I've been with Talk Talk for about 3 years, but the last few months have been dire with constant hang ups, disconnections(having to restart the router 20-30 times a day) and speeds down from 3-4 Mps to 1Mps at best and often much much less at popular times.

But will another ISPs be any better? Presumably they use the same hardware at the exchange. And does the Broadband provider with the best reputation nationally necessarily have the best service locally? We don't have cable in the area so that is not an option.I'm tempted to go to BT purely because those people I have known with issues at the exchange had so much trouble getting anything done about it until they transferred to BT who suddenly got interested.

Some ISPs will have their own hardware in popular exchanges but more often than not you'll be sharing BT kit. The local loop is obviously the same regardless. Have you discussed the issues with TalkTalk? There's a few tests they can do their side and if they do suspect a fault can get a BT engineer out. If TalkTalk are no help then I'd definetly try switching ISP as many have 1 month contracts now so apart from a bit of hassle and probably losing your connection for a day or two it's fairly simple to try a different ISP. Personally I'm with Zen, who do charge a bit of a premium but have a solid rep and their customer service is very good.

The only "local" consideration is something called contention ratio and this is the max number of other people who may be sharing the total bandwidth of, say, 8mb/s. You don't get it to yourself, you know…

The ISP will advertise the max people who share a line but you'll never work out the reality. I think I must be very lucky; I must be the only one with 16mb/s broadband as I can always saturate the line when downloading files from apple etc.

Rachel

Interesting to hear that your speed has dropped. I have a customer on a long line and they have had major problems but only since the exchange was upgraded from 8Mb to 20Mb. I think the infrastructure was able to cope better with slower line speeds.

We even tried LLU broadband from a different ISP and although that worked for a couple of months the speed went from 750Mb to virtually non-existent. They said that there would be a maximum of 20 people using the LLU line which seems remarkably little but obviously even that was too much with a long line!

Almost certainly down to contention ratios. Each ISP has their own router in the exchange. It's up to them how many customers they have on one box before they invest in another one. That's why the line speed will fall, as new customers get added. They probably don't react until they get a number of complaints about the same router

Thanks for the responses.

I did a couple more speed tests, one at 10am yesterday when most of the real world was at work and I got 5.7Mbps so it shows there is nothing wrong with the line and then another set between 10 & 11 last night and didn't manage to get a better result than 250kbps and some as low as 50kbps! Clearly a terrible contention ratio – talktalk doing broadband on the cheap.

I'll give them a call to complain, give them a week or two to see if anything improves then move on.

We had similar problems to you and it turned out to be a damaged line at the point it came in to the house.

I'm with tiscali (now talk-talk?) my speed has gone down from 2.2 mbps to 196Kbps in the last few weeks.