silverage said:

Thanks guys - many useful suggestions there.

All her devices are connected via wi-fi and it's latency that's her issue really I think. She thinks jumping ship to another provider (currently with Sky) will sort things out, but I'm not so sure.

It won't. Some investigations into how congested the airwaves are and/or replacing the (I suspect) utterly garbage ISP supplied router.

[biggiles]

24mbps is "more than good enough" for most people and work video calls. Sometimes VDSL is worse than ADSL2 if the distances are long, there are online charts showing the trade-offs.

A common issue with async services like ADSL/VDSL is buffer-bloat - uploading (e.g. transmitting video) can kill perceived bandwidth. It's a rabbit hole, but decent QoS can fix that, and there are some online speed-tests which try to measure buffer-bloat.