Dublin and Leinster
Broadband evidence report
Aoife Sample
What we found
Over seven days, the trouble was in your broadband connection, not in your home, and it was at its worst every evening.
A video call would have stuttered or frozen in 1275 of the 10,042 minutes measured, and 86% of those trouble minutes fell in the evening. Evening download was 80 Mbps on a typical test, against 196 Mbps the rest of the day, on a 300 Mbps package.
You are welcome to send this report to your provider. Everything in it was measured on a cable at your router, so your Wi-Fi plays no part in it.
What you told us
Recorded when you booked, before anything was measured.
“Teams calls from the garden office keep freezing, mostly in the evenings and when the weather is bad. The provider says the line is fine.”
How it was measured
A small box of ours, plugged into your router with a cable and left for a week.
Every minute, day and night, the box sent 20 test signals to the internet and 20 to your router, and timed each one coming back. A signal that never comes back is a lost packet: on a video call that is a frozen picture or a dropped word.
Checking the router at the same moment tells the two kinds of fault apart. If the router answers and the internet does not, the problem is beyond your home. Once an hour the box also ran a speed test, 167 in all, and measured the delay while the line was busy.
The box was unplugged for 38 minutes on Wed 7 Oct afternoon. Those minutes are left out rather than guessed.
The week at a glance
One square for every hour of the week. The darker the square, the more minutes in that hour a video call would have struggled.
The connection, minute by minute
10,042 minutes measured over 7 days.
| To the internet | To your router | |
|---|---|---|
| Signals lost | 1.5% Too high | 0.04% Normal |
| Signals lost, evening | 6.2% | 0% |
| Signals lost, rest of the day | 0.2% | 0.04% |
| Minutes with any loss | 1164 | 4 |
| Minutes completely cut off | 47 | 4 |
| Response time, typical | 30 ms | 1 ms |
| Jitter, typical (under 30 ms suits video calls) | 8 ms | 0 ms |
| Minutes too jittery for a video call | 161 | 0 |
The 4 minutes when your router went quiet too were its own overnight restart. They are counted on the router side only.
Every drop
Each run of minutes in which not one signal reached the internet.
| When | How long | Your router |
|---|---|---|
| Mon 5 Oct, 20:14 to 20:21 | 7 minutes | Router up beyond your router |
| Tue 6 Oct, 21:03 to 21:07 | 4 minutes | Router up beyond your router |
| Wed 7 Oct, 19:40 to 19:51 | 11 minutes | Router up beyond your router |
| Thu 8 Oct, 22:18 to 22:21 | 3 minutes | Router up beyond your router |
| Fri 9 Oct, 20:51 to 21:05 | 14 minutes | Router up beyond your router |
| Sat 10 Oct, 07:02 to 07:10 | 8 minutes | Router up beyond your router |
| Thu 8 Oct, 03:12 to 03:16 | 4 minutes | Router silent too house side, not counted against your provider |
Speed
167 speed tests, one every hour, of which 2 reached nothing at all because the internet was down at the time.
| Typical | Lowest | Highest | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Download | 182 Mbps | 38 Mbps | 276 Mbps |
| Upload | 28 Mbps | 3 Mbps | 44 Mbps |
| Download, evening | 80 Mbps | 38 Mbps | 145 Mbps |
Response time while the line was busy with a speed test was 74 ms, against 30 ms when quiet. Above about 60 ms a call starts to suffer, so a call in this house struggles whenever someone else is downloading or streaming.
Day by day
Minutes measured, minutes cut off with the router still up, and trouble minutes, when a video call would have stuttered: any signal lost, or jitter over 30 ms. Download in Mbps.
| Day | Minutes | Loss | Cut off | Trouble | Down, typical | Down, lowest |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mon 5 Oct | 780 | 2.6% | 7 | 163 | 167 | 64 |
| Tue 6 Oct | 1440 | 1.3% | 4 | 185 | 198 | 47 |
| Wed 7 Oct | 1402 | 1.7% | 11 | 180 | 177 | 80 |
| Thu 8 Oct | 1440 | 1.5% | 3 | 191 | 184 | 47 |
| Fri 9 Oct | 1440 | 2.0% | 14 | 187 | 168 | 38 |
| Sat 10 Oct | 1440 | 1.4% | 8 | 166 | 178 | 44 |
| Sun 11 Oct | 1440 | 1.1% | 0 | 191 | 180 | 53 |
| Mon 12 Oct | 660 | 0.1% | 0 | 12 | 222 | 150 |
What to do next
Our advice, based on the week above.
- Send this report to your provider and ask them to look at the mast your router uses, quoting the evening loss of 6.2% and the 6 drops with times.
- Ask about moving the router to an upstairs window facing the mast, or about an outdoor antenna. Your provider can tell you which way the mast is.
- If they cannot fix it, a fixed line (fibre where available) would be the dependable choice for work calls. We can repeat this test on the new line so you can compare.
What we are not recommending
New Wi-Fi equipment. Your router answered our box in every minute except one restart, so the house side is not what is freezing your calls. Spending on mesh or powerline now would not fix this.