TalkTalk broadband speed halved

aurongrande_2

I'm currently on TalkTalk Pro/Plus package for phone and broadband. Up until early this week, everything was going smoothly and then my broadband download speed halved.

My town has 1 phone exchange located in the town centre not far from the Town Hall Council building which from where I live, is about 1 and half miles away at most.

In general for the whole of the town, the average download speed no matter the ISP is about 3.2Mb. In a couple of small areas you can get 4.2Mb. Up until earlier this week, I was hitting that very speed. Now, it struggles to get 1.5Mb.

I replaced the filter thinking that would help, but that didn't work. So I rang TalkTalk tech support and spoke to someone in India who was a little difficult to understand, but eventually, after running the talktalkmembers.com speedtest which proved what speed I was currently getting, the guy said that because I'm on the pro package, I should be getting faster speeds than this.

So, we went through checking the usual router settings, using LAN cable and not wireless, changed the filter (which I already did), emptying internet cache and turning the router off etc. Each night I turn my router off, and every day I empty the internet caches. (heck, I run CCleaner almost daily.) He even hinted that other TalkTalk members in the area have been calling about slow internet speeds.

Eventually, he patched me through to level 2 tech support. After waiting on the line for 40 minutes, another person in India who was harder to understand answered. After accessing my account, he said that my profile was set to 1.5Mb download, and always has been. However, it's possible that because they updated their system to something called Dynamic Line Management which is automatic, it has halved the speeds. They use to have a system where they manually set the download speeds.

They bloke said that he would refer this matter to the higher ups in the tech department and get back to me on Monday with an update, but apart from agreeing that I should be getting higher speeds than I currently have, there's nothing more he can do.

Has anyone else on TalkTalk ended up with slower speeds recently?

whatajoke1

aurongrande wrote: »

Has anyone else on TalkTalk ended up with slower speeds recently?

Lots have, you just have to looik at there forum. Mine went up 44 % bloody shame that as the service is current good, its just there total disregard for the terms and conditions, and UK Law, that !!!!es me off.

penrhyn

Care to post your router line statistics?

aurongrande_2

Apparently, this issue is not isolated to TalkTalk. My parents BT Broadband has also been halved.

What do you mean by router line statistics?

macman

aurongrande wrote: »

Apparently, this issue is not isolated to TalkTalk. My parents BT Broadband has also been halved.

What do you mean by router line statistics?

http://www.kitz.co.uk/adsl/frogstats.php#34

penrhyn

Router Line Statistics.

These provide information regarding your physical connection with the telephone exchange.
These include the actual upload and download synchronisation speeds that you are connecting at.
Your line attenuation, and noise margin, these give information regarding your distance from the exchange and the quality of your connection.

Reasons for your slow speed may be due to the physical constraints of your line, a fault say excessive noise, or poor internal wiring.
When these have been eliminated what's left is the possibility that the ISP is itself throttling your connection at peak times due to its network being overloaded.
This is quite common where ISPs use BT to deliver their service rather than use their own LLU network.

Knowing how to get at your router line stats is something that all ISPs should tell their customers.

How to do it depends on the make of your router, some common ones are listed here.

http://www.kitz.co.uk/adsl/frogstats.php

aurongrande_2

ok, looking at my router details, the stats it's showing are as follows

Downstream; Upstream
Rate (Kbps): 1432 kbps 458 kbps
SNR Margin (dB): 10.3 14.5
Attenuation (dB): 64.0 36.2

My router is currently at Firmware version 1.14. I've just noticed that DLink has released version 1.16. I'll just download it and update shortly.

Just to mention this again. TalkTalk customers in the area are not alone in that our broadband speeds have been halved. BT's broadband has been halved as well.

kwikbreaks

You have a very long phone line.

Your target noise margin is above the normal default of 6dB right now. That may be because some line management routines have increased it because you've had some instability or it could be that local noise levels have fallen since you last synced. It is normal for noise levels to increase in the evenings and especially after dark when MW radio signal levels increase and interfere.

If you reboot (power off/on) your router during the day and check the stats they will probably show a slightly higher sync and a noise margin close to 6dB - if it is higher then DLM has increased your target to improve stability. If you do get a higher sync it may not hold overnight.

It looks like you are on LLU as the upstream sync is higher than BTw IPstream's 448 (for home connections).

aurongrande_2

When the OpenReach engineer came to install my phone line... well, reconnect it anyway. He connected a device to the line which said how far a dummy signal was going. I don't know how it works, but it said that the end of the line was 540(ish) meters away. That's one of those greens boxes at the side of the road. This one was just round the corner. You could walk to it in 5 minutes.

My router refreshes the status screens every 30 seconds, so I don't actually have to reboot my router to get up to date info. I don't know whether it would hold overnight or not, because I turn my router off each night.

macman

The green box is not the distance we are concerned with-that's just the street cabinet. The distance that matters for ADSL is the distance to the exchange. Your exchange may be 1.5 miles in a straight line, but the cabling may go the long way round via many other streets, it could be twice that distance. As kwikbreaks advised from your router stats, you have a long line, which is the main limiting factor.
Is there any particular reason why you turn the router off every night, as this causes a resynch every time you power it up again?

TalkTalk

Hi aurongrande,

We would need to investigate into this issue in more details for you.

There may be a number of changes we can make to resolve this issue.

IF your line is currently managed by DLM (dynamic line management) then the speed reduction may be due to an automatic change of your line profile, in an effort to improve stability.

We can look at this and make manual changes as necessary to overcome this issue or investigate as necessary.

Regards

Mark

http://www.talktalkmembers.com/forums