Is there anyone else on the Wirral having problems with thier phones or intermerwebs today? We've lost the use of our phone and the internet keeps dropping and my fiance can't access the internet but can use her phone! Just wondering if anyone else is in the same boat before I tear the house apart checking filters and wasting money ringing them.

my talk talk intermerweb is always faulty! my wireless laptop is wired to my modemy thingy as the "wireless" doesnt work! hence shopping around for a new supplier =- sky any good anyone?

Sounds like your filter. They don't last long, sadly.

I know how crappy thier filters are, we go through the ones they send us as fast as we go through socks. It's back on for now but itll go off again

The routers they supply suck and their 'up to 20mb!' sales line is bullshit. I'm like 200m from my exchange and get 8.5mb downstream max. That said the line hasn't dropped in over a year so at least the uptime is good.

If it's speed you're after go for Virgin Media.

They used to make indestructible socks when I was a lad,the socks lasted for years but your feet wore out.Sorry, off topic.

Problems have stopped at my house and at the fiances at the moment, all normal services restored. I was dredding the call to the call center from my mobile!

I'm on talktalk and get over 20mb down load speeds most of the time. I've never had a filter fail - despite the call centres getting you to change them as the first guess.

Service does get mucked around with between 1am and 3am on occasions, and the bandwidth is wound back at peak times, this was a change that they made to satisfy the whingers who had heavy downloads, instead of limiting the heavy users, they now limit everybody.

huge problems with it today - been having problems since friday but today has been horrendous.

Filters don't go wrong. They're just some passive components.

UP TO 20Mb/s.

I'm on TalkTalk too, here's my router stats:

Statistics Downstream Upstream
Line Rate 17256 Kbps 561 Kbps
Noise Margin 3.6 dB 11.5 dB
Line Attenuation 27.5 dB 11.6 dB

2.5km from the exchange. Rock solid connection, stays up for weeks at a time. But then I know how to configure the kit properly.

Tell me genius, how do you configure a pre-built non-flashable sky router which you can't change because sky won't give out user and passwords to their clients accounts? You plug it in and press go, there's nothing else to config on the box. So that said, all things being equal, I should be riding that 20mb line, correct?

GTFO

Its says "upto"....

Its mainly down to transmission speeds. If you have a good connection to your ISP and noone else is using that connection, you should get close, if its busy you are going to get less.

In theory you could get 20mb/s, but in reality, you get "upto" 20mb/s

Uh huh, which I'm well aware of. I've worked with exchanges and LLU lines professionally. Like I said, their spin is bullshit and their call center monkeys don't know anything about anything that isn't written in their scripts. Didn't mean to turn it into an argument, the guy asked how sky was and I gave my opinion.

It's not like there isn't hundreds of papers about ISP's claiming 'up to 20mb speeds!' that turn out to be false.

We do actually get a lot of calls for the Smartedge routers that Talk Talk use, but they also have a fair amount of redundancy built in to their network.

Transmission speed is always a grey area, as its very dependant of where you live.

IMO a reliable ISP is more important (as well as their cost and the deal you can get), though all suppliers have a lot of redundancy, and ISP issues are quite often down to imtermittant board failures in the routers. Any ISP problems are usually short lived, fustrating as it may be at the time

Sorry, I thought you actually had a clue. My mistake.

You don't have to use the router that $ky give you. It's against their Ts and Cs but you can use any router you want.

You will need the login and password to put into the replacement router and $ky won't give you this, but it is possible to extract them from the original router. I'll leave it to you to find out how for yourself, assuming you know how to use google.

Once you have done that you can tweak away to your heart's content.

By the way, I use an ex-$ky Netgear DG834GT bought brand new from fleabay for 2 quid and flashed the DGTeam firmware. Highly recommended.

Please, anyone knows how to hack the user and pass from the router. I'm talking about people in general, not people that know how to bypass Sky's stupid policies using third person sniffing scripts.

Even once this is done I'm at a loss to explain how you think you can get decent speed increases through firmware options. Feel free to explain.