[Traduk]

I posted weeks ago asking if anyone had kept any PingPlotter traces from between the national outage (21 Dec 2007) and a few days after this thread started.

The reason I asked is because I had surfing difficulty during that entire period and on numerous occasions had run Ping Plotter to try and determine where the system was falling apart.

My first two hops ( (1) my router (2) the Modem\UBR) never resolve but there were definitely one or two extra unresolved hops on the front end eg before the first major network hop. I stupidly remember thinking why 4 not 2 unresolved hops but failed to even look up let alone save.

The placement of anything was either in the UBR or most likely the collective UBR's gateway (major city).

That period of time was rubbish surfing with lag and packet loss almost constantly. Magically it stopped within days of this thread and the surfing has been back at excellent speeds ever since.

I cannot provide any evidence for whatever happened but without doubt this thread was either coincidental or instrumental in getting the service back to normal.

If what I saw was a Phorm test then we have few worries because it cripples the service to such a degree that I insisted on an engineer's visit to tweak power levels and change the modem and then entered into a war with retentions. People will find what I endured intolerable and without doubt complaints will go through the roof with potentially thousands leaving. It really was that bad with stuck pages, part loaded pages and DNS resolution failures.

That "supposed" national outage was never explained, did not affect everyone and IMO was long enough to bolt on something we knew nothing about.

I am in an ex-NTL area.