Broadband Internet & ISP Recommendations?

Lol, guy just showed up at 4:40pm to a morning appointment. He changed his tune from
"nothing ever goes wrong with these" when he installed it to "there is a design fault with this
model and sometimes the fibre just splits".

You should be accruing automatic compensation after 2 days on an outage.

https://www.ofcom.org.uk/phones-telecoms-and-internet/advice-for-consumers/costs-and-billing/automatic-compensation-need-know

Not surprisingly my provider is not on the list, I was hoping because it was a rolling contract
they would have some incentive to keep the customer happy but they couldn't care less.

I would guess they care more about homes passed than active. The business model is essentialy get grants, loans and then sell it to virgin or openreach.

That sounds very plausible.

Can I ask how you came to choose 4th utility? Was it just price or were they recommended?

They installed their gear in the building here and I thought it's going to be just like Hyperoptic or Community Fibre.

Anyone want to send me a referral link for community fibre
https://communityfibre.co.uk/refer-a-friend
Need to sort it asap.
Cheers

https://www.communityfibre.co.uk/friends?referral=OYDsBy_G4-

Cheers for that. Now ordered.

I use Plusnet and just upgraded to a full fibre package, went for the 900mb one and it's coming through about 400. Definitely still enough but I do hope it picks up a bit.

Wired or wifi? If wifi then you'd need to check wired before talking to them as it's quite likely the router and/or receiving device

Wifi but I'm using a decent TP Link router for that and I'm sat about 2 meters away from it.

Can your router run its own speed test? You can usually find one on the web interface or in the app, if it has one.

which router, which device?
and try wired if you have something to test with. I'd guess it's that rather than the broadband speed

or ^

I've got CommunityFibre
desktop (wired) gets 935mb down, 910mb up
tablet (M1 iPad pro) next to the router gets 760mb down, 240mb up
mobile (iPhone 13 mini) next to the router gets 710mb down, 200mb up

There isn't one in the routers software, they just tell you to plug in a device and run the test on that.

TP Link Archer AX53, annoyingly I only have cat 5 ethernet cables here so can't test over 100mbps plugged in. Tested on macbook pro, pixel 7 & ps5

It seems to jump around a lot, tested a mintue ago and got 650mb but now it's sitting around 330 and before that it was doing 430. Gonna give it a day and see if it settles.

It won’t ‘settle’; WiFi works on a timeshare principle. Your devices will be sending/receiving data in an airtime queue shared with other devices/routers/access points using that particular frequency in the local area

The only way to test your actual WAN connection, not your Wi-Fi quality, is over a cabled gigabit link.

@hippy
no idea if you got sorted but i was looking at these earlier:
https://www.3grouterstore.co.uk/product/dwmm4-6-60-5sp/

A friend is renting my flat for a year and Virgin want an 18 month contract with a £250 get out so the alternative is Three 5g but it’s a 60mb service here with it on the windowsill compared to 300-500 on the 6th floor 2 min walk away. one of these antennas is likely to improve that.

Broadband issues. Just got back from holiday. While away our smartthings account kept notifying us it was offline. Now we are here it appears our broadband is fucked. Downloads speeds of 500mbps but upload 0.07 mbps

What is likely to be causing this and how do we sort it out?

More than likely a fault at the ISP end. I'd do the usual checking everything is tight and reset. If not cured I'd get on the phone.

If your download speed is around what you expect it show the data is getting to you but not back and is likely on their kit.

I've been away so haven't had a further look at options.

I need to do something coz I'm now out of contract with Virgin and want to ditch my TV package but Virgin penalise you if you're using broadband-only and penalise further if you want a rolling contract.

Could probably get my own 4G/5G router and use the grrl's spare Simply SIM and stick it near window - it's only a small flat so wifi cover probably ok. Not sure I'd need the external antenna, though it'd probably help given what I've seen with 4G->5G flipping.

Having been playing around virtually all day with sodding CF routers (replaced non CF parent node, mr7340, with retail flashed mx4200, got two mesh routers connected, but 2 other mx4200s wouldn't), I think that there is a limit within the firmware with regards extending your network.

The two mx4200s that would connect, then cycle through flashing red, solid blue, flashing blue and infinitum, were on the CF firmware. I flashed one with the starhub firmware, then the retail, and it connected as a child node and stayed connected. I could then add the single remaining CF firmware mx4200 as another child node and it worked straight away. I'll flash that one at some point too.

Oh hang on. The CF mx4200 has disconnected. I'll give it some firmware to make it ok again

The latest in the Linksys / Community Fibre saga: The original MX4200 that I flashed with retail firmware was v1 - the other three MX4200s (labelled as something else) are v2, which work with the V1 firmware, except it stops the lights from working.
Auto updating their software via the app got them into the red flashing / 2 second solid blue / flashing blue cycle again. This needed a factory reset, connecting with a LAN cable and manually flashing back to V1 firmware, once rebooted I could manually flash with the V2 firmware.

It turns out one router that I thought was faulty due to the light not changing, was actually working perfectly, so I've added that to the network too.

I'm very Community Fibre router rich.