It appears that BT have lost BB connectivity large chunks og the UK

I've been off line since Friday ( currently using a mobile dongle ) and it looks like it won't be sorted for another couple of days Oh happiness and joy

They best refund those affected for the missed days of service. Unfortunately I'm in Cardiff so can't tell if we've been affected too.

Hmm, interesting.

I'm with Demon, and we've had "up to 8MB" giving us a fairly solid 6-ish for ages. The past week or so, though, it's been hit and miss, and when we checked (after rebooting the router a few times) we seem to have been running >9MB.

Which is nice, except the router seems to choke if the bit rate creeps up above 10MB.

Anyhoo, I've boosted the MTU to max, and it's been fairly stable for a while now. Investigating more widely, it seems BT are upgrading much of the network to ADSL 2+, which is nice. It's very likely we're being affected by that, so until it settles down and our router (and Demon!) can keep pace, we may have intermittent problems.

Alan, could I just ask you who your mobile ISP are and what speeds (real world speed tests) you get? I'd just like to compare it to mine.

Sure Dan, I use vodafone between 10 and 45 kb at home, I live in the middle of nowhere. ( about 10 seconds for a web page to load )

In central London / Bristol etc over 3Mb reliably.

Basically I have it as a backup for home and hand if on a customer site, if I haven't got internet access.

Hope that helps.
ps its horrible if you cant get 3G and end up on 2Gg though

My God, I hate you (just joking, incase you didn't realise )

With 3, I get around 0.4Mbs in what they call a "good signal area". I'm fairly close to two fairly big cities and TBH, your 3Mbs makes me feel sick. Thanks for telling me although I wish I never asked .

Sorry about that.
A neighbour of mine bought a 3 dongle recently and I couldn't get it to work here at all.

We actually used 2 laptops with the vodafone dongles as plan B for publishing the governments budget this year, thankfully we didn't need it.

I'd love to have a backup 'net connection for where I live, especially when the internet is broken due to my error . Unfortunately, there's no 3G coverage in Perranporth .

Well the BT engineer showed up this morning. Did some head scratching and all of a sudden without him doing anything it suddenly started working. Totally agreed that it was nothing to do with my kit but not a clue what had happened !

LOL @ BT engineer. The last one who turned up at my mum's house didn't have a clue. I had to tell him over the 'phone to check the hardware switch for the laptop's wireless, and then tell him how to switch it on.

In all fairness he knew what was on about but BT outreach engineers can only touch your machine through to exchange. They are a different company to BT who handle exchange and beyond. ( It gets BT around the anti competition rules ).

Something else that came out of our chat which was interesting was that contention ratios no longer exist. each ( BT ) customer has, in my case 8.2 Mb allocated to them ( differing contracts obviously will change this Chippenham can by up to 28 Mb apparently), my line is only capable of 2 Mb so that's what I can use all the time.