Worth risking LLU?

I thinking of risking requesting upgrading to max/llu and just wondered if it's really as bad as people make out if I end up on LLU. My exchange is Tiscalli enabled so I assume there's a fair chance they'd give me LLU.

I've got an ADSL2+ modem and I'd love the chance of getting higher than 8Mbps (estimates I've looked at suggest I might get about 10Mbps based on my stats), and the prosepect of not being tied to BT.

However if LLU (or Tiscalli) is really so bad I guess I'd be better off opting out. Thing is it might just be better to give it a try first but then I guess I'm stuck on it if it's bad.

Opt out for the love of god. It's likely there are different ISPs on your LLU exchange, try them if you want higher speeds.

I remember posting a message like this back in April when there was talk of people being moved to LLU by Plusnet. Thing is I also wanted to try it out because of the potential higher speeds and being only across the road from my exchange. Most replies were that the majority didn't want LLU because of Tiscali being the network supplier.

According to my router stats I could get the higher speeds but it's never gone over 6Mb down and 512Kb up even though the sync rate was higher:
Down: 7.6Mb, SNR: 12.5dB, Att: 11dB
Up: 512Kb, SNR: 13dB, Att: 3.5dB

From the proposed day of transfer back in May I experienced problems. I was informed that it would be done on the 11th when it was actually the 15th and then when the move was completed I had two days worth of downtime.

Every so often I was experiencing downtime and losing connection even though I was still syncing to the exchange. August was a terrible month, downtime at least 15 times a day.

In the end I decided that the Tiscali LLU was bull and requested Plusnet to move me back to the BT network. They had to oblige and move me back for free after several requests as they never offered me the 'opt-out of LLU' option.

BTs no better but at least i've not experienced loss since the move back and it gives me an easier option to migrate which i'll hopefully do at the end of the month to BE.

The choice is yours but my recomendation is NOT to go with Plusnets LLU.

I requested to stay on BT provision as I had read so many horror stories about LLU on PlusNet.

When they figure out how to make it all work properly I will opt back in.

Unless you can live with the constant problems others report, I would stay on BT for the time being.

I wonder what it's like now though?

PlusNet went through a lot of teething troubles I feel both with LLU and Max but what's the situation now the dust has settled? Has there been any people here who've gone with a switch to LLU in recent months and how did that go?

PlusNet's guide to LLU states that they've had less problems with LLU than with Max.

I'm not trying to defend Tiscali LLU, I just want to get to the bottom of the real situation so I can make a choice. It's hard to judge as people tend to post mostly when they have problems and not when everything's okay.

Though I've read PlusNet do have a trial in place to migrate back to BT now. If migration back isn't too hard it makes it an easier choice so long as they are happy to do so if I have problems with LLU.

Just remember that if you want to migrate back to BT then it will cost circa

In reply to:

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To be safe stay on BT or try a different LLU.

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Precisely.

I'm amazed that people would even consider Plusnet LLU after the recent fiasco. Plusnet FORCED customers on to it. There was no debate, no explanation of the outbound LLU migration issues and very little help given when it all went pear shaped.

If you really want the benefits of LLU why not go with an ISP which specialises in it (be* or UK Online for example) as at least then you'll get a clean unshaped unlimited connection with an ISP who doesn't have to go through a third party every time there's an issue.

An example of a Plusnet LLU customer issue would be:

1 - Customer Mr Smith has been having connection issues to Plusnet and now has no connection at all
2 - The connection is via Tiscali LLU
3 - The connection was fine up until yesterday and the router is still syncing to the exchange
4 - Mr Smith calls Plusnet to log a fault
5 - CS goes through the usual - check your router, wiring, filter, user/password etc - all is ok
6 - CS now log a fault
7 - Gets passed to the LLU faults people who add it to a queue
8 - LLU faults raise it with Tiscali LLU wholesale
9 - Tiscali LLU check their end, if problem not found investigate further
10 - Tiscali then contact BT Openreach
11 - BT Openreach then arrange visit to exchange
12 - BT Openreach engineer sees fault and fixes it
13 - BT Openreach then contact Tiscali to notify
14 - Tiscali contact Plusnet to notify
15 - Plusnet then update ticket
16 - Mr Smith sees ticket update and checks his connection. Connection still down
17 - Mr Smith responds to ticket saying connection still down
18 - Go back to step 7 above and follow through.

