A favour from Gigafast customers

[laneyweb]

Hi All, 

I am in deadlock with VF over speed issues on my Gigafast 900 service. I am having very poor download speeds to many sites that were working very well for the previous 11 months. 

I need some evidence on speeds achieved by other ISPs and I have that from a BT FTTC customer friend of mine.

May I ask you to take some time to see what download speeds you get from the following links? Doesnt matter what Gigafast service you have, just let me know what you have and the speed you get from any of the links below. You dont need to get the whole file, just enough to judge the rough download speed. 

Any file from: https://support.apple.com/downloads

Any file from: https://www.raspberrypi.org/software/operating-systems/

Get the Amazon Music Desktop Player from here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/b?ie=UTF8&node=14074016031

For what it's worth, I get 15Mbps at best from all of these sites. All sites were selected as known to me before to be very quick prior to my issues starting in April.

Thanks for your help!

Thank you for your help.

[Cynric]

.@laneyweb I'm ex-Vodafone and now on John Lewis Broadband.

At 08:10 this morning

Apple: 56.5 Mbps

Raspberry Pi: 55.8 Mbps

[laneyweb]

Thanks for the help. Really appreciate it. What is your down speed on your John Lewis package please?

[Cynric]

.@laneyweb The JL product is "up-to 66 Mbps" which looks like the standard you'd expect for FTTC from any ISP.

Speedtest shows me getting 56.8 down and 13.3 up, and this is consistent. Last readings from VF a few weeks ago were 10 to 53 down and 9 to 16 up (depending on time of day, evenings being the worst). I feel that JL have improved downloads by about 5 percent and maintained uploads at the same speed. I now do not get variations with time of day. I have not had errors and drop-outs, it's amazing what a different router can do over the same OpenReach FTTC.

Uptime is 18 days 23 hours, which sounds about right as I was making some local network adjustments at the beginning of May.

UPDATE: The router status page says 60.978 Mbps down and 14.071 Mbps up

Aside from the technical, JL sent me their £70 gift card exactly 14 days after go-live.

[Jayach]

As you have not had any replies from Gigafast users yet, all 3 downloads maxed out my Superfast FTTC connection at 8.8MBs (70Mbs) on a 78.8 sync speed.

[laneyweb]

Thanks for taking the time to reply. It helps to give a comparison to show the destinations are not the issue.

[Cynric]

At the moment a download from Steam is running at 60.3 Mbps, which is the fastest I have ever seen.

[laneyweb]

Had my reply from VF, they say that they stand by their decision and if I want to cancel, they will apply a 50% termination fee. I dont think I should pay at all. so off it goes to CISAS. 

[Jayach]

Unbelievable, if downloads from the sites you mention can max out our SF2 connections, your Gigafast connection should be much higher, I have no doubt that CISAS will rule in your favour.

Vodafone must be so stupid to allow it to go so far.

[laneyweb]

I raised the CISAS case yesterday, spent hours gathering evidence, uploading images, transcripts, emails and video footage of my testing. 

This morning I got a call from the VF team that said they would not help, only for them to now accept there was a speed issue after reviewing my case (they said it was reviewed last week too!) and "You will be allowed to cancel with no termination fees". No offer of help or further testing or fixing with higher level of tech support or Level3 or CityFibre.

I have agreed to cancel at no fee and will keep the CISAS case open ##~## I think they have handled this terribly.

I now have BT 900 (not that I wanted this to be the way I got my 900 back) and I'm set with that in contract now so onward and upwards. 

Thanks for the comments/support.