How Smart are Smart Routers?

[vernonmoat]

Broadband Speeds
Since the Broadband providers (ISP) gave us "smart routers" i have noticed that my broadband Speedtest has been slowing down.
My provider, Vodaphone, gave me a minimum contract speed of 27mbps. Which unsurprisingly BT failed to provide as my street BT2000 broadband access point is over a mile away with a few hundred copper terminations & connection pits in between.
Vodaphone then gave me free broadband for six months but then decided that it had been fixed, which it hadn't.
The strange thing is that when I do a speedtest on www.Speedtest.net I get 22mbps & when I do a test on BT Wholesale I get a reading of 8mbps.
I also get this on my partners ISP, TalkTalk.
How Smart are Smart Routers?
I have found that Smart Routers do not give a continuous broadband connection (which we pay for), they connect for millisecs & I now find myself waiting for them to reconnect for my typing to display a letter at a time. w h a t ?
Also, Speedtests seem to be completely fake as they don’t include connection time. Sometimes connections to websites take as long as two minutes!!
Have the ISP's completely abandoned their own bench marks?

 

[failboat]

If you have a spare computer with dual NICs ipfire has all the monitoring software you could need to log data to show it's poor quality.
It keeps a graph of pings to your ISP gateway and bandwidth usage. So you can show that during periods of no traffic you are losing connection. If the modem is the "smart router" then see if they will allow another modem.

Typing in a webpage doesn't use the internet. only when you hit submit. do some tests from other devices as well.

If there are other ISP options consider those before trying to fight with the current one. Here in the states you can complain to the FCC. Maybe there is something similar there. You will need some evidence.