After Talktalk's outage a few days ago I've been keeping an eye on their service centre where you can run a line test, allegedly. On Monday the number that belongs to the guest house flagged up an invitation to do online chat with a Tt person because there was a problem. He ran his test on the line and said there was a persistent problem and he would book an engineer. I hadn't noticed a problem, Tt's basic internet gives me 9-13 Mb which is quite satisfactory.
This morning a very jovial engineer, who lives at the other end of the village, appeared and I gave him access to the house. He curled his lip when he saw the Pluscom socket with telecom port and RJ11 port I'd fitted to replace the sun-yellowed and cracked main BT socket and he replaced it with one branded Openreach. 'You'll need a filter for that', he said. So I asked if he couldn't have fitted a socket with an RJ11 port. He couldn't do that for Tt, because every provider, he said, had their own version of a filter. I found a filter but it's annoyingly untidy and I'm sure that a guest will unplug it or drip coffee on it or something. Guests are like that.
Special filter for each provider? Really?
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>> Special filter for each provider? Really?
No, what he means is its beyond openreach's scope of work to provide anything other than a standard socket. TT does not pay for anything out of scope.
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Most modern wall boxes come with filters built in now with strong advice not to fit another filter.
It might be worth double checking on Google to see if yours is one of them.
Re Talk Talk. The whole service was down this morning pretty much across the south of the country.
Over the last 12 months I have had problems with no internet that TT have said are local to me and don't appear on the down detector web site. They say its a problem at the exchange and its usually fixed in 24 hours. Right pain though when you work from home a lot.
Last edited by: zippy on Fri 29 May 20 at 19:15
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>>
>>
>> Re Talk Talk. The whole service was down this morning pretty much across the south
>> of the country.
That explains something. I deleted 13GB of redundant files, mainly windows updates, this morning, restarted and half my 'home' pages wouldn't load. Initially I thought I'd caused a problem. Looked like a DNS issue. TV was on (all streamed here) and continued working. I restarted the router and things were worse (TV stream would not restart). I set some new DNS servers and it all worked again.
I have probably given myself credit in error and it mended itself.
It's rare I have problems with TT fibre. I can't remember a problem in the last year. It connects at 40 meg down and 10 up, and actual speed is usually mid 30's down, 9 up.
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>>It's rare I have problems with TT fibre. I can't remember a problem in the last year. It connects
>>at 40 meg down and 10 up, and actual speed is usually mid 30's down, 9 up.
How do you test that?
The reason is I ask is that I use speedtest.net and the results are interesting. My service provider is VTR and the server it automatically chooses is GTDGrupo.net - both telcos in Santiago.
The result is 109/19
If I force it to use Movistar Buenos Aires then the result is 46/4
If I force it to use Vodafone London then the result is 21/9
Since you're in the UK the chances are that most of the websites you access are in the UK or at least in Europe. However, since I am in the a*** end of nowhere, almost anything I will use is international and probably intercontinental.
It makes a huge difference. Also, of course, is the difference between speed and bandwidth.
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speedtest.net used to be the one of choice for some of the techies at work, and it's the one I stick with. Virgin kindly increased my speed to 200 Mbps and speedtest reports I am getting 221 (and 21.4 Mbps for download, which is capped)
If I use the VPN to go to Chile I get a much slower ping and download of 4.57 Mbps.
Similar ping to Argentina but only 0.47 Mbps!!
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FAST.COM is by Netflix to test suitability of download speeds for streaming. It's the one out IT dept uses to test speed.
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Presumably though Netflix has a server in most countries and so is testing in-country speeds. Which in Chile are fine. At least in the 5 or so cities.
It's the international stuff which is so crap.
Out of interest though, it gave me 73/1.6
Last edited by: No FM2R on Sat 30 May 20 at 01:07
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>> Presumably though Netflix has a server in most countries and so is testing in-country speeds.
>> Which in Chile are fine. At least in the 5 or so cities.
>>
>> It's the international stuff which is so crap.
>>
>> Out of interest though, it gave me 73/1.6
>>
I guess the IT dept that I liaise with is only concerned with local connectivity.
My employer is a worldwide operation and I guess they use dedicated facilities for worldwide file server and transaction traffic.
(There are very big satellite dishes on the roof of one of the data centres that I have visited but I guess that's a back up as latency would likely be slow.)
Last edited by: zippy on Sat 30 May 20 at 02:32
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>> FAST.COM is by Netflix to test suitability of download speeds for streaming. It's the one
>> out IT dept uses to test speed.
>>
Cheers not heard of that site. I just tried and got 10 up and 3 down, which is roughly what I'd expect.
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To a Maidenhead server, I am 226 down, and 11.9 up, 37ms ping time
To La Serena, Movistar Chile, its 123down and 11.6 up 226ms ping time.
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Fast.com to the UK gave me about the same result as before
Fast.com to Chile, I got a message which said "Could not reach our servers to perform the test. You may not be connected to the internet"
How did it send me that message then?
EDIT: Oh I think I know. Presumably because the page was already loaded from the previous test.
Last edited by: smokie on Sat 30 May 20 at 09:41
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>> >> FAST.COM is by Netflix to test suitability of download speeds for streaming. It's the
>> one
>> >> out IT dept uses to test speed.
>> >>
>>
>> Cheers not heard of that site. I just tried and got 10 up and 3
>> down, which is roughly what I'd expect.
>>
Neither had I. My son, who works for a company doing IT for local schools, prefers speedof.me but it takes ages and the pretty waves make me nauseous. I just use OOkla aka speedtest.net.
The house that the BT engineer attended is giving me stonking speeds for 'ordinary' broadband 13 down and .8 up. It's better than it used to be. ISTR it was 9 down and .7 up when we last had guests in March.
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>> How do you test that?
Speedtest.net usually. I only check when there are problems, to narrow it down a bit.
Last edited by: VxFan on Sun 31 May 20 at 19:39
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I've had my leg pulled haven't I ? - Zero
