Since TalkTalk say they will never slow you down it cannot be throttling.

As for the permanent online theory - urban myth.

Indeed it wouldn't.

As for the permanent online theory - urban myth.

I have attended faults , though not for a while, where the punters regular disconnection of the router had made remote monitoring perceive a fault and slow it down accordingly.

Yes have met some who only turn on the ADSL router when about to use the internet and turn off immediately after and doing that multiple times in a day, particularly in an hour is a problem

Out of interest, Zarjaz, from your experience, how much was it slowed down in such situations? Would it have been just a small percentage (eg. a 10% drop) or could it ever have gone down to extremely low speeds (eg. a 90% drop)?

Depends on the line, and the drops Zarjaz is referring to would be visible in the ADSL2+ statistics, with slower connection speeds which does not appear to be happening in your case.

Ah yes, I see what you mean. Thanks for the explanation!

One more observation...

Whilst playing around this evening, during another bad bout of "slow ADSL" (required about 7 router restarts to get back my normal speeds) I noticed that, whilst the slow connection is occurring, if I run the ping command from my laptop, it will generally lose some packets.

So, for example, if I run

ping www.bbc.co.uk

the ping report will come back with something like

Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 2, Lost = 2 (50% loss)

whereas, when the connection is working normally I get a 0% loss.

Does this phenomenon also support the "bad gateways" theory?

Edited by deleted (Thu 22-Sep-16 19:28:06)

visible in the ADSL2+ statistics, with slower connection speeds which does not appear to be happening in your case.

Agreed .... My money is on the ISP end of things.

Bad gateway or a bit of network misbehaving. Where the packets are getting lost might prove useful, i.e. combination of using trace route and ping commands