Slow web browsing with BT Fibre (but fast downloads)

[BigFatAl]

I have Infinity 2 from BT; speedtests tell me Im getting c. 63M down and 13 M up; downloads are very fast and streaming performance onn Netflix etc is great.

HOWEVER, good old fashioned browsing of webpages is slower than my old TalkTalk ADSL service I had previously; its particularly slow at peak times such as weekend mornings or weekday evenings.

Ive tried various conversations with BT who have given me all manner of reasons for the poor speed:

Wrong browser - have tried the usual 4
Problem with my device - have tired multiple laptops, desktops, tablets etc
Slow wifi - Im using a wired connection to my main desktop
Problem with server at the site I'm browsing - this is slow for all websites
Too many devices connected - Ive turned off everything but the desktop *
AV / firewall problems - Ive tried disabling these and I had the same ones with TalkTalk when it was fine

Whilst BT didnt mention this, I have also tried Google & Open DNS with no real change

My assumption is that the constraint is on BT's side and is most likely a contention ratio issue. ie BT put a cheap low capacity router into my exchange / underestimated the number of users which means my packets queue up at busy periods

Any suggestions or confirmation / disagreement with my assumption would be gratefully received. Is there anything I can do to make this better / anything I can use in my argument with BT to escape my 18 month contract. Is it likely to be any better under TalkTalk or Sky fibre (my other two options)

Many thanks, Al

* An interesting side question: the nice man at BT explained to me that the router equally divides the bandwidth by the number of connected devices irrespective of how much they are using. ie. a 60meg connection with four devices attached equals 4 devices with 15 meg each even if three of them are sitting idle and not accessing the internet. Surely this cannot be how it works?!

 

[kanewolf]

Have you tried overriding the DNS servers provided by BT by default? It could be a DNS slowness. Try Google DNS servers 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4

 

[BigFatAl]

Have you tried overriding the DNS servers provided by BT by default? It could be a DNS slowness. Try Google DNS servers 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4

Hi. Yes, I did try this but didnt notice a major difference. It also screws up BT TV

 

[bill001g]

You know how many people actually want a router that can divide the traffic between machines using any rules. In generally it is almost impossible even using third party software because of the complexity of the configuration.

The way it actually works is machine use as much as they possibly can. As long as you are under the limit for your connection everyone get as much as they want. Now if you exceed your bandwidth the ISP will start to randomly drop traffic. It should more or less drop the same percentage of traffic from each session. The ISP really has no idea if the sessions are from the same machine in your house or different ones, but what generally happens they all get some traffic dropped.

Your router is in no way involved in this. This is why no matter what software you run you can not really guarantee traffic since the ISP is the one actually in control and they could care less.

So you have a one of your standard script reading droid on the phone telling you garbage.

In any case it doesn't matter, even if it were true web browsing should fly at 15m.

Since you are using web based things to test and some work fine it likely is not a restriction on web traffic or something like that. If for example torrent or ftp runs fine but web does not those are different.

Although you checked it really sounds like a dns issue. Pretty much a file transfer...or speedtest etc. will look up the ip and then transfer lots of data.

The main difference is web pages open many tiny session and download very small amounts of data. Most times they will do DNS query for many of these sessions. Sometime the DNS query actually uses more bandwidth than the actual data that is loaded. If the dns is responding slowly you will get some parts of a page that load fast and others that load slow if they have to do a lots of DNS.

You need to be sure you are using the DNS you really think you are. You might be able to configure open dns to block some location and then see if you can still get to it. It is not uncommon for a ISP to force dns traffic though one of their DNS servers no matter what you use.

You could try a vpn/proxy service....just use the free trials....to see if you get any different results.

Worst case load wireshark and capture the data. It takes quite a while to learn to read these but what you are looking for is how long it actually takes a web server to respond. You can actually see the delays. If you are getting errors those tend to be highlighted fairly well by wireshark.