Internet issues

I've not found much difference in things like customer service, plusnet was really bad for us and the speed was terrible.

It also depends on where you live, in rural areas you may not have the choice of supliers you do in towns and cities. My bugbear with BT is now they're partnered up with EE and I wouldn't trust them at all ater they lost all my data several times and ate my PAYG money and kept wanting more for me to be able to get things like phone numbers back.

TheCornish said:

to be honest all the companies rent off BT, so youre best buying from them. 

Not quite the full picture here. 

All companies lease the cabling infrastructure from BT Openreach but they all have their own infrastructure in regional hubs and their data centers.

BT broadband customer support is pretty appalling from my experience of helping with broadband issues and there are smaller companies who offer much, much better customer support for anything which is not infrastructure related (Plusnet was one such company).

Prices for the same service can vary a lot depending on supplier so it is always worth shopping about before deciding.

to be honest all the companies rent off BT, so youre best buying from them. 

Mines been so reliable since changing to Vodafone it threw me off a little that it was playing up. I'm hoping it was a bad day. Will see how this week goes.

Thanks. I've done the testing over the router and that came back saying no connection issue. Interesting as it wouldn't actually connect at the time I did it.

I have previously had a nightmare with an internet issue with sky so I think I'm probably affected by that.

I'll see how it goes this week as to whether it's an ongoing issue or a bad day and then get in touch with Vodafone.

I hate having to ring companies so that doesn't help the issue.

Expecto_Patronum said:

My internet is being a pain today. It keeps dropping out. Its usually very stable.

I would check your router and if you are finding the Internet/WAN light is flashing slowly, going red or is completely off then you have issues with connecting to your service provider and you need to contact their support team to get them to investigate.

It is quite common when engineers are connecting new properties to the exchange box in you street as they often have to switch off the bank of connections that they connect the new line to.

Also with all electronics, there are occasional faults and these can be intermittent but the broadband supplier support team can run remote diagnostics to the exchange then all the way up to your router to work out exactly where the fault is.

I had an issue where the phone line in one property was failing between the exchange and the router and after much elimination turned out to be the phone cable that was strung at high level to the outside of the window and when it was windy the cable would swing and cause tiny changes in resistance in the wire (partially frayed) that would cause signal loss for a fraction of a second and cause the connection to drop occasionally.

The supplier will probably send out BT Openreach to check the exchange and connection to the property if needed (this is their responsibility to fix) - they don't have the best reputation for good customer service so some patience may be needed.

If the router is faulty then the suppler will swap it out and the last point it could be is the cable connection to the phone / fibre socket in your house that is the responsibility of the homeowner to repair. These are actually remarkable simple to check for loose connections and I've repaired a few just by pushing the cable strand back into the little v-shaped connector within the plug socket. These are low voltage so are not dangerous to check.

Only try to look at the cables if everything else has been eliminated.

I find understanding what the components are and who is responsible for each helps remove the fear of the unknown and lets me get on with sorting the issue.

Ours does it at school kicking out time every day and remains unreliable for 2 or 3 hours, even now we have fibre optic cables it still does it. It's a right pain as it makes doing anything even ordering a free kindle book really difficult

Vodafone. I've turned it off each time and it's reconnected but then it would drop again. I'll see today whether it was a one off issue or not.

BT or similar? Turn off (behind router on / off switch) wait 1 minute then turn back on.