Well, whatever the reason I'm seriously considering getting the MAC now. For the past several weeks, since the ping problem in fact, I've been having browser problems. Specifically, On TheTimesOnline I can be browsing and then a link won't work. Neither will any other. I found that closing Firefox and re-opening would fix the problem for a couple of links, so I suspected a problem with that. I run NoScript and thought perhpas something was iffy there (even though I disabled it for that site as a test). I later found that I could get a dead link working by repeatedly clicking it until it worked, so I put it down to something like an advert in the target page being blocked, and each click would cycle the ads until a safe one turned up.

Then I noticed that on news.bbc.co.uk I'd sometimes get the text of pages by no pictures. Or no video. Maybe they've changed something there too and my setting have fallen foul of 'em. Doesn't happen that often, but now and then.

So tonight I'm having problems with the BBC and, by changing only the default gateway on my NIC, I switch to my Enta connection. Et voila - no problems whatever. I go off to TheTimesOnline and spend some time following links waiting for one to fail. None do.

Enta in a week

To recap:
IDNet in a week

Edited by deleted (Thu 05-Mar-09 20:36:24)

In reply to a post by ThePurpleOne:

Well, whatever the reason I'm seriously considering getting the MAC now.

Oh well more bandwidth for the rest of us, bye.

Have you contacted support recently to express you further concerns?

Hi ThePurpleOne

If you could please contact us then we can check your line for you. Out of interest, when you change your default gateway, do you also change nameservers?

Regards
Simon

The TheTimesOnline is indeed quite slow, and, I might add, not standard compliant (45 Errors, 5 warning(s) in the W3 validator), just one of many poorly crafted websites.

TimesOnline pages are incredibly fast here using very tight browser settings, but that means losing some content and javascript links don't work..

TimesOnline UK Home page has 32 references to doubleclick, so there's plenty to block LOL

pings fine here, btw

Not yet, because I wasn't sure if the previous problems were suppose to be fixed. Hence why I posted here to find out.

DNS servers are in-house, so there is no change to those when the gateway changes - the only effect is to use one router or the other.

I've just put a sniffer on my connection and notice that I'm getting TCP retransmissions, and out-of-order warnings. The Times page seems to be particularly prone to giving these, possibly because there's so much stuff on there, but as I type now I can see they turning up. Switching to the Enta link clears these completely.

What information do you require when I contact you? I've previously spent some time compiling information (your ref CID6271) but the situation remained unresolved - it kind of cleared itself up mid-testing around the point where a BT visit was necessary. My router is still getting stupidly high numbers of uncorrected blocks, and similarly high numbers of corrected blocks. However, at this moment the pings are flat, there are no accumulating errors in the router, but I still get periodic retransmissions.

Hi,
Not sure if this will be helpful, but I switched from a Netgear wired router to an SMC wireless one and found that I was getting timeouts on things like Google maps etc. Where Google causes IE to send multiple requests but only a small number were coming back. Turns out it was the firewall settings on my SMC router, they were too tight and causing the transmissions to fail. I've now relaxed the settings and I get all the replies back.

the only effect is to use one router or the other.

Is it the same make/model/revision router in each case?

Not sure how relevant this is, but when I ran a Windows machine I couldn't access the TimesOnLine site at all until I changed my firewall... but the browser gave the error message, not the firewall.

I was running Win98 with Comodo. Changed it for BlackIce and it was fine.