I'm assuming this a typical example where you can see the steps taken. If using Bulldog, BE or UKOnline as an LLU ISP then they would only have to contact BT Openreach for any fault checks at the exchange.

Great post - should be a sticky.

Re Bulldog - I think its only a matter of time before Pipex sneak in and implement traffic shaing (in line with what they've done with f2s and Nildram) so they are not an ISP I would feel comfortable recommending anymore.

Last time I looked UKOnline didn't allow running of certain servers and I run a mail and web server. Rules them out for me.

What gets me though is PlusNet are claiming they have less problems with LLU.

Could quite possibly be true as they only have approx 20,000 customers on LLU out of a total 200,000. We would only be able to measure the actual amount if it were 50% on LLU and 50% on BTw.

They were, but I'm sure when I looked a while back Plusnet posted somewhere to say they say 10% faults on BT and 8% on LLU. Not that big a difference given the limited coverage of LLU for Tiscali and the greater control they have...

I got moved to LLU without any Plusnet notification in mid June.

Its worked fine for me and there have been no problems. I suffered terrible peak hour contention problems with ADSLMax and these problems have gone with LLU.

Most of the people on here complaining about LLU aren't actually on LLU...several aren't even on Plusnet!

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Re Bulldog - I think its only a matter of time before Pipex sneak in and implement traffic shaing (in line with what they've done with f2s and Nildram)

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Don't forget that Pipex,F2S & Nildram customers use the BT network which costs more, BD customers are on the C&W network which is not as costley. Any future traffic shaping would either mean routing us through the Pipex network or it would have to be implimented by C&W.

Anyone is free to post about their happy experience with LLU but very few do. Possible explanations:

a) there aren't many happy (PlusNet/Tiscali) LLU users
b) forums tend to attract people who are having problems

You should also differentiate between people who have PlusNet LLU problems (ie customers) and people who comment on PlusNet's LLU policy (anyone).

Simon

Hi

PlusNet changed me to LLU in June, it worked for about half and day then died, it took 11 days to get a connection back. PlusNet support was hopeless.

It's worth noting the following, negative and positive:

• If you are looking for higher upload speeds note that despite PlusNet saying LLU customers get up to 800kps upload, it actually seems capped at 640. On various occasions I have asked about this and have never received an answer from PlusNet.
• There is no BRAS profile like BT so a bad sync has no affect on your download speeds for days afterwards, so you always get what you sync at.
• There is no automatic adjustment like MAX and no training period.
• Because there is no automatic training, the line is set to a conservative level, and that's an SNR of 12db (BT by default is 6db). So if you connect now with a margin of less than 12db, then on LLU, you will find you sync slower.
• ADSL2+ is supported in most exchanges (if your own hardware also supports it), so this gives you some extra db over ADSL1 (depending on distance from the exchange) so this may still allow you to connect at the same speeds as BT Max on LLU as you have extra SNR to play with.
• ADSL2+ is capped at 8Mbits/sec for the majority of PlusNet customers, don

Perhaps we should make your last post a sticky as it contains some good stuff in there?

A title like "How does being on a Plus.net (Tiscali) LLU connection affect me?" would be a good eye catcher.

Edited by caesar_salad (Sun 22-Oct-06 10:48:20)

I am not on Plusnet or LLU, and thank goodness Elcipse will now give people a choice to opt out just like Plusnet, if Tiscali unbundles our Exchange I ill certainly opt out, not that it is going to happen here.

>> Because there is no automatic training, the line is set to a conservative level, and
>> that's an SNR of 12db (BT by default is 6db). So if you connect now with a margin
>> of less than 12db, then on LLU, you will find you sync slower.

I wasn't aware of this - can this LLU SNR be lowered ??

At the moment, on maxDSL my SNR is between 5 and 6 (sync'ing at 5932). I was thinking about moving to Sky's LLU when it became available to me ... but if the SNR can't be lowered on LLU I may not bother.

Hi

Sky's LLU will have it's own profile and way of obtaining a stable speed. My comments only relate to LLU on PlusNet, different LLU providers and ISPs will do their own thing.

Sky appears to have a target SNR of 6db and uses interleaving as ON by default if my friends connection is anything to go by.

Thanks, there's some really useful stuff there.

I think I should follow up my question with this which has answered many of my questions...

http://usergroup.plus.net/tiscali_faq_280706.php

Most of you probably have read it already, but may be of use to those who haven't. Helpful to me anyway.