Hi everyone.
After a number of years with Plusnet I decided enough was enough and switched provider. This time to Pulse8/TalkTalk Business (line switched at ~1am this morning). I'm actually in shock at how much better the connection is. It's making me wonder why our connection with both BT and (finally) Plusnet was so bad.
The PPPoE link would drop randomly while the line remained up with no increasing errors, the only change on reconnection was the gateway.
DNS would sometimes fail, pages would only half load, in pieces or not at all, requiring a number of page refreshes. Services such as Youtube, Netflix and Sky Go were terrible. Youtube and Netflix unbearable, random buffering, took ages to start and at lowest bitrate. I'd often change the quality to HD or whatever, it buffered but it would eventually work, for a while at least & then revert back and buffer when it felt like it.
I assumed it was the router (HH5A on Openwrt) with DNS-TLS, maybe that was struggling or the line was screwing up again. I often did try to find out the cause of this but due to other things I never really found out what the problem was.
I do remember doing mtr tests at various times on my debian desktop to various places like BBC.co.uk and seeing very high loss percentages on IPs. I also got a friend on Talktalk retail to do the same, and he had no losses whatsoever.
Now we're on a TTB connection, none of the above appears to be happening, although time will tell. But so far, pages, Youtube, Netflix and Sky Go load fast with no buffering or things missing!
It's just baffling how much different it is, it's still the same crappy aluminum line but it honestly feels so much faster. I have no idea why and thought I'd post here and get some insights from you wonderful people!
Line State: UP [0x0]
Line Mode: G.993.2 (VDSL2)
Line Uptime: 3h 8m 35s <- I rebooted to enter pulse8 PPPoE info for static ip but that hasn't applied yet.
Annex: B
Profile: 17a
Data Rate: 17.976 Mb/s / 3.462 Mb/s
Max. Attainable Data Rate (ATTNDR): 20.390 Mb/s / 3.462 Mb/s
Latency: 0.14 ms / 0.0 ms
Line Attenuation (LATN): 27.3 dB / 30.9 dB
Signal Attenuation (SATN): 23.6 dB / 30.7 dB
Noise Margin (SNR): 7.3 dB / 6.1 dB
Aggregate Transmit Power (ACTATP): 6.7 dB / 11.3 dB
Forward Error Correction Seconds (FECS): 0 / 0
Errored seconds (ES): 0 / 21
Severely Errored Seconds (SES): 0 / 1
Loss of Signal Seconds (LOSS): 0 / 0
Unavailable Seconds (UAS): 53 / 53
Header Error Code Errors (HEC): 0 / 0
Non Pre-emptive CRC errors (CRC_P): 0 / 0
Pre-emptive CRC errors (CRCP_P): 0 / 0
ATU-C System Vendor ID: Broadcom 193.144
Power Management Mode: L0 - Synchronized