BatchFile Posted November 10, 2009 Posted November 10, 2009 Is anyone else having problems with their Tiscali connection at home at the moment? Everything was fine until about 6pm last night when the connection dropped. Rebooted the router, got an IP etc.... but there's something strange about the connection: Pinging bbc.co.uk (or anything else) works fine, websites lookup ok, but after 100kB or so opening pages grinds to a halt. Anyone else seen / seeing this? have tried Opera and IE - and another PC - same result. We're fed up of Tiscali, it's always dropping out etc and will move soon... but this is, well, different!
soveryapt Posted November 10, 2009 Posted November 10, 2009 Tiscali are one of those providers who are absolutely great .. until something goes wrong .. then when that happens they have shocking Customer Service. I have a couple of friends who had to go and switch to virgin to get a package that didn't use a BT line as Tiscali just didn't release their line and because they were the ones who had the agreement with BT, BT wouldn't release it either, so they cancelled their BT lines and went virgin instead, so just be careful when you come to swap. Could cause you a lot of hassle!
Arcath Posted November 10, 2009 Posted November 10, 2009 I have a friend who uses tiscally and hes allways having problems. the last big one was his phone line got struck by lightning, he then had a month of no or unusable internet, during which BT appeared agreed the phone line was broken then proceeded to say we will inform tiscally. he then had to phone tiscally to get them to tell BT to come and fix it
BandyQuill Posted November 10, 2009 Posted November 10, 2009 hi, yeah im with tiscalli, ive been having problems for about a month since they went over to TalkTalk, before i was getting about 0.7 of a meg, now im lucky if i get 0.3 at any time, about had enough of them but no one else will serve us p.s. where abouts in Yorkshire are you mate ?
BatchFile Posted November 10, 2009 Author Posted November 10, 2009 p.s. where abouts in Yorkshire are you mate ? I'm in the bit that's in South Cumbria:D but most of my family's from Sheffield so I'm claiming at least dual "nationality";) For Cricket purposes I've redesignated the 4 square meters that are my office as part of Yorkshire as they're all Lancashire fans round here!:feedtroll:
BandyQuill Posted November 10, 2009 Posted November 10, 2009 ahhhh fair enough... nice area cumbria just logged into my home machine, and i can get onto websites but it wont load ANY pictures or anything as though its not got enough bandwith to load them... will give them a call tonight and have a whine in there faces (prepair for me to be booted from there service tomorrow XD) 1
kmount Posted November 10, 2009 Posted November 10, 2009 (edited) Tiscali are awful; they have broken all of the ISPs they've taken over too. (f2s, nildram, pipex, etc). They are cheap, and for cheap they act cheap at times. about had enough of them but no one else will serve us BandyQuill if you're in Pontefract you have a lot of options available to you, but if not it's worth checking samknows.com to see if you have any LLU providers first, and if not then you should still be able to apply to any 'normal' adsl (ie, bt resold ipstream/datastream) supplier. Edited November 10, 2009 by kmount
kmount Posted November 10, 2009 Posted November 10, 2009 We're fed up of Tiscali, it's always dropping out etc and will move soon... but this is, well, different! First thing to do is investigate whether the ADSL Sync is being dropped or whether it's just the PPP connection (ie, after sync'd to the exchange). If it's the sync that's going it could be your router/line or the line card in the dslam/msan in the exchange which may or may not change if you were to move providers (if it's llu then yes it would but otherwise it may well not). If it's the PPP connection dropping (ie, dsl light stays solid on router) then absolutely right give them some grief for it. Check samknows.com for your exchange to see which other options you have. 1
BatchFile Posted November 10, 2009 Author Posted November 10, 2009 (edited) ahhhh fair enough... nice area cumbria just logged into my home machine, and i can get onto websites but it wont load ANY pictures or anything as though its not got enough bandwith to load them... will give them a call tonight and have a whine in there faces (prepair for me to be booted from there service tomorrow XD) Yup, that's exactly the symptoms I've got. that helps a great deal, at least it's not just us! I'll ring them tonight too (if only to get a MAC!). I love the way their service status (http://www.tiscali.co.uk/cgi-bin/status.cgi is still at 100% Edited November 10, 2009 by BatchFile
kmount Posted November 10, 2009 Posted November 10, 2009 Careful still, even with a mac if you're on llu you may need to pay the new provider to migrate you in. (and change you 'back' onto ipstream/datastream)
WithoutMotive Posted November 10, 2009 Posted November 10, 2009 My Tiscali connection has been perfectly OK for months at the speed I pay for
BandyQuill Posted November 10, 2009 Posted November 10, 2009 what is an LLU Service ? will it be any better for me? i live about 6 miles from the nearest exchange (were in a bit of a dead spot where we live) so i ve come to terms with the fact that ill never get the propsed 8mb...
