Broadband package

[colin.hepburn]

Hi All
Well I have just upgraded my Broadband package to fiber today as my local exchange has been upgraded
Only thing is from the exchange to the house it’s still copper but it’s a short run of about quarter of a mile from the exchange this helped with the speed of standard broadband for me so should work the same with fiber.I hope


They say I will get a speed of 32mb we will see it will only costs me the same as my standard connection so hopefully nothing to lose there
Maybe some of you on a fiber connection could comment on the sort of speeds you were promised and what you get in the real world
PS forgot to say my broadband provider is talk talk

[bob orbell]

We are on FO, but as you say, copper from the road into the bungalow, it is quite quick, but sometime's it will falter. We are with Virgin.

[colin.hepburn]

Originally Posted by bob orbell

We are on FO, but as you say, copper from the road into the bungalow, it is quite quick, but sometime's it will falter. We are with Virgin.

Yep it will be interesting to see how well it performs with streaming Netflix and others TV stuff

[Richard]

Hi Col,

We're lucky to have been cabled up round here many years ago (20?) by Diamond cable before it became NTL then Virgin. Fibre to the cabinet in the street then wire to the house.

Been with them for maybe 12 years now when the speed was about 2MB and have always had just the basic package which is now 50MB. We get a bit over that on ethernet PC and N spec wireless laptop.

On wireless the router and position in the house can have an effect and speed used to drop away to a couple of MB in the worse corners. The latest Superhub 2AC is very good though, much better coverage, but has just failed after only 3 days It went down today but they enabled my old hub over the phone and are sending a new one.

This is fine for all regular surfing and watching films on a You View recorder which does the catch up TV thing very well. The You View box needs a wired connection and the TV is in another room. So we went for a TP link powerline connector (plugs into the mains at either end with ether net cables to the router one end and the TV box at the other) and we're surprised how good it is. Could well be worth using for a computer connection to another room if you're not on wifi

[John Caswell]

Hi Colin et al,
Up until about 2 years ago I was on dial up on Tesco.net (Virgin Media) then the local exchange - 6kM away! - went over to Fibre but not to the local box about 200m away until 6 months later.
I was told by Virgin that there were not enough subscribers to warrant the interface to be installed.
The only other supplier was BT which I changed to the nett result being an increase in speed from about 56Kbps to about 60Mbps.
The workshop is about 10m away from the hub, so I tried WiFi, but in the wet it was not reliable, then moved the hub into the loft but still poor in the wet. Finally finished up with a pair of Zyxel ethernet thro' mains units. Not ultra fast but reliable.
I think if you are going to use stuff around the house cable is probably best, with WiFi and mains feeds on a par.

John

[colin.hepburn]

Hi All
Thanks for the reply’s
Lucky I am all on one level so not really got problems with Wi-Fi
My standard broadband speed is around 10 to 12Mb so the 32mb Fiber connection should make a big difference as it’s at the same cost too.

The only units’ I use on wifi are my HDTV which works well on the standard speed and my printers. Which are one in bedroom and the other laser is in the workshop the main and workshop computers are hard wired
One thing I have to say about talk talk is that’s it’s been consistent.

But has to be the worst for customer support and stuff
But most ISPs are like that it seems

[colin.hepburn]

Well typical talk talk Broadband **** up again
No emails or phone call or tracking info on my new order update for the fiber connection after phoning the customer complaints

Today when I phoned I t turns out the order was taken and the details read out to me over the phone but she did not processed it thought the system

After a few stiff words from me it has been sorted and I got the email with all the details this time and as they admitted it was there mistake

They refunded me £50 very good but is it worth the hassle also two different people quoted two different speeds 17 to 32mb and today 28 to 42mb for the same package well we will see

[Greg.]

