TT or BT which is best?

linni

patman99 - don't know how many server sites TT have - is there any way to find out?

baby_frogmella

patman99 wrote: »

Just a thought, but how many server sites do TT have?. The reason that TT slows-down is nothing to do with the exchange and contention ratios (although LLU kit still has to share the same back-bone as BT kit).
Your point of connection to the internet is NOT at your exchange, it is at your ISP's server. This may sharing only 10Gb of bandwith on a 100Gb fibre-optic back-bone to the ISP's local BT exchange (not uncommon as data is charged 'per-kb', so if TT installed and ran a full 100Gb connection, you would be paying £156 p/m in service charges).
If every TT customer is online at the same time, then that bandwidth becomes overloaded and the whole thing slows down.

I don't know how many server sites TT have, however from my experience i always get line speeds 24/7 on talktalk. One of the reasons for this is that TalkTalk heavily throttle P2P traffic whilst leaving all other protocols untouched...great for gaming, streaming videos, web browsing, VOIP etc. AFAIK TalkTalk have plenty of network capacity, if they didn't their forums would be full of complaints

patman99

There are a lot of reasons why b/b speed drops-off in the evenings. For instance, you may be on a local exchange that feeds in to a main exchange using a copper wire backbone instead of fibre optics.

If you are lucky, you will be connected to a local exchange that also houses a repeater exchange as I am, this means that my b/b connection goes to my local exchange where a fibre-optic link then connects to the repeater exchange and straight into a full-on 100Gb f/o backbone that links (in my case) London to Norwich. My bb speed rarely fluctuates.

Other reasons for slow-down may be the sites you visit. For instance sites like Play.com, Amazon and Ebay are very popular and when everyone hits them during the evening this slows things down (but not by much), whereas if loads of people access iPlayer the speed drop is quite significant.

As BT controls the feed to the network there is nothing stopping them restricting the bandwidth available to LLU customers in order to preserve the speed for their own customers.

linni

baby frogmella - I'll try and monitor the line speeds at various times of the day and see if there is much difference and i'll get the router later this week and try it.

patman99 - We don't use Play.com, Amazon or Ebay but I get what you mean, in the evening it's mainly homework done on the college & school websites, that's if we can get on the internet at all. It sounds like BT might be better but I'll monitor things for a while and see what happens. I've found the Buffalo' instruction manual online so i'm off to read it.

linni

Hi again, i've finally managed to get my line stats (I haven't managed to get anther router yet). I hope these are the right ones: SNR Margin: 12 downstream 12 upstream. Line Attenuation: 39 down 23 up. Data rate: 2689 down 859 up. CRC/HRC erros: 0

penrhyn

SNR Margin: 12db downstream 12db upstream.
Line Attenuation: 39db down 23db up.
Data rate: 2689 kbps down 859 kbps up.
CRC/HRC erros: 0

For some reason TT have put a cap on your connection.
With a line attenuation of 39db, you could reasonably expect to be syncing at over 10Mbps, not the 2.6 as you are presently.
Could be there was a previous problem that caused them to reduce the speed to stabilise the line.
IIWY I'd get onto them to up the speed.

Hope you managed to log out by now!

linni

Penrhyn- There shouldn't be anything wrong at all as i've never had any dealings with them at all, since I first joined them. I'll contact TT and see what they say.

Hope you managed to log out by now!

After my panic at not being able to log out. I did just close it down in the end. phew! I will probably look at getting a new router sometime soon but i'm not sure i'd be able to set up a new one myself.

shifty27

Do not under any circumstances go with AOL, there customer service terrible and surveys by ofcom have consistently put them at the bottom of the average broadband speeds chart in the uk. Just a heads up

Your best bet in the options available to you (according to samknows) is either BT or Sky. Orange, Talk Talk and AOL may be the cheaper packages of the lot but a majority of customers aren't happy with their overall services.

Have a look on the sky and BT websties and check your estimated speed connection and compare both in terms of price, download allowance, and estimation of speed.

Hope this helps

linni

Shifty - ok thanks -
I'll compare speeds & see if they are any better.