I'm fully aware Talktalk are a rubbish ISP as well but there was clearly no benefit in paying more to go with Brawband having seen how laughably bad their support was.
There is something quite wrong on those two traceroutes - you are getting routed into mainland Europe (Paris and then Amsterdam) to reach Google, who have UK servers. For comparison, this is mine. Here, the Google endpoint is in London ("lhr") whereas yours is "ams":That's where it starts off yes. Pretty much anywhere I ping will go via Edinburgh which is good for me as it's not too far away. A little closer than Manchester is. My theory was that rather than my previous ISP who routed everything to London I might have had lower latency with someone who would send it more locally.
View attachment 11013
View attachment 11014
Yes, that's them
Unfortunately TalkTalk don't let you switch to them if your CityFibre line is already active. They'll only sell you Openreach products which in my area is FTTC. And as for Zen they aren't available at my exchange.
$ traceroute google.co.uk
traceroute to google.co.uk (142.250.187.195), 30 hops max, 60 byte packets
1 fritz.box (192.168.178.1) 0.468 ms 0.566 ms 0.659 ms
2 lo0-0.bng6.wh-man.zen.net.uk (51.148.77.135) 6.100 ms 6.106 ms 6.165 ms
3 51-148-244-6.dsl.zen.co.uk (51.148.244.6) 11.550 ms 11.533 ms 12.687 ms
4 lag-3.p1.thn-lon.zen.net.uk (51.148.73.136) 12.624 ms 12.559 ms 12.601 ms
5 * * 192.178.97.189 (192.178.97.189) 14.128 ms
6 142.251.54.33 (142.251.54.33) 14.119 ms 142.251.52.148 (142.251.52.148) 12.551 ms 172.253.66.88 (172.253.66.88) 12.625 ms
7 192.178.97.94 (192.178.97.94) 12.566 ms lhr25s33-in-f3.1e100.net (142.250.187.195) 10.920 ms 10.950 ms
$ traceroute 80.249.99.164
traceroute to 80.249.99.164 (80.249.99.164), 30 hops max, 60 byte packets
1 fritz.box (192.168.178.1) 0.624 ms 0.685 ms 0.781 ms
2 lo0-0.bng6.wh-man.zen.net.uk (51.148.77.135) 6.307 ms 6.419 ms 6.466 ms
3 51-148-244-6.dsl.zen.co.uk (51.148.244.6) 12.188 ms 12.104 ms 13.409 ms
4 lag-3.p1.thn-lon.zen.net.uk (51.148.73.136) 13.541 ms 13.440 ms 13.589 ms
5 ae11-11.edge-rt2.thdo.ncuk.net (80.249.97.21) 14.711 ms 14.702 ms 14.619 ms
6 te1-51-36.core-rs3.thdo.ncuk.net (80.249.97.72) 14.610 ms 13.252 ms 11.300 ms
7 po5-32.core-rs4.thdo.ncuk.net (80.249.97.90) 11.341 ms 12.494 ms 12.484 ms
8 pingbox1.thinkbroadband.com (80.249.99.164) 11.251 ms 11.678 ms 11.666 ms
Thanks for the update. Sounds like a provider to avoid.We're going to have to consider this case closed. I got in touch to explain my problems and asked about cancellation. Within seconds my line was ceased.