In reply to a post by OpenAccess:

Also are all other sockets dead when the you are using the "Test Socket" Not all installers do a good job, and sometimes the wiring does not confirm to good practice.

I did this test last night, and the other socket is indeed dead when I take the master socket out of the test socket.

In reply to a post by locutus:

Have you tried pinging your default gateway (the router) just to make sure it's not your end?

I did the following test last night:. The router gave me this information:

ADSL port: 78.156.55.48
Gateway IP address: 78.146.48.1
LAN port: 192.168.0.1

Now pinging 78.156.55.48 and 192.168.0.1 is fine, no packet loss.

But pinging 78.146.48.1 shows up packet loss.

What do you make of this?

So here an update on Wednesday morning. (Problem started Sunday afternoon.)

Thanks to a very helpful neighbour (Thanks Trevor!), I managed to test my connection with an alternative router (a Netgear DG834PN in this case), and with alternative ethernet cable, adsl cable and adsl filter.

The same problem occurred, again also with the test socket.

According to my limited knowledge, and on recalling that TT CS said that they can see no problem on their side of the line, this points to a problem with the phone line between my house and the exchange, or a problem at the exchange itself.

Maybe some other ISP changed something somewhere at the exchange on Sunday afternoon?

I am now awaiting the £50 engineer that is due to come tomorrow morning. I would hope I do not have the pay the £50 fee if he confirms that the problem is indeed outside of my house.

Many thanks for all your helpful comments again!

In reply to a post by Myth:

i would run 4 concurrent ping tests:

Thanks. See my post above for the results.

So by now you should have had your £50's worth of 'Cube' engineer, why did they organise this when from what you have said, it clearly isn't an issue in your house, and that's all these guys can test for you ??

The 50 sobs would be for a Talktalk 'cube' engineer.

Actually, and surprisingly, my internet works again as of 7pm tonight!

I still need to check with Mark from the TT member forum if he had anything to do with it.

Anyway, I managed to cancel the engineer's visit, which was scheduled for tomorrow morning. As I cancelled after 4pm on the day before the appointment, a charge of £24.99 would normally be due. But the guy on the phone very kindly said that this would be waived, given that the cancellation is not my fault etc.

Anyway, I am very happy to have my broadband up and running again.

It would be very interesting to find out what the cause of the problem was.

It would be very interesting to find out what the cause of the problem was.

Would be, wouldn't it. Your best bet would be via your TT contact, Mark.

packet loss on routers may just be some QOS or something coming into effect, as the router drops low priority traffic, so you need to ping further into the network or something like www.google.co.uk to prove there is a real issue.

In reply to a post by locutus:

packet loss on routers may just be some QOS or something coming into effect, as the router drops low priority traffic, so you need to ping further into the network or something like www.google.co.uk to prove there is a real issue.

Well, I wrote in my original post that I had pinged www.talktalk.co.uk, with the described results.

So what you are saying is that the packet loss I saw when pinging the Gateway IP was merely due to it being considered low priority traffic by the router?

I would rather think that as the Gateway IP itself was already part of a different subnet, the pinging went via some other TT server, which caused the packet loss.

But I am no expert on this, so I may be wrong. For example, I do not really know what the connection between the ADSL port IP and the Gateway IP is.