Below is a copy of the briefing we received around 11th May regarding speed issues from BT Wholesale. There was a previous brief on 22nd April which had a flow chart which required either 2 speedtests below 400kbps within a 20 hour period, or 1 below 400kbps and 1 below 1000kbps within a 20 hour period and the exchange isn't on the "VP Hot list" but this was superceded by the following.


BENCHMARKS – BT IPSTREAM HOME
The throughput benchmarks for BT IPstream Home are listed in the table below. These would be regarded as normal service:

Product Benchmark Instantaneous throughput range
BT IPstream Home 250 between 50Kbps – 250Kbps
BT IPstream Home 500 between 100Kbps – 500Kbps
BT IPstream Home 1000 between 200Kbps – 1000Kbps
BT IPstream Home 2000 between 400Kbps – 2000kbps
Table 2

SUPPORTING OUR CUSTOMERS
BT Wholesale cannot investigate slow throughput fault reports outside of the ranges detailed in Table 2 until the Customer has investigated and discounted factors that are within the customer’s control as highlighted above [1].
BT Wholesale will investigate throughput fault reports where the Customer has determined that it is not caused by factors outside of BT Wholesale’s control. For example, when the Customers End Users are receiving the expected level of performance and one End User is still not achieving throughput within the ranges specified above.
Due to variations within IP networks, especially the Internet, testing should be replicated at suitable time intervals to determine if external influences are affecting performance. A suggested minimum is a test off peak and another at peak times both using the same test facility [2].
Speed related faults should only be referred to BT Wholesale once it has been confirmed that an End Users performance is consistently below that being experienced by the rest of your End User base.

[1]BT would regard the speed ranges shown below as normal service. Please note though that end user speed can be affected by various other factors outside of the BTW Broadband Platform, these could include:
BTcentral utilisation
Customer Network availability
Internet Peering bandwidth availability
Internet / website availability

These would be negated by the same speed results on the BT Speedtester

[2]When queried with our account manager at BT Wholesale the off peak was set at midnight to 7am

"Demand for the BT Broadband products is extremely high and with the current migration program we are having additional demands placed on the network. We monitor the network constantly and apply trigger levels to capture high usage in our VP’s.

The trigger is based on a 7 day period measured during the 3 hour busy period and when it breaks the threshold, it goes forward for a regrade, and the monitoring recommences. BT manages its network to ensure that our customers and their end users experience good service performance.

The higher bandwidth demand for BT IPStream products has meant that a higher number of VPs need to be increased in size. This has led to some issues in increasing VP capacity, resulting in a number of ‘hot spots’, with the effect that some customers may see throughput at peak times drop to a level less than that experienced at other times. BT Wholesale has been running stricter capacity management rules, which has helped speed up VP upgrades with a view to improving performance.