I’ve been on the Carphone Warehouse “Talk Talk” plan for quite some time now. Generally I’m happy with it. Call costs are great, for example our calls to Australia are about 50 times less than they were with BT. ADSL is generally stable, and download throughput close to the 8Mbit rating. There just one niggling problem: I can never turn off my ADSL modem. If I do turn it off, as I did last night, then I can look forward to several hours of unstable ‘net access the following day. What happens is, after powering up the modem, every 10 to 20 minutes the connection drops and comes back 30 seconds later. It’s a fresh connection each time, so new IP address and all existing SSH sessions need to be restarted.

I depend on ‘net access for work since I work from home. I can do almost everything without a connection. But getting up and running on a Monday morning tends to be a pretty ssh-intensive period. Mainly email and fresh checkouts, also of note if that our SCM (Perforce) requires connection to the server to edit files. I should look into running a local mirror/proxy of something I guess. Anyway, this all means that I never turn off the ADSL modem now. If I don’t turn if off the ADSL connection will remain rock solid for days at a time.