Hi Folk,

My apologies if this is being discussed elsewhere.  The only blogs I could find that vaguely related were lacked because they had been inactive.

We have had pretty acceptable broadband performance (1600 or so and up to 2400) for months, but over the past month or so all of our browsers have been locking up. They are either not displaying the page (cycling endlessly) or taking a heck of a long time to do so.  I am also getting MS Outlook mail server (my own domain is based in the US somewhere) timeouts that I am sure are related.  I have gone through all the usual checks and had suspicions of what might be the cause, but am still hitting the proverbial head against a brick wall.  At the moment our house has the following:

-          Machines … desktop and two laptops, all different brands
-          Connections … two are currently internally wireless and one is wired, cat 6
-          Operating systems … XP on two and Linux on one
-          Browsers … Internet Explorer, Firefox and Google Chrome
-          The house is split for broadband at the entry point so has a dedicated line straight to the ADSL router

...so I figure it isn’t us.

Called Telecom.  They checked the lines and came back saying they are okay so want me to monitor the performance over the next three days.

However.  It occurred to me that two things happened around the time our troubles started:

 1. Our Sky phone line has been unplugged for months and only plugged back in the day they installed the new ‘My Sky’ unit.  I am pretty sure it is only used for ordering movies online so I wouldn’t have thought it would have an impact but will leave it unplugged and confirm that the Sky unit works normally without it.

2. Telecom introduced their TIVO TV service and since it downloads movies over broadband I was suspicious that such a service couldn’t possibly work over existing circuits.

I would be grateful to hear if anyone has any thoughts or knowledge on this. 

Many thanks,

David