TalkTalk Broadband not displaying all web pages - eBay / Tesco / GMail / etc. - Solved!
ADSL MTU settings and router tips. Go straight to the solution!

I'm not a TalkTalk broadband customer but recently (Christmas 2008) I was asked to help someone who is and was having problems displaying some web pages on some websites!

The main problem with eBay was easily repeatable. Initially viewing a page would be fine, but after performing a 'search' and attempting to click 'next' to move to the next page of the results would cause the problem. No errors were received but the page would not change - the problem happened with both IE (Internet Explorer) and FF (FireFox) browsers.

As many people (even TalkTalk) have documented this type of broadband problem can usually be fixed by changing the MTU settings in the modem/router.

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Logging in to the SmartAX router and changing the MTU settings to 1432 is what most people recommend.

After doing this and rebooting the router didn't