I don't live in the best area for Broadband as it is (rural). My local exchange is enabled for the 8Mb Max speed service, but on average I tend to get between 2-3Mb most of the time, and late at night it sometimes creeps above 3Mb, but not that often. I did once even see it up above 4Mb, but only once.
The strange thing is that I've never had a drop in the upload speed, with it always working at the full 448Kb speed, which is OK for seeding.
But this past couple of weeks the download speed seemed to be slower than normal so I've been doing some tests and it is being extremely erratic. Yesterday it was at about 2400Mb, then when I got home late in the evening it seemed really slow to do anything so I checked and it had dropped to 400Kb!!! Which is too slow for me to think that is acceptable. This morning it had gone back up to 1400Mb, and now it is back to 2500Mb.
Has anyone else been experiencing such large changes in their download speeds?
I did some quick searching online and a lot of people seem to be posting on forums saying their broadband connections are getting slower and slower each week and all think something is going on at British Telecom's exchange end of the connection which is causing this. Many think they are overloading the nodes and the only way they are going to fix it is to split them so less people are on each.
I'm going to be ringing my ISP tomorrow morning to ask them about this and to check they haven't actually introduced some sneaky traffic shaping crap on the connection (if they have I'm moving ISP). It does say they will check the connection and if they can't find the reason they will demand BT to open a fault request and make them test the line completely. So fingers crossed it is just some problem on the line and can be fixed.
Very annoying though, especially when you go our leaving a download running at over 200KB/s, coming back later thinking it will have finished and it is still going, but dropped down to something silly like 20KB/s.