Moving from TalkTalk

I'm a longtime Pipex/TalkTalk customer, on a small rural exchange, who has always been happy with the service, but the dreaded BACKHAUL CONGESTION is making life intolerable. Speeds go through the floor evenings and weekends.
TalkTalk have shrugged their shoulders and said there's nothing they can do about it - it seems the only option is to go back to dear old BT - but is it really going to make any difference ???

I found this with TalkTalk ( ex nildram) on small market 1 exchange less than 0.7Mb at times. They were not prepared to invest bandwidth on non LLU exchange.
Now with Eclipse, higher cost but reliable 24 hour connection speed
Their are a number of other suppliers, other than BT with their onerous 18 Month contract, most of whom have 1 month contract for ease of movement.
Plusnet, AAISP, Freeola depending on download usage requirement,

Edited by flippery (Tue 18-Dec-12 17:45:27)

if the backhaul congestion is from the exchange then it's a lottery if another ISP will be better - they may be sharing the same link.

Easy check for that - what do others with different ISP's say about their service.

Also TalkTalk/Tiscali has been pretty slow at moving people off old slow products, so an ISP change may boost connection speeds.

Which exchange is it please? The URL of what samknows says would be useful. That will let us check on some forms of exchange congestion as well.

In reply to a post by wilkofife:

- it seems the only option is to go back to dear old BT - but is it really going to make any difference ???

Very very unlikely. Like you i'm on a rural exchange (Scottish Highlands) and used to suffer peak time slow downs on an ADSL1 service...this wasn't with the notorious Sky Connect or O2 Access services but with quality ISPs such as Goscomb, Zen, Netplan etc. Two years ago TalkTalk LLU'd my exchange, joined them immediately and BINGO! peak time slowdowns were a thing of the past. Possibly your only hope is AAISP, who could whip BTW's asses once they see your slowdowns but TBH it happens at nearly every small/rural exchange come tea time. Just pray for LLU at your exchange, that's all i can suggest

It's Strathmiglo in Fife. ESSRM. Sounds a gloomy forecast...

Indeed . No record of Virtual Path congestion for ages, if at all. Last update 14 Dec.

It could just be TT, which is known to be very poor. Or it could just be poor backhaul from the exchange as the others have said. I don't know, sorry.

Well, after a disastrous holiday period, when speeds were laughable - I finally got a new deal with Plusnet.

Speeds have not dropped below 6.3Mbps since. The improvement happened as soon as the router was reset.

Where's all the backhaul congestion gone now, then ?

Well at least you did the right thing.

It's the TalkTalk non-LLU interconnect with the BT Wholesale backhaul that is where the bottleneck was, or the TT backhaul from there to their routers. Not the BT Wholesale core backhaul.