Are internet services becoming less reliable ?

[sor]

IME a lot of what people say are "internet problems" are actually in that last few feet between the router and the computer, especially as people insist on using wifi where ethernet would be more appropriate and more reliable (even if it is less convenient to get a cable installed where necessary)

e.g. it didn't stop MPs from doing their covid participation over wifi (with the dropouts) even though I understand parliament IT explicitly advised them to use a cable.

Someone asked "why do you need the speed" - fibre to the home is always better than any other connection type, even if you choose not to take advantage of the speed that it can offer, e.g. BT and others will still sell their 40 or 80Mbps speeds over fibre to the premises, you do not need to upgrade to gigabit.

A +1 from me as to Teams' uselessness. My internet is as very reliable as it ever was, it's fibre to the cabinet but the copper is still in good condition so I get the full 80/20 without issue.

 

[najaB]

Someone asked "why do you need the speed" - fibre to the home is always better than any other connection type, even if you choose not to take advantage of the speed that it can offer, e.g. BT and others will still sell their 40 or 80Mbps speeds over fibre to the premises, you do not need to upgrade to gigabit.

The real advantage of fibre isn't speed, as much as its immunity to interference. This makes the connection much more reliable.

 

[yorksrob]

IME a lot of what people say are "internet problems" are actually in that last few feet between the router and the computer, especially as people insist on using wifi where ethernet would be more appropriate and more reliable (even if it is less convenient to get a cable installed where necessary)

e.g. it didn't stop MPs from doing their covid participation over wifi (with the dropouts) even though I understand parliament IT explicitly advised them to use a cable.

Someone asked "why do you need the speed" - fibre to the home is always better than any other connection type, even if you choose not to take advantage of the speed that it can offer, e.g. BT and others will still sell their 40 or 80Mbps speeds over fibre to the premises, you do not need to upgrade to gigabit.

A +1 from me as to Teams' uselessness. My internet is as very reliable as it ever was, it's fibre to the cabinet but the copper is still in good condition so I get the full 80/20 without issue.

I always use cable at home and I still encounter problems !

 

[py_megapixel]

A +1 from me as to Teams' uselessness.

As far as I can tell, the Teams desktop program is completely pointless. If you run the web version in a modern browser, you are getting a near-identical experience*, just in a way that doesn't take up space on your local drive, automatically start and pop up obnoxiously when you log in, and use a ridiculous amount of memory.

*(IIRC this is literally true the desktop version uses Electron, which is basically a fancy way of making a web page into a package that can be distributed as a standalone application with a rendering engine and JavaScript interpereter - the same ones used by Google Chrome - built in. But it's very resource-inefficient).

 

[Busaholic]

Has anything become more reliable in recent times other than the mendacity of government statements?

 

[yorksrob]

Has anything become more reliable in recent times other than the mendacity of government statements?

Fair point, no

 

[jumble]

Is anyone else finding that broadband and internet services seem to have deteriorated over the last week ?

First of all, we had all that doings with the forum internet address not directing properly. What was that all about !

Also more generally at around the same time, my broadband has been going down at the drop of a hat. Barely a night goes by without having to re-boot it, often more than once.

Thirdly, my large public employer can't seem to string together a working i.t.system of late - it was never particularly good in the first place, but again it seems to have gotten worse in the last week (it all relies on this dreadful cloud now, which slows everything up).

I have seen some quite bad internet this week
I have a FTTC 40 down and 10 up and real world upload has been horrible but is back to 8 realworld today
( offsite backups from a server to a Datacenter which has FileZilla which gives exact speeds
I also have been testing a Gigcube 5G unit Vodafone
This started at about 10 upload but pretty soon went to about 2 and stayed there so it is a reasonable assumption that Vodafone are traffic shaping on 5G

 

[yorksrob]

I have seen some quite bad internet this week
I have a FTTC 40 down and 10 up and real world upload has been horrible but is back to 8 realworld today
( offsite backups from a server to a Datacenter which has FileZilla which gives exact speeds
I also have been testing a Gigcube 5G unit Vodafone
This started at about 10 upload but pretty soon went to about 2 and stayed there so it is a reasonable assumption that Vodafone are traffic shaping on 5G

With regard to the first paragraph, hopefully mine will speed up as well.

