Any Broadband experts / recommendations ?

[AndyG]

I have a mate who has been through a similar farce. Will have a word tomorrow at work and see what he makes of your predicament.

[/tobys]

Is your router connected to the master socket in your house? That can make a difference if you have outlets in other rooms and are connected to one of them.

Also, try googling "remove bell wire" as depending on how your master socket is wired, you could be getting interference which affects your DSL sync speed (the Bell wire is no longer needed with modern phones).

I almost doubled my upload speed and added >1Mb to my download by disconnecting mine....just be careful 'cos if you disconnect the wrong ones, you could disconnect the lot!

I'm with BE and they seem pretty good - much better/faster than BT Business that I had installed from my previous employer and infinitely better than Eclipse. I get about 850kbps upload and 5.5mbps download FWIW.

HTH

[Cardnim]

It aint your line. Those download speeds are fine.
TalkTalk are known to be poor for service; and as you say, their official line is that they dont care about upload speeds.

Better move ISP to someone who can give you what you need.
Seriously, check out O2, BE or one of those others. See if there are others in your area who have moved to them and see what speeds they are getting.

[petemid8]

I had AOL and apparently Talk Talk took over their UK operations and I think I ended up with a service via Talk Talk. (Can't be sure, mind)

It was alright for a while but overnight in June 2010 there was a sudden degredation of the speed and I never got to the bottom of why it happened. It was slower than dial up, similar to yours, no way could you view videos on youtube etc. I tried different computers thinking it was a virus or something, tried changing the filters, nothing improved it. The tech support were no help so I changed to Sky and immediately got between 3-4 meg download, about 0.4 upload, so much better it's not funny.

[Richard Lowe]

I couldn't agree more about dumping Talk Talk, them and Orange get the most complaints from our customers at work.

Do you have Sky TV Andy? I'm with them for my BB and don't really have any issues, on the top package you have proper unlimited bandwidth and I never seem to get throttled. I'm about 3.5km from the exchange and get about 400k up and 7mbit down with a 40ms ping from speedtest.net

Another thing is FTTC (fiber to the cabinet) that BT are starting to roll out, check with BT if you can receive 'BT Infinity' at your exchange.

Originally Posted by andys

Rich - tried it on the PC too and surprisingly it's exactly the same speed - still crap.

Just having a Mac in the same building will cause issues, even if it's turned off

[andys]

Originally Posted by Richard Lowe

Another thing is FTTC (fiber to the cabinet) that BT are starting to roll out, check with BT if you can receive 'BT Infinity' at your exchange.

Hi Rich / Chaps - Many thanks for all the info - really helpful.

Rich, I looked into BT Infinity, it's coming to my area this March - not cheap though
Also, I do have SkyHD, so I was considering going there as I could get a decent deal as they already steal quite a bit from me.

Just tried disconnecting everything, and plugging the adsl router straight into the master socket downstairs - exactly the same crap speeds, so it's not my extension wiring in the house.

Also, i'm only 800m from the exchange.

Bloody nightmare this. I need to send clients files quite often, had to send 330meg today.

At least my iphone tethered to the mac is averaging 150k - 200k, amazing that 3G on a bloody phone is faster than my broadband !

Will look into the 'bell wire' thing too.