Forums Forums Enthusiast Forums A - Z Gadgets & Tech Router problems. Talk Talk?

Has anyone had Router problems this week and been unable to get internet?

I am with Talk Talk and parts of the day get a message to state I am not connected.

Had no problems in liscard. Will check when I get home.

Pax I too am with Talk Talk. I was with Virgin without any problems, they tansferred us to Talk Talk, and every day I have the same problem as you are mentioning.

Fine through the daytime, but once 11pm to midnight comes, it's an absolute pain in the neck. On of, On off constantly.

No connection, no connection, no connection every five minutes.

Don't know what they are up to but not satisfactory at all.

I used to have that all the time but must admit been quite good lately. I was with tesco and they transferred me to Talktalk. They gave me no incentive when became a customer so a couple of months ago having seen it being offered lower to new customers I rang up and complained, reduced my monthly bill and so they should. Maybe worth a phonecall see what they can do for you. If I remember right I had to take cover off my phone socket and plug it it without something they test,it worked quite well without cover on so I've left it off.

You can always check the state of their service by visiting this site....
http://downdetector.co.uk/problems/talktalk

That's providing you have an internet connection.

On a slightly different note, I have just bought their 76 Mbps service boost. I ran a speed check and found my upload speed had increased from 1.9 Mbps to 19.5 Mbps but the download speed had hardly increased and was only 38 Mbps.
I rang talktalk and after spending half an hour with an Indian gentleman who I could barely understand, and repeatedly watching my routers lights while he reset it and lost all the passwords in it, he decided he would escalate my call and I was promised a call back within 24 hours. (which never happened)
I resolved the issue by switching off my router for half an hour. When I turned it back on, my speed was up to 75.5 Mbps.
My point is, if you have issues, try switching off the router for half an hour and see if it fixes things before you take the next step of applying for a headache trying to decipher what an offshore agent is telling you.

True to form, no problems all day or evening @ 11.04pm and it's started already.

Can't be bothered battling with it. Night folks. Will try what Habdab says tomorrow..

Yep, I was sceptical that the half hour off would work but it did with mine as well a while ago, but this is only applicable with fibre connections.

Best fix for non-fibre is to reboot the router only during the worst connection time, this trains the signal when noise is at its worst and may prevent it dropping out, you may lose a bit of speed the rest of the time.

If you do not have any joy with talktalk and their telephone non-help call centre, escalate your problems with Milton Keynes staff on the talktalk forum although some of their best staff there have left they normally get things resolved and even talk sense.

Thank you so much everyone. Your advice has been most helpful.

As the problem continued, and I was using two different providers for internet and landline, Talk Talk and BT, I decided to take the plunge.

So, after much debate over best deals, contacted John Lewis, on 4th April . I now have a brilliant service, which is provided through PlusNet, £22.50 a month (1st 12 months) for all and cheaper calls too. I was paying £19 for internet alone, and another similar amount for landline to BT.

So for roughly half the price, it's faster broadband, no disconnections or dropping out and also have the 1 hr free landline calls on Evening and weekends for no extra cost, free 1571 and caller display .

Received a general email from them yesterday saying the £22.50 has now been put on offer for £20.00 . So I decided to move in on them, and hey presto they have agreed I can have it for £20.00 raising to £26.50 after 12 months.

Happy bunny today.

Well done Granny, always good to get a wining result and always good to question suppliers of anything and try for a reduction.
You will be able to pay for the brown bin now

You could always try altering your DNS server. I changed mine to google's public server, the setting is 8.8.8.8 primary and 8.8.4.4. secondary.
You can google how to change it for your operating system. takes a couple of minutes to do it.

There are pros and cons to doing that, if you are concerned about privacy it means google can track every site you use. Additionally it means all your DNS traffic has to negotiate its way through many servers and back instead of talking directly to your ISP's DNS server.

In reality its rare to have a DNS problem these days, normally your computer points to your router's DNS server, the router's DNS server talks to your ISP's DNS server. DNS is cached at the ISP, cached at your router and cached at your computer.

DNS propagation has been changed enormously in the last couple of years whilst it used to take up to two days for DNS to propagate round the world it usually happens within the hour these days and sometimes in seconds round USA and Europe. The occasional problem is the caching on your router and your computer doesn't keep up with the changes that fast never mind which DNS server its pointing at, but most sites have fixed IP addresses so the DNS rarely needs to update.

Sorry if that's a bit techie but just to help people follow, DNS is the table of website names to their IP addresses. Whilst you type in a name (url), the traffic to and from your computer uses the IP address which is basically an identity number. You need a DNS system because your normal computer's traffic (http) couldn't pick up a DNS table because it wouldn't know the IP address or route to fetch it from. There are other matters as well but that doesn't matter to understand the basic functionality.