Why You Should Replace Your ISP's Modem-Router

Last year I had a long-running problem with Talk-Talk, who could not find out why my broadband speeds had been so slow. They were in fact in breach of the contract, that’s how slow it was, but I wasn’t hammering the bandwidth at the time, so didn’t notice. I had a Bright Sparks engineer visit, I had BT replace the copper into the house from the distribution pole. Still nothing. So I retired the modem they had sent me a few years ago, and used the modem in the Netgear D6400 I was using as a router. It has wireless-AC and Talk-Talk’s router only had wireless-N.

Hey presto! Instant speed and reliability increase. The problem must have been with the Talk-Talk router: one of those faults that hides in the shadows when an engineer pokes around with a stick. That lasted for about 120 days, and then the connection started to go. I could watch the Netgear sign on, and see the downstream signal/noise sink down, go below zero and drop the connection. By now, I had learned not to call the helplines, who start talking about freaking micro-filters, and diagnosed a faulty modem chip: the rest of the router was just fine.

So I swapped in the Huawei modem-router Talk-Talk had finally managed to send me while they were not finding out what was wrong with my connection. I turned off the wireless and hooked it into the Netgear. Line reliability restored, with a speed of 4600 mbps. Um yeah. Let’s see if it improves after a week or so.

Nope.

So after having read many reviews about the Billion routers, I bought an 8800NL R2. £55 plus change from Amazon, with delivery via Doodle. It needs to be connected to a computer via LAN cable to be configured at start-up, but otherwise, plug it into the ADSL socket, hook it up to the Netgear. Take a look at the line speed.

8190 mbps.

Out of the box.

Boom. For real.

It’s currently at 9120 mbs. Never had that before.

This proves what I’ve often suspected. It’s in the ISP’s interests to send you something half-way reliable with speeds towards the lower end of what they promise. That way it naturally restricts the amount of their network bandwidth you can take. If it drops out fairly frequently, that’s a plus as well because they can always restrict your line speed even more while they "test for quality of connection". Oddly, you’ll never go above about half of their quoted maximum.

There are reasons Talk-Talk is cheap. A call centre in Guam is one of them. Second-rate Huawei modem-routers is another.

You can’t do anything about the call centre. You can buy a decent modem.

(Caveat: the Billion has wireless-N. That didn’t matter because I use the Netgear as a router. If you need wireless-AC, you will need a different model.)