Okay, experiences of dealing with TalkTalk:
March 25th, experienced a long outage that lasted most of the bank holiday weekend. Following the outage, line speed was variable - anything between 1 - 5 Mb/s down and 0.1 and 0.7 Mb/s up. The line had previously been stable at 7 Mb/s down and 1 Mb/s up. This is of course an indication of a fault on the line as OpenReach's dynamic line management automatically adjusts the line speed in response to noise/interference. Average package loss over any 24 hour window was around 3% (it was sporadic)
I put a call into TT and a broadband engineer was sent out, for which I had to take a day off work. The engineer turned up, informed me a fault in the area had been resolved on the prior day and left. He was present for less than five minutes. At the time, the connection speed/quality was reasonable so I accepted the explanation. However, things continued to get worse.
TT dispatched a new router which didn't resolve the problem. Over the course of the next month or so, the internet connection varied between usable and pants. Every time it was pants, I'd call TalkTalk, explain the problem, run through their tests and then deny that there was a fault.
Eventually a crackle developed on the phone line. They dispatched a line engineer who turned up, established that the line was underground fed into the house, said he was not trained to deal with underground fed lines and left.
Then another line engineer was dispatched. He re-terminated the connection at the cabinet because it was corroded. The phone was working without crackling and the internet connection was working with no packet loss and he went on his way.
Over a longer period of time, I was able to establish a baseline of around 2% packet loss and periodically we would lose connection completely for short periods of time. Line sync speeds were still variable.
TalkTalk again denied there was a problem, even though at times the sync speed was as low as 1Mb/s down, 0.1 Mb/s up. As far as they were concerned, the problem was resolved. The twice-weekly call to TalkTalk became a bit of a running joke. Anything less than 3% packet loss was acceptable to them, and they literally didn't care what the upload speed was.
Gradually things deteriorated again and another engineer was despatched. A broadband engineer, who quickly determined it was a line fault (I told TalkTalk it still looked like a line fault when they informed me they'd send a broadband engineer). So, a few days later a line engineer turned up and checked the termination at the cabinet and apparently it just fell apart. He also detected high resistance on the line near to the property and resolved that too.
Finally, four months later the problem was resolved.
OpenReach have to share some of the blame here, but getting TalkTalk to actually do anything was a ball ache. There seem to be many levels or escalation and the diagnostics they can do are very basic. I couldn't even email them packet traces until the problem was escalated to the right team. Another team wanted remote access (via Teamviewer or some such) - the only Windows PC in the house was my desktop PC, literally on the wrong side of the house to the hub. A further escalation meant I could circumvent this and just send them the data I had collected.. They were keen to blame my equipment and countless times I disconnected their hub from the firewall/my network, reset it and and left a single PC attached running diagnostics.
VirginMedia on the other hand (we had three issues early on) have been absolutely brilliant - each time an engineer was with us within 24 hours.
(like telling clients it takes 3 hours to upload 100 photos - if the signal holds)
) my connection is on and off like a tarts knickers at times!