I hope Talk Talk get you sorted soon Colin. I wasn't going to comment on this thread but on reflection will add some of my own observations. I have Virgin cable, supposedly one of the fastest services available, however, recently I have set up music streaming with an RPi with Hi-Fi Berry. On installation I suffered a lot of signal drop out when streaming although this has now improved and only occasionally get the problem which also affects iPlayer etc through my Humax box for Freesat. Interestingly it happens when broadband traffic is likely to be busiest. Virgin are probably the biggest supplier of broadband services in my area and are probably over subscribed in relation to the quality/quantity of service they can provide. This is a well acknowledged problem in my city.

I have a friend who is an IT maintainance and support company director and he advises me there is no way around this problem short of changing provider until such time when the ISP upgrade their system to meet demand.

His advise to his clients and to me is to sign up to Plusnet. His clients (some being big commercial companies) who have done this have apparently, never looked back.

Also, I have been advised that when you run a speed test of your system, your ISP will detect this and have incorporated software to ensure your results read favourably regardless of whether the speed of service you are receiving is bad.

I don't know if that is true or a conspiracy theory, but certainly, when I suffer drop out on music streaming and I carry out a test, the results suggest a very healthy fast supply, which is not reflected in the experience of service being received.

Just my two p'worth.

[Richard]

A few years ago I'd have agreed about poor isp service but it does seem better these days. Back then we regularly had NTL "outages" for days at a time and when I complained got a very "take it or leave it" attitude from them. I looked into going to BT but when chatting about the problem to one of my customers she said they had BT and had been disconnected a week with another week to go before they'd be fixed, so it seemed other isps were the same.

This continued for 5 years or more when it was NTL. I remember one laughable conversation when I was going to leave and retentions offered us a double speed package for the same price in compensation. I said double nothing is nothing(!!) and that all I wanted was the service we'd paid for.

Anyway fast forward to the Virgin branded company and it's better. Recently our new Superhub packed up but I had the call centre on the (free) line at 6.30am in the morning for an hour. They reinstalled our old Superhub (I swapped boxes and they pressed switches) and 2 days later we received a replacement hub. All in again working well.

On the speed test thing I'm not sure as the tests I've run over the years have always agreed with what I already sensed from surfing. In addition, I've wandered round the house with the laptop playing the speedtests in different rooms finding good and dead spots and the tests confirmed the different performances. I think that sort of thing would be hard for an isp to control.

Re drop outs Greg, are you streaming wifi or ethernet cable? Which Superhub are you on, original Superhub1, 2, or 2AC? In my experience 1 was ok, and 2 no better, but 2AC has much better wifi coverage. If wifi is still the problem put the Superhub into modem mode and connect your own good wifi router. Also, we recently bought a new HP 5532 wireless printer to work with an ethernet PC and a wireless laptop on our home network. For a week I was frustrated by it, seemingly randomly, dropping offline.

I did 2 things which fixed the problem totally but I haven't spent time isolating which fixed it. You may want to try these as neither will have a bad effect and both can be switched back.

1) Reserve IP addresses so the PC and printer get the same ones at every reboot. Otherwise DHCP allocates IP addresses depending on which other devices are already connected and so IP numbers change and devices may not find each other;

With your network up and running go 192.168.0.1 from your browser and then into Advanced Settings. Under DHCP Reservation select your PC in Attached Devices and its details will appear in Add Reservation underneath. Click Add Reservation and it will be listed then in the IP Lease Table at the bottom. Repeat this for your Humax if it's showing and any other devices you want. Then, at any future reboots those devices will always get the same IP number so the other devices can find them.

2) Under Firewall tick the 3 pass-through boxes.

[colin.hepburn]

Hi All
Well have been up and running Fibber Broadband a few days now seems to work fine thou sometimes I don’t see much differences in speed when surfing
at first but this has improved over the last week or so
But when streaming Netflix in HD its good Speed seems steady at 49.04 Mb

Not bad as talk talk said they cap it at 32mb so I may have something to say if they do that
Speed test link
http://www.which.co.uk/technology/br...et-connection/