With regard to the second, I don't hold out much hope !

 

[sor]

The real advantage of fibre isn't speed, as much as its immunity to interference. This makes the connection much more reliable.

Interference is a factor but the main problem is simply line length, so even if you stay on the slower speeds you'll get the full speed no matter how far away you are from the cabinet or exchange. This is one of the drivers for BT and co to eventually force people onto fibre to the premises where it is available, whether they feel they need it or not. (it's the same price either way, you would only pay more if you chose to upgrade to a faster speed, so why wouldn't you want it)

I always use cable at home and I still encounter problems !

Sure, it can still happen, but from having worked on the R&D side of things at a major ISP the first question is always, "is it wifi, does it still happen on ethernet" and more often than not that solves the problem.

As far as I can tell, the Teams desktop program is completely pointless. If you run the web version in a modern browser, you are getting a near-identical experience*, just in a way that doesn't take up space on your local drive, automatically start and pop up obnoxiously when you log in, and use a ridiculous amount of memory.

Yeah that's my understanding too. Theoretically reduces their developer effort but at the expense of speed and usability (which I suppose they don't need to care about). I don't do anything meaty on my work laptop but it is the sole reason I had to upgrade the RAM, just so it had enough to gobble up. Skype for Business had its own problems but at least it was snappy.

I have seen some quite bad internet this week
I have a FTTC 40 down and 10 up and real world upload has been horrible but is back to 8 realworld today
( offsite backups from a server to a Datacenter which has FileZilla which gives exact speeds
I also have been testing a Gigcube 5G unit Vodafone
This started at about 10 upload but pretty soon went to about 2 and stayed there so it is a reasonable assumption that Vodafone are traffic shaping on 5G

Are you sure it's not a problem with the server? FTTC speeds are generally very consistent (assuming your ISP is keeping up with things, shouldn't be a concern with the big providers like BT, Sky, TalkTalk etc), and the nature of the way people use their internet connections means upstream is even less likely to be congested.

Again, from the experience in the aforementioned job there is a lot of "crying wolf" around throttling or shaping. Mobile networks may deprioritise users but this is usually after seriously heavy usage for a prolonged period. Fixed line networks don't bother these days, as the cost, effort and expense doesn't stack up against adding more capacity.

 

[najaB]

Interference is a factor but the main problem is simply line length, so even if you stay on the slower speeds you'll get the full speed no matter how far away you are from the cabinet or exchange.

The two are directly related. Noise increases with line length because the copper wire acts as an antenna, soaking up RF from all sources (including thermal noise).

 

[Peter Mugridge]

Part of the problem is that Teams is such an appalling piece of bloatware AND the PC version doesn't cope well with momentary dropouts (whereas the IOS version does)

Interesting... we have both Teams and Zoom installed at work, and everyone agrees that Teams is by far the superior product...

I can't say I've ever noticed Teams causing the speed to drop when I was working at home during the recent virus incident.

 

[najaB]

Interesting... we have both Teams and Zoom installed at work, and everyone agrees that Teams is by far the superior product...

Oh, Teams is superior to Zoom in that it does so much more, but that doesn't make Teams a well-designed or engineered product.

 

[yorksrob]

ITV hub seems to plumb depths of abysmalness I've not seen elsewhere. I can barely get through an episode of Midsommer without it crashing repeatedly.

 

[najaB]

I can barely get through an episode of Midsommer without it crashing repeatedly.

It was the nephew that did it. Or the butler.

 

[DerekC]

As far as I can tell, the Teams desktop program is completely pointless. If you run the web version in a modern browser, you are getting a near-identical experience*, just in a way that doesn't take up space on your local drive, automatically start and pop up obnoxiously when you log in, and use a ridiculous amount of memory.

*(IIRC this is literally true the desktop version uses Electron, which is basically a fancy way of making a web page into a package that can be distributed as a standalone application with a rendering engine and JavaScript interpereter - the same ones used by Google Chrome - built in. But it's very resource-inefficient).

