Article provided by forum member Squawk
There are four major attributes of your broadband connection that affect it's speed/stability. When a user posts in the forums we ask you to provide stats so we can see those attributes and try to determine probably cause of whatever the issue is that you are having.
Here is the Squawk guide to those attributes In no particular order, they are
This is the theoretical maximum speed that data can be transferred along your connection, both up and down. It is the data rate that your router and the exchange try to communicate at. Your router may also call it bandwidth.
Attenuation can be thought of as resistance on your line. The more resistance, the harder the broadband signal has to push to get through. Think of trying to push a box along the floor and then imagine that you slowly start to fill up the box with concrete. As the box fills so the speed at which you can push it slows down, until there comes a point where you can no longer move the box at all. Line length to your home could be thought of as the concrete in the box, the longer the line, the more concrete, or resistance, the signal has to push through. Attenuation between your exchange and the test socket in your house is almost entirely determined by cable length and cable type. Ideally your attenuation is as low as possible.
Signal to noise ratio, also known as noise margin. This is simply a ratio of good signal to noise on your line.
Think of it like speaking to someone in a quiet room. In a quite room there is no noise so when you speak at normal volume the percentage of sound in the room is almost 100% your voice, no noise. You are easy to understand. Now imagine that there are another couple of people in the room talking at the same time. You carry on talking at normal volume, but so do they. You conversation is still perfectly understandable, but the percentages have changed. From the point of view of the person you are speaking to probably only 80% of what they hear is you, the other 20% is noise. That would be a ratio of 4:1, or an SNR of 4. If you had that same conversation but there were hundreds of people in the room there would be so much noise that you wouldn't be understandable at all.
The same theory applies with broadband. In broadband terms the two people are your router and the exchange, the good sound is the signal between them, and noise is any kind of interference. Noise on the line can be caused by a vast number of of things. Think what happens to your MW radio signal when you pass under power lines.
For a list (updating all the time) of factors that are known to have affected other forum members, have a look here
As you now understand, the higher your SNR the cleaner your signal, the better your router and exchange can talk to each other. When the admins change your profile think of it as almost like changing the volume the router is speaking at. As it gets louder it has to speak slower, quieter and it can speak faster. But as it gets quiter/faster it becomes more prone to noise. Hence, you sacrifice speed for stability. High SNR is desirable
Errors are many and varied, google the various different types if you want an explanation. They can affect your connection in many ways and often point to various issues but there is no real pattern. Errors need to be monitored over an extended period and linked to variations in the other variables before we might be able to isolate a problem
There are effectively two networks involved when you connect. The first network is between the exchange and your test socket (or master socket if you do not have a test socket). The second is between your test socket and the rest of your house.
Talktalk (or any ISP) can only influence your connection up to the point where it reaches your test socket. Up to that point the cables connecting you to the exchange are not your responsibility and if a fault is found it is up to BT Openreach to fix it.
By testing in the test socket the problem can be isolated to either
If you do not test in the test socket all sorts of other variables come into the equation. In my own house if I test in one particular phone socket instead of another I see a decrease in sync speed of over 3000. And just yesterday I tested a micro-filter that we have had connected to our phone for years and found that it reduced my sync speed by over 2/3.
Bearing that in mind, if all the various tests are carried out and it is determined that you need an engineer visit, but that engineer subsequently finds a problem in your internal wiring rather than your external wiring, you will be charged for that engineer visit. If you looked at the link earlier in this post you will have seen just how strange some of aspects that affect your connection can be, so you really do need to eliminate them.
Testing in the test socket is for your own benefit. What can be done when a problem is found There are far too many variables to go into detail here, but for a majority of people changes of profile are often enough to sort out a connection.
The various profiles that talktalk can put your connection on support various different line characteristics. Usually it is a case of finding the right tradeoff between speed and stability. You want as much speed as possible without sacrificing stability.
We need to gather as much information as possible to help deal with your problems. Try to be as verbose as possible describing what happens when you experience problems. Posting your stats is great, but if you happen to have either an echolife or smartAX router from talktalk you can download and run the monitoring software written by matt, the forum admin.
Click here to download the monitor. To begin with set the monitor to update every 15 seconds and just leave it running. If you experience a disconnection, keep it running. Save the log files as a CSV file and post them to the forums and we can take a look.
If you are having speed problems perform speed tests with the talktalk speed tester in the service dashboard and include your phone number when the speed tester asks for it (don't put a space between your dialling code and your actual number). This will automatically link the speed test to your talktalkmembers account.
Squawk
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