Traffic management / bandwidth shaping

Everytime TalkTalk call me up trying to sell me their service, they always claim that they have zero traffic management on their network.

Is this true, or are they telling fibs?

It's true

In reference to www.thinkbroadband.com/news/i/5866.html:

TalkTalk Essentials and Plus products now Totally Unlimited
TalkTalk started to offer an unlimited downloads service on its Essentials package to replace its original 40GB monthly usage allowance a while ago, today shows another major change in that there will be no more usage of traffic management in peak hours on either the Essentials or Plus product range.

These changes mean the provider will be able to advertise its products as Totally Unlimited, as opposed to just unlimited, the key difference being that with a plain unlimited service reasonable levels of traffic management are allowed.

Previously the differentiation between Essentials and the Plus product was that Plus had less management, but now the Plus product is promoted as the Plus TV service, including a YouView box and unlimited calls to UK landlines.

Edited by deleted (Sat 22-Jun-13 20:22:30)

beaten to it but here's an addtional link to their policy http://www.talktalk.co.uk/legal/broadband-traffic-ma...

Edited by deleted (Sat 22-Jun-13 20:24:31)

What about customer traffic going through their antivirus system? Is this still the case? I don't like the sound of that.

My neighbor has a TalkTalk connection and there is something just not quite right about it that I can't put my finger on exactly, the equipment/router is all good, as I set it up for him. That said, this was probably before the recent policy change.

Explain the not quiet right?

A lot of people I think benefit by changing the DNS system used.

In reply to a post by MrSaffron:

A lot of people I think benefit by changing the DNS system used.

+1

Use OpenNIC DNS on TalkTalk and never had a problem.
http://www.opennicproject.org/

Laggy in places, does not perform as well as my Zen connection (despite the fact I am on 8Mbps and they are on 20Mbps).

Never thought of DNS, is there an issue with TalkTalk DNS? Seems bizarre an ISP would make their DNS servers a weak point.

In reply to a post by Pipexer:

Never thought of DNS, is there an issue with TalkTalk DNS? Seems bizarre an ISP would make their DNS servers a weak point.

I don't know why but from experience TalkTalk's DNS servers have never been the fastest. But its hardly a big deal, as the likes of OpenDNS, OpenNIC, google DNS etc work just fine.

Would be happy to use the one in the OpenNIC, but wouldn't touch the others with a bargepole. As it happens, on Zen, using GRC DNS benchmark Zen's DNS servers are the best performing.

Two different DNS benchmarking tools report slightly different results:

GRC's DNS benchmarking tool was running in WINE. It reports that the Opal Telecom (TalkTalk) primary name server (62.24.139.9) provided by the peer during PPP session init, is overall fastest [1]

Whereas namebench [2] an open source alternative to the GRC tool, reports the benchmarking results in more detail:

According to namebench, the Opal nameserver (62.24.139.9) has the fastest individual response duration. [3]

However, on average, it is the ns8.bt.net nameserver (194.72.9.38) that is consistently fastest.
Hanging off that IP address, BT apparently runs Nomimum Vantio 5.2.0.1, the carrier-grade DNS caching engine [4]

Following close behind that BT name server is Google's Public DNS-2 server (8.8.4.4).

Although not really much to choose between any of the fastest servers!

cheers, a

EDIT:

namebench reported quite a number of failed responses or timeouts from the Opal primary nameserver, deciding eventually that it was "probably broken". So maybe the Opal server is actually pretty fast but only while its load isn't heavy, at which point it just ignores requests?

[1] http://www4.picturepush.com/photo/a/13387112/img/dns...
[2] http://code.google.com/p/namebench/
[3] http://www5.picturepush.com/photo/a/13387113/img/dns...
[4] http://www.nominum.com/products/core-engines/caching...

Edited by deleted (Sun 23-Jun-13 02:25:52)