Just putting this one to be bed (hopefully)

Been a good week this week.

Firstly, TTB (driven by Adam) have managed to identify whatever was causing the poor single thread speeds and now getting single thread speeds that match the multi thread speeds.

http://www.thinkbroadband.com/speedtest/results.html...

Secondly, Pulse8 have just announced a drop in their pricing, so my 80/20 fibre will drop from £44 to £39.90 from 1st April (plus £2 for a fixed IP).

So will be staying put for the time being.

Looks good. I assume its repeatable.

Is the speed test auto-detecting Pulse8 as well now? It used to pick up TalkTalk. The change could be part of when they upgraded the packages to business level rather than retail.

They must now have their own allocated IP address range. Which is surprising seeing as I wouldn't have thought there were any ranges available. Unless TT have released some to them.

Yes, it is repeatable, although I do get an occasional first test blip which disappears if I do a follow on retest.

I discovered a week or so ago that by doing PPP disconnects and reconnects I could bounce myself onto a good connection.

Pulse8 have always been on business connections as far as I am aware. (They definitely were when I joined them last November.) It's just that they are all on the highest priority now, which you only used to get if you paid £6 more for a Biz product.

Pulse8 are just TTB resellers, so the speed test still picks up TalkTalk automatically.

There is a confusion there about business connections.

All Pulse8 have always been on TalkTalk Business Wholesale, but that is basically equivalent to BT Wholesale.

They have also always had "Home bundles" and "Business bundles". The same as most BT Wholesale based ISPs have.

AIUI the Pulse8 Home bundles now run on the same service as the Business ones, with the Business ones still having some better provision. I haven't looked into it in depth though .

Edited by RobertoS (Fri 03-Mar-17 23:12:40)

Just had a trawl through my email history with Pulse8.

When I contacted them regarding migration, Adam wrote to me at the time of migration and said "We use the back end of Talk Talk Business.".

There has never been any indication in terms of my contact with them, either via email or or on calls, that we are on anything other than a TTB connection

And after all they are a TTB reseller, so it is difficult to see how they can be offering anything other than a TTB service.

It is still possible I've got hold of the wrong end of the stick though.....

It's hard (for me at least) to explain. Somehow I might have confused you by even mentioning BT Wholesale earlier, when I was just equating TT Business Wholesale to it. I wasn't meaning the Pulse8 Home packages ran on BTW.

The confusion is caused by TalkTalk providing a service to resellers, and calling it TalkTalk Business Wholesale. Easiest perhaps to rephrase it as TalkTalk Wholesale for Businesses that are Resellers.

TalkTalk's own service has a Retail product range and a Business product range.

BT that many of us use has Home user and Business user ranges. Plusnet has Home user and Business user ranges. Both of those ISPs sell only BT Wholesale services. But what if BT Wholesale was renamed to BT Business Wholesale? Purely the name would change, not the services.

Similarly, in reverse, TalkTalk Business Wholesale could have been called TalkTalk Wholesale.

Think of John Lewis Broadband. That is basically a resold Plusnet service running on Plusnet routers and backhaul. With Plusnet relying on BT Wholesale.

Pulse8 has always had two ranges, Home user and Business user. The Home ranges were TalkTalk provided by TT Business Wholesale but running on the same "network/backhaul/systems" as TalkTalk Retail. At higher priority than TalkTalk Retail itself. In a similar way that John Lewis runs on BT Wholesale via the Plusnet internal network for the ISP services.

The Pulse8 Business ranges may or may not have been on the same but with higher priorities still, I don't know. The same as on ADSL Max BT Wholesale had a higher level service called Max Premium or something like that. Higher priority through the network and 832Kbps upstream instead of 448Kbps.

Puilse8 recently upgraded so the Home ranges, and obviously now if not previously the Business ranges, run directly on the TalkTalk (Business) Wholesale backbone. Neither is a resold TalkTalk Retail service.

It's more like John Lewis ditching Plusnet and becoming a stand-alone or more likely a white label ISP on BT Wholesale. Which is what years ago Vodafone were, and the Post Office were until they handed it over to TalkTalk instead. EE Broadband even now I think is BT Wholesale white label. No routers or internal network of their own is the best way of describing it.

Thanks for the explanation Bob, even if it leaves me slightly nonplussed about what connection I actually have.

Happy to publish the Gateway servers I connect to in an attempt to confirm whether or not they are Business or Home gateways.

Whether these will be common or not with what the true TalkTalk Business or Talk Talk Residential users are seeing is anybody's guess.

If you are on a Fibreoptic Home package you are on a business grade backhaul connection, just like the Fibreoptic Business packages are. You also get the enhanced care that goes with it, primarily I think a faster TalkTalk/Openreach response to fault reports.

Before Pulse8 recently upgraded all their Home packages for all customers they were (AIUI) directly reselling the TalkTalk home product not on the business grade. Though the Pulse8 traffic was on a higher priority than TT Retail customers.

It was reported a while back that TalkTalk retail customers were on the lowest priority, 7. Pulse8 customers were on 3, 2 or 1 depending on which package they bought.

What TalkTalk priorities Pulse8 customers are on since the upgrade I don't know. But they aren't on the retail service anyway now.

I've seen that thread, but IIRC it was regarding ADSL services, so not sure how applicable it was to the fibre services.

According to Adam, the only difference between the P8 Home and Business packages is that "the business lines will have Care LVL3 instead of Care LVL2".

I wonder how the priority works too. Is this only when nesr full capacity and the P8 traffic will take priority over TT residential users?