TalkTalk Peak time congestion

Hi guys,

I have been having issues with TalkTalk lately with peak time congestion. I provided them with hourly speed tests, ethernet only, no other connections etc, that clearly showed between 6-11pm ish speeds would drop bad, sometimes below 11mbits, when I would usually get 67mbits. I did a few days worth of tests, each showing the peak time congestion speed drops. I tested by connecting the router to the test socket, disabled both WiFi bands and disconnected all but the one ethernet cable. I even checked the windows task manager to see if anything else was using bandwidth.

Their network team "investigated" and came back saying they can't see a problem. I know an engineer visit to my house wont solve anything, because off-peak speeds are great, 70mbits+ and they will end up charging me for the visit.

I can post the link to the TalkTalk forum post here https://community.talktalk.co.uk/t5/Fibre-Broadband/... it's 3 pages long now.

I'm just hoping you guys could give me some advice on what to do here. My contraact ends in September and I plan to move to BT. Is it true that TalkTalk also use their own network equipment?

Thanks very much

TalkTalk has its own backhaul network, and it is possible that the congestion is on that.

So switching to any ISP that does not use the TalkTalk LLU network and its backhaul would fix this.

The VDSL2 service you are on uses Openreach hardware in the street, but once TalkTalk pick up the traffic at the handover exchange how they handle congestion is over to them.

Thanks for the reply. Other than price, do you know if there is any difference between Plusnet and BT, in terms of backhaul and that type of thing? Just wondering if BT is worth the price increase over them.

You'd need to follow TalkTalk's formal complaint process to leave the contract early (https://community.talktalk.co.uk/t5/Articles/How-do-I-make-a-complaint/ta-p/2204670), if they don't fix the problem or let you out the contract then you can take it to CISAS.

It pains me to see people having awful experiences with ISPs (e.g. Vodafone) and then posting on the forums about how they just paid the early cancellation charges to make the problem go away, I just see it as rewarding failure.

The technical details no, but Plusnet and BT can perform differently in relation to backhaul, and the Plusnet support can be harder to get hold of, best route being their own forums but when broadband down that is more problematic.

I pushed the TalkTalk staff a little with a bit of an annoyed reply to them, to ask the network team to look into it further. They talked to the network team again in the afternoon and now all of a sudden they said they might of found a potential issue. I'm waiting for more information now.

Hi, guys I posted a lot more information on the TT forum in my last comment:

https://community.talktalk.co.uk/t5/Fibre-Broadband/...

What do you guys make of it? The packet loss started at the talktalk gateway, so must be either there or with the equipment between me and it.

Could all this be caused by the SNR margin always being 3db, even when it's congested? Would a 6db help keep the line stable? I know it would reduce the sync speed slightly though.

oh, I also made a TBB graph https://www.thinkbroadband.com/broadband/monitoring/...

I've been using hardly any data in the last 24 hours.

Edited by deleted (Mon 06-Jul-20 16:33:33)

Definitely nothing to do with the 3dB.

The only thing that could do to cause packet loss is increase ES.
There would need to be hundreds of ES to show up as packet loss and if that was the case DLM would increase the SNRM above 3dB.

The fact it sits at 3dB means the copper part of the loop is performing well.

The issue then lies within Talktalk's backhaul or on their links at the exchange.

Your BQM looks clean to me though, no visible packet loss. So that just leaves the throughput, which is down to Talktalk.

Edited by j0hn83 (Mon 06-Jul-20 16:47:34)

Awesome, thank you for the advice