Hello. We have a woeful internet speed of 3mb into the house. (Fibre is not available) so when watching films via cartoon hd etc, it regularly fails to stream.
Any tips for a better setup, I wondered if a better shop bought router may be the answer, as I would have thought that the plus net one isn’t a top spec unit. ? Thank you

We recently changed to Plusnet and their router was much worse than the previous Talk Talk one, so I’m using the TalkTalk one instead.

The Billion 7800 routers seem to have good reviews. We swapped from the BT one and our speeds increased from 1.8 mbs to about 2.5 mbs. A bit of fiddling around with the Signal to Noise ratio settings means we can run at about 3.1 mbs though it is slightly less reliable.

There might be milage in a better router, my old one was 10 years+ and still worked better than EE’s so called bright box (which would not allow streaming even though we get 16Mbs over ADSL)! It’s an extensive gamble though.

I’m the same, rural location and used to struggle to get any video to stream. Had Bt out and made very little difference but swapped to a secondhand billion 7800 router off here and has helped. Less drop out and can watch you tube ok now most of the time. Still takes ages to down load stuff compared to friends house just a mile away that gets bloody fibre!

Are you hard wired router to device or wi-fi? That will help.

It’s worth finding out the spec of your current router – it’ll be a low end generic model under whatever branding is on it – swap for a mid-range netgear or something.

Are you sure the problem is your end? These dodgy streaming services are not only immoral are pretty flaky. Netflix, NowTV, iPlayer was fairly robust in HD for me when I was stuck with 4Mbps at my old place.

How does it connect to the adsl, are you in the master socket? Home wired extensions are the bane of adsl.

If you have extensions get a filter plate for the master socket and plug router into master socket. The removal of the bell wire (done by the filter plate) is worth at least +.5mbs in most cases.

Have you checked the speeds available to you from other service providers?

Sam knows

eckinspain – Member
We recently changed to Plusnet and their router was much worse than the previous Talk Talk one, so I’m using the TalkTalk one instead.

Exact same here, speed and reliability was ok near the plus net hub one router but dropped off horrendously with distance. So I’m back on talktalk super router. Although with just 3mbs to start with might be harder to notice.

If you’re streaming,make sure nothing else is logged into the router at the time,as you can’t afford to share the bandwidth.I’ve used Billion routers and I think they are very good.

Oh,if you’ve got 3 or 4G,you might do better setting up a phone as a wifi hotspot,depending on your contract.

Another thought. Make sure none of your devices is automatically backing up photos & video to the cloud. I think upload will have priority over download making any sort of internet use extremely slow until the backup is complete. If you have autoback up set it to work overnight.

Upload does not have priority, you get one speed down (the quoted speed) and normally max 1Mbs up (ADSL, other types vary). But if all the upload if used then a connection can appear slow as you struggle to make requests to the outside world.