As with the old dial up 56k modems line quality will affect the speed you connect to TalkTalk at. For more information see What factors affect my sync speed.
Your sync speed effectively will limit the speed your download, its not usually a limit imposed by TalkTalk but a limit imposed by the laws of physics. In some cases your speed needs to be reduced in order to get a stable connection on your line and in these cases TalkTalk may apply a speed restricted profile in order for your to receive broadband service.
So, TalkTalk have provided you with an "up to 8Mb" connection and the first thing you need to do is see what effect your line conditions are having on that connection so you need to find out your Sync Speed
When connected to the internet if you log on to your modem/router you will normally see this under the home page, status page or the WAN page, it differs by router. On the TalkTalk router the sync speed is called the "ADSL Link Connection Speed". It has two parts upstream and downstream and, on ADSL, the upstream is always significantly lower than the downstream. its designed this way as usually upstream traffic consists of simple requests like "get me this web page" and the downstream traffic, ie traffic coming to you, consists of the content of the page including all images and videos.
For the TalkTalk HG520s and MT882 routers the login in pages are normally at http://192.168.1.1 when they are connected by an ethernet network cable or http://192.168.1.2 if they are connected via USB. When you connect their default username and password are both "admin" in lowercase without the quotes.
Extract From A Sample ADSL RouterADSL Link Downstream Upstream Connection Speed 3101 kbps 343 kbps Line Attenuation 64.5 db 19.2 db Noise Margin 14.8 db 27.9 db
In the made up example above you can see that the connection speed, although is a max of 8Mbps, can only be obtained over the line by reducing the speed down to about 3.1Mbps. This is the sync speed of your line.
Another thing to note is the 3.1Mbps shown is the maximum and when your computer talks to other computers on the internet a lot of other traffic and error correction is taking place. That traffic is hidden from you, the user but is essential to allow your computer to talk on the internet. A good rule of thumb is that when you are downloading then only expect a maximum of between 80% - 90% of your sync speed to be available to the download, the rest will be taken up by "housekeeping" the line and the connection. In this example you would expect your maximum download speed to be around 2480 kbps (kilobits per second) which equates to about 310KBps (kilobytes per second).
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