The switch went smoothly!

[JoM]

That all sounds so easy Debbie! Something I'll have to look into, we're under contract with Virgin until sometime later this year though
Our internet is woeful. Probably more to do with the exchange than the ISP though, apparantly some work is being done on the local one in the next two weeks according to an email from Virgin.
Our connection drops out a lot, particularly at certain times and is also really slow - Speedtest rarely shows it as being over 2mbps. John called Virgin last week and the woman (in India) who was 'helping' him said changing the router password should speed it up and she then spent the next 90 minutes faffing around, changing this and that (though if the truth be told, a lot of that time was spent saying "Sorry, could you repeat that?" or "Sorry no, I don't understand what you're saying". It was no different afterwards, if anything it was a little worse - the first Speedtest I did after that came up at 0.54mbps Trying to watch iPlayer or Netflix is fun
I have a Virgin email account which I only use for Virgin emails - they assigned me a long email addy when we moved and took on a new account and said it couldn't be changed so I use Gmail for personal email instead. Anyway, since she meddled with the account I've not been able to access my email, it says that the username or password are wrong - yet I don't know what the new ones are!

[Kaz]

Your speed depends on how close you are to the exchange I'm afraid.................

[JoM]

We're not actually that far, less than two miles - we were even closer at the old house and it was the same then. We can't even blame the equipment as everything was new when we moved here as it was treated as a new installation

[debih]

We seem to be so much faster with Sky than we were with Utility Warehouse.

I wasn't going to change email addresses - we have had the same one for donkeys years. But I struggle to get on my emails at work (we are with talk talk - used to be tiscali) and it is a "banned" website at work for some reason. So I thought I may as well change.

But with just one click all my emails to the tiscali email address are automatically being transferred to my new sky address so I don't really need to bother changing the address on many things.

[Kaz]

Yes but the cables aren't laid as the crow flies, it can depend on local geography, plus some of the older under road cabling might just be aluminium rather than copper which really slows things down.........Not so often these days but it can be..............

[Suff]

Interesting tester they have here Jo

http://www.uswitch.com/broadband/speedtest/

I saw on a blog that it also tells you how close you are to the exchange. They also tell you who has the fastest broadband in the area.

As for changing your password making the line faster??? ollocks...... I often wonder if these call centre people get into an involved discussion so they can avoid taking the next call. Spend 2 hours working with one customer and you don't have to deal with the next person who might be angry...

You should be able to change your email password or there should at least be some way on the customer portal on their website. I set up my wanadoo mail to forward my account emails to my Yahoo address a long time ago. Orange here in France lets you log into your mail without a password so long as you are at home, so I've long since forgotten it.

[Gal]

I've been with Tiscali/TalkTalk for about 8 years now, ever since I changed from dialup to BB - no probs apart from a couple of outages over all that time I can't go on non work related websites at work so I only ever use emails on the laptop at home, and I only ever use my web based ones anyway

ETA - Just used that link and according to that my speeds are pretty low, but tbh I have no problem with them, I don't wait long at all for any pages *puzzled* Mind you I don't d/l films or anything like that

[JoM]

Thanks for that link Suff, it's very interesting! You can also see the results of any tests carried out by people in your area, and it tells you who their provider is.
Oh, and there probably is a way to change your password in the Virgin Media customer area but I couldn't even log into that! After a call I now know why. The Indian operator who was dealing with us last week changed the password incorrectly and when John told her what we wanted it to be and spelled it out for her she was told "b for bravo" TWICE but she heard it as "d for dog"

Kaz, I'd hazard a guess at it being the quality of the cables used in that case. The exchange is virtually at the end of the A road which goes through our village so distance wise we are pretty much as the crow flies. Friends who are several miles out are getting a decent speed with Virgin. Talking to neighbours (and looking at the local tests on the link Suff posted) it seems that speed's a problem for everyone in our immediate area.

[Suff]

Jo,

This is the hardest one to resolve. A friend of mine once told me of a program which you could run on your modem in the PC (do any but a laptop have them any more???) which would test the phone line, tell you how close the exchange is and how many connections you have between the house and the exchange and also how poor (noisy), each connection is.

I'll see if I can get him to find it for me. It might help if you have a machine with a modem. Although I'm not sure it's even XP capable let alone Vista/W7/W8....

I have another friend who is at the end of a 5 mile line. He had pitiful broadband with constant interruptions. It took 3 years to get an engineer in to look at it and when they replaced the cable from the pole to the house his speed went up from 0.5mbits/s to 5mbits/s. The problem nowadays is that they won't send a BT engineer unless they can bill you.....

[JoM]

Thanks Suff.

That's the problem isn't it? Getting the suppliers to acknowledge that the fault lies with them, and that it's not your settings or equipment.