I have reluctantly decided that it is the end for my VFX connection over TCL.  I have had this for my only landline for the last several months.  Most of the time it works really well - its just that some of the time it doesn't.  My wife (understandably) wants just to pick up the phone and know it will work with no drop outs, missed audio, etc.

The past few days have been the last straw with quite a lot of breakups (although last night things were working perfectly). When I made calls on Saturday, packet loss was running at about 10%.  Then the internet dropped altogether - pc could ping the router and modem and bring up the modem status page, but I couldn't ping the gateway.  Rebooting the TCL modem fixed the problem.  Called TCL on Sunday 30+ minutes on hold - then "nothing's wrong with your modem sir, and we've been having no problems with the cable network".

The problem is that when my VFX goes down, I can't just call one party, and let them take ownership of the problem.  Personally, I think the majority of the problems lie on the TCL network side, considering that often the PC has trouble at the same time.

I have been holding off, hoping that the upgrade of the TCL network will solve the problem, but with sickness in the extended family, we need a landline that we know will work, and can't really wait in hope any longer.

So today its off to try and get a POTS line back and see if I can get my old number ported back onto it.

Then the next step will be to try and get (slow and cheap) ADSL over that line (we only use about 2GB a month and with TCL + VFX were spending $61.25 and want to keep our spend under $70).  Then when that's working it will be cancelling our TCL.

I am a bit sad, because when TCL+VFX works it is great - its just not as reliable as POTS in my experience.