timbo343 Posted November 10, 2009 Posted November 10, 2009 what is an LLU Service ? will it be any better for me? i live about 6 miles from the nearest exchange (were in a bit of a dead spot where we live) so i ve come to terms with the fact that ill never get the propsed 8mb... I know that feeling too. Just looking where you are from, i am kinda in the same situation. We only have a few LLU services (about 3). We didnt have any problems last night but we have some problems before but it seems to be more exchange based then anything, as 2 other people around me are on tiscali and when mine dies theirs is ok and vis versa. Tim
tech_guy Posted November 10, 2009 Posted November 10, 2009 I don't know if it's related or just a coincidence but last night the internet went really slow and I had problem loading webpages for about an hour. I'm with Sky and a friend in another town with Talk Talk also saw the same problem around the same time.
Jamo Posted November 10, 2009 Posted November 10, 2009 I used to be a Tiscali customer...... V poor speeds 8 Meg connection (verified by downloading from MS site) and yet youtube woudn't buffer videos EVER! Peak speeds were appauling and in the end after leaving they chased me with a debt collection agency despite me not actually owing any money. Even after being told twice by customer service advisors I didn't owe any money I still got calls from their automated computer person saying that I owed money. Thanks to a government group who oversees the whole ISP thing it was eventually cleared up with nothing on my credit record, but stilll what a marathon!
BandyQuill Posted November 10, 2009 Posted November 10, 2009 @ timbo343: it seems around this area the exchanges are pretty spread apart and there are only about 3/4 in the area, my girlfriend who lives in castleford has the same problem and she's only half a mile from the very centre of town, its ridiculous to be honest... id contemplate changing ISP but i know id only have the same problem with speed, ive thought about a BT i-plate to try and bump it up a bit but i cant see it making all that much difference ! Chris
kmount Posted November 10, 2009 Posted November 10, 2009 LLU is Local Loop Unbundling. Kitz explains very well on her site here. If you have it available it typically means you can potentially achieve up to 24mbit/s from an ADSL2+ product instead of the normal up to 8mbit/s offering from BT/others. Now, if you're barely scraping the barrel to 1mbits you're not likely to get much more I'd have thought if LLU is even available on the exchange but it's worth asking. More usefully though, lets get some sync and line stats out of your router to see whether an i-plate would help and whether your isp need to have a quiet word with the phone line.
BandyQuill Posted November 10, 2009 Posted November 10, 2009 yeahhh would be supprised if i can get it any quicker without giving them a quiet word with my user persuasion tool (hammer) line stats (i think) http://i114.photobucket.com/albums/n273/bandyquill/Untitled.jpg
kmount Posted November 10, 2009 Posted November 10, 2009 Yeah, pretty poor quality or very very long line there fella, worth trying the same with it plugged into the test socket (behind the master socket) which will disconnect any internal extensions and provide the best test. Looking at it, the 11.5dB downstream SNR (signal to noise ratio) is why the sync speed is so low (at 0.5mbit), I imagine normally the DS SNR would be lower (closer to 6dB) which would push the sync speed up a bit. A 'normal' BT target SNR is 6dB but there are cases of line instability where this changes to 9dB (reducing your sync to increase stability) or 12dB etc. You used to be able to argue that the line was stable and have it dropped to 3dB (to push sync up) but that seems pretty difficult these days. 1
BandyQuill Posted November 10, 2009 Posted November 10, 2009 its plugged into the main socket because it WONT work on any of the extensions XD is there anyway i can get it upto 1meg? that would be surficcient for the xbox tbh... thats all i want to work, i want to come home from work, turn on the projector and kill zombies
kmount Posted November 10, 2009 Posted November 10, 2009 Have a look through this and see if you can get behind the master socket to get us another set of line stats (the sync speed will probably be the same but im interested in the other figures). This'll allow us to see if there's going to be a decent benefit with an iplate or an ADSL Nation filter here. The dynamic line management stuff will gradually increase your line sync (by lowering the target SNR) which will in turn increase your ipprofile (throughput speed) but it can take some days of stability. (Or a quick call to your ISP to reset the profile but often they can't be bothered, especially if it's Tiscali!).
BandyQuill Posted November 10, 2009 Posted November 10, 2009 that looks like a weekend job to me i shall return with more info XD
kmount Posted November 10, 2009 Posted November 10, 2009 If I don't respond (I'm in London this weekend so will miss some posts) drop me a pm with a slap.
soveryapt Posted November 11, 2009 Posted November 11, 2009 I don't know if it's related or just a coincidence but last night the internet went really slow and I had problem loading webpages for about an hour. I'm with Sky and a friend in another town with Talk Talk also saw the same problem around the same time. THE INTERNETS ARE BROKEN!! ARGH! :drunken_smilie:
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