I didn't know the technical reasons but I have certainly found that that installing the Teams desktop application slows my rather elderly laptop down to a crawl. Having deleted the application, the Teams web version running in Edge does everything I need as a meeting participant. (I only use Teams when talking to Network Rail staff - that appears to be the only conference tool they are allowed to use)

Interesting... we have both Teams and Zoom installed at work, and everyone agrees that Teams is by far the superior product...

I can't say I've ever noticed Teams causing the speed to drop when I was working at home during the recent virus incident.

See comment above - I suspect it depends how powerful a machine you are running on. Zoom does everything I need. As a matter of interest, what does Teams do that Zoom doesn't? (Genuine interest question).

 

[najaB]

As a matter of interest, what does Teams do that Zoom doesn't? (Genuine interest question).

If you just use it as a conferencing tool, not much. It is linked to the M365 ecosystem though so allows for easy document sharing through OneDrive, is tightly integrated with Outlook, is presence aware, interacts with the corporate directory, supports web hooks for automations, supports add-on functionality, and a bunch of other stuff.

 

[yorksrob]

It was the nephew that did it. Or the butler.

Turned out to be the mad bloke in the woods in the end !

 

[D365]

(I only use Teams when talking to Network Rail staff - that appears to be the only conference tool they are allowed to use)

NR computers are very locked down, so I believe you are right. The fact that it comes bundled within Windows/Office surely helps...

By contrast, in my work as a consultant, Zoom is our only no-no.

 

[Peter Mugridge]

See comment above - I suspect it depends how powerful a machine you are running on. Zoom does everything I need. As a matter of interest, what does Teams do that Zoom doesn't? (Genuine interest question).

For a start, subtitles without having to ask the meeting organiser to enable them... and a parallel live chat function.

Don't know if Zoom also has groups and files access including the ability for multiple people to work on an Excel spreadsheet at the same time in the same way as Teams does? Never tried using it for that...

 

[najaB]

Don't know if Zoom also has groups and files access including the ability for multiple people to work on an Excel spreadsheet at the same time in the same way as Teams does? Never tried using it for that...

To be fair, it's OneDrive that powers that. Teams does have tight integration with OneDrive as noted above though, Zoom does not - nor does it have channels and groups though, as you noted.

 

[JohnMcL7]

The real advantage of fibre isn't speed, as much as its immunity to interference. This makes the connection much more reliable.

This was the primary reason I wanted FTTP as I've had chronic problems with speed on my own line (rated at 66Mbps, latterly running at just 14Mbps), many of the times I've helped people with their internet connections it's been problems with the line. I had FTTP installed earlier in the year which started at 540/540 and has run at that all the time since plus these days I find the high speed extremely useful given how large downloads are for games and patches in particular and now I can upload much better quality video to Youtube as it doesn't take long to upload a few hundred gigabytes.

Never though I'd have such a great connection and it's certainly very welcome.

 

[Crossover]

The only issue I have had with our home internet of late (full fibre to the house) was caused by the specific connection of our Powerline adaptors causing some very odd behaviour on a couple of computers. Other than that, it has been pretty reliable (we streamed the funeral yesterday for some 6 hours, followed by the news and Paddington 2, and it didn't hiccup once, that I can recall!)

Interference is a factor but the main problem is simply line length, so even if you stay on the slower speeds you'll get the full speed no matter how far away you are from the cabinet or exchange. This is one of the drivers for BT and co to eventually force people onto fibre to the premises where it is available, whether they feel they need it or not. (it's the same price either way, you would only pay more if you chose to upgrade to a faster speed, so why wouldn't you want it)


Sure, it can still happen, but from having worked on the R&D side of things at a major ISP the first question is always, "is it wifi, does it still happen on ethernet" and more often than not that solves the problem.

I can well imagine FTTP is a damn sight easier to administer from an ISP perspective - though I haven't worked for an ISP, I have done plenty IT support and ADSL and the like has always been an absolute nightmare (particularly so in petrol forecourts, as I was dealing with some 11-12 years ago). Having worked with corporate network fibre, it is relatively simple to deal with, and my experience of installation of FTTP at home is that it Just Works™ without all the faff of needing to let the line settle etc