A lot of problems with student house internet

skippy2421 · 18 Feb 2011 at 19:31

Evening all, I have a few problems with internet connectivity in this house. I have two problems, one regarding a Bt homehub2 and one regarding tiscali (or talk talk as it is now). Firstly a bit of a background story, The house has 2 lines, one providing BT broaband the other Tiscali/talk talk. You may ask why two well I don't know, not my house but it may have something to do with 10 people living here. I would also like to point out everybody works on wireless.

problem 1: The BT homehub's performance I can only describe as inconsistent. At times it flies along quite merrily then out of the blue pretty much stops dead which is pretty frustrating and results in everybody using the other line. I would like to fix this instability if possible. Firstly I thought peak traffic or whatever but firstly that would not cause a complete stop nor are these complete breakdowns time related they happen at random. So how would I attempt to go about diagnosing the problem and resolving this? Anybody with any tips on getting the best out of the homehub2?

problem 2: Our talk talk line seems to have died resulting in us being left with the flakey Bt one. The reason for this seems to be that the router cannot authenticate our username or password. Now bare in mind this was fine 2 days ago and nothing has changed since, we are somewhat puzzled. I have attempted to get in touch with tiscali regarding this but to no avail so far. Was just wondering if anybody has any experience with this, I shall continue to chase talk talk on the matter.

Thanks in advance guys, also if you could try and keep the answers simple as I'm a bit of noob with networks etc. Great with hardware but no idea with networks.

MadMan-JaMeS · 18 Feb 2011 at 19:39

What sort of router do you have on the talk talk line ?

And if i was you i'd buy a decent router for the BT line and chuck the homehub out lol

skippy2421 · 18 Feb 2011 at 19:59

MadMan-JaMeS said:
What sort of router do you have on the talk talk line ?

And if i was you i'd buy a decent router for the BT line and chuck the homehub out lol

It's a Thomson something or other, basically one they provided. As for a new router instead of the homehub, no point as I'm only here 3 more months and we have a perfectly fine router at home so would be a wasted investment. Hence me trying to make do with what I have.

Semple · 18 Feb 2011 at 20:08

Do you pay for both lines? Otherwise it was just a thought that maybe your landlord cancelled the contract on one of the lines.

Yamahahahahaha · 18 Feb 2011 at 20:43

Is an FTTC or any kind of LLU service available in your area?

skippy2421 · 18 Feb 2011 at 22:04

Guys my landlord isn't the sort to do anything quickly, so I'd see very little benefit to changing provider, I'm looking for a quick fix really. Plus we don't pay the internet bills it's all included in the rent, so completely up to him if he can be bothered. The fact we have 2 lines has kind of saved our skins as we'd have no internet at all right now if we didn't. Plus 2 lines means we don't have 10 people connected to the one which would quite easily come to a grinding halt as all the girls attempt to catch up with eastender etc. on iplayer.

Was hoping there'd be a few settings on the homehub to make it a bit more stable, it's not the amount of devices that's doing it either even if it's just me connected it falls over regularly. At least until talk talk sort out our other line.

ThorpedoUK · 18 Feb 2011 at 22:29

Ok, first off BT Homehub - garbage, my ex gf had one of these and if the 2 of us used the internet at the same time it had major issues, she used to blame me saying I was hacking it or something but seriously, all I was doing was browsing this forum, BT > 1 person = fail.

Tiscali, no idea, but 10 people on a standard ISP issued router is just asking for trouble.

I would hazzard a guess that NAT is destroying your routers, it did for me so I dumped that junk and got a decent Cisco router and the problem has gone.

Bottom line: take control of the routers, remove dhcp, assign static ip to yourself = win, or buy some better gear.

skippy2421 · 18 Feb 2011 at 23:23

ThorpedoUK said:
Ok, first off BT Homehub - garbage, my ex gf had one of these and if the 2 of us used the internet at the same time it had major issues, she used to blame me saying I was hacking it or something but seriously, all I was doing was browsing this forum, BT > 1 person = fail.

Tiscali, no idea, but 10 people on a standard ISP issued router is just asking for trouble.

I would hazzard a guess that NAT is destroying your routers, it did for me so I dumped that junk and got a decent Cisco router and the problem has gone.

Bottom line: take control of the routers, remove dhcp, assign static ip to yourself = win, or buy some better gear.

Well i'm not buying better gear for three months and for others to use. So that's that ruled out. Right so the other stuff, what does removing dhcp do? I know about assigning static ip's although It didn't seem to like me doing it when switching between routers but I'm sure I can suss that.

muon · 18 Feb 2011 at 23:59

10 people will mean 300GB FUP is useless.

ThorpedoUK · 19 Feb 2011 at 00:20

Ok lets get something straight are you looking for advice on how to make "the internet experience" better for you only?

Forget the 9 other people, is it just for you?????? or all of them?

skippy2421 · 19 Feb 2011 at 01:27

ghost101 said:
10 people will mean 300GB FUP is useless.

two lines doesn't seem so silly now.

ThorpedoUK said:
Ok lets get something straight are you looking for advice on how to make "the internet experience" better for you only?

Forget the 9 other people, is it just for you?????? or all of them?

No I'm not really the selfish type. Just looking to minimise the number of times the router falls over, kinda getting fed up of streaming stuff only for it to fall over half way through. If there's 5 or so on each surely it should be achievable or is there really no way I can make what we have work any better?

muon · 19 Feb 2011 at 03:04

skippy2421 said:
two lines doesn't seem so silly now.

Even if it was working, talktalk give an additional 80GB.

You need multiple BT/sky/bethere lines to get a decent experience.

I suspect the bt line is throttled to 1Mb very often.

DJMK4 · 19 Feb 2011 at 03:06

Cisco, traffic shape, job done...you are talking about 10 people there. There is less people in our office!

3dcandy · 19 Feb 2011 at 08:24

as said above multiple times 10 people one domestic router is causing problems. Also wifi congestion in your area could cause it to slow down, you need to maybe try and change the channel that the BT HH is using.
http://192.168.1.254 in your browser and have a poke around. If you put netstumbler or something similiar on your pc you can check what channels are in use. Lots of variables affect wifi, but after a bit of messing and channel selection I can honestly say the HH isn't too bad a router for free. Bear in mind, the amount of people accessing your internet will cause BT to throttle it regularly, if not 90% of the time - they really don't expect 10 people to use 1 line! (unless business broadband plan).

So, just so you understand....10 people on 1 BT line will cause slow downs, you WILL be going over the download limits. 10 people using one wifi connection will push the HH hard and probably not help, it will struggle with those amounts of connections. Wifi is pretty rubbish when pushed hard like you are doing, 10 people won't help here either. TalkTalk have a dodgy reputation and can be as bad as BT, but if you're not LLU at your exchange then they just use BT anyway so all the above applies. You *might* improve things by changing channel on the BT HH, but then again you might not.

Hope that helps. You are pushing your connections hard I expect with 10 people, and I know you don't have control but I can't really see how you can honestly improve the service too much without a change of router and possibly broadband tariff.

skippy2421 · 19 Feb 2011 at 13:26

ghost101 said:
Even if it was working, talktalk give an additional 80GB.

You need multiple BT/sky/bethere lines to get a decent experience.

I suspect the bt line is throttled to 1Mb very often.

I appreciate that but there's not a lot i can do. The house hasn't had any issues with FUP before. However 380gb is a fair amount when a lot of the housemates only really use facebook or stream music the only really heavy user of it is me and perhaps another girl and I've eased off as of late and do all my downloading at night.

DJMK4 said:
Cisco, traffic shape, job done...you are talking about 10 people there. There is less people in our office!

Had a brief look at it, I would appear to be out of my depth somewhat but nothing a bit of googling might not be able to solve.

3dcandy said:
as said above multiple times 10 people one domestic router is causing problems. Also wifi congestion in your area could cause it to slow down, you need to maybe try and change the channel that the BT HH is using.
http://192.168.1.254 in your browser and have a poke around. If you put netstumbler or something similiar on your pc you can check what channels are in use. Lots of variables affect wifi, but after a bit of messing and channel selection I can honestly say the HH isn't too bad a router for free. Bear in mind, the amount of people accessing your internet will cause BT to throttle it regularly, if not 90% of the time - they really don't expect 10 people to use 1 line! (unless business broadband plan).

So, just so you understand....10 people on 1 BT line will cause slow downs, you WILL be going over the download limits. 10 people using one wifi connection will push the HH hard and probably not help, it will struggle with those amounts of connections. Wifi is pretty rubbish when pushed hard like you are doing, 10 people won't help here either. TalkTalk have a dodgy reputation and can be as bad as BT, but if you're not LLU at your exchange then they just use BT anyway so all the above applies. You *might* improve things by changing channel on the BT HH, but then again you might not.

Hope that helps. You are pushing your connections hard I expect with 10 people, and I know you don't have control but I can't really see how you can honestly improve the service too much without a change of router and possibly broadband tariff.

Exactly the sort of advice I'm after, thank you. Downloading netstumbler as i type this, so I'll give swappping the channels over a try to see if it helps things. Normally It will be about 4 or 5 to a line but it's just at the moment we are a line down so with any luck the routers will hold up.

3dcandy · 19 Feb 2011 at 13:51

Yeah....obviously getting 2nd line back will help. I solved 99% of my wifi probs with our HH2 by changing channel. Some people can't find a free channel. but even so a less congested channel will help

DJMK4 · 19 Feb 2011 at 14:10

2nd line, and bond them? If you are in an area with BE LLU, they offer bonding, up to 44mb down, 4.5 up or something like that, plus they are good with heavy downloaders. Mine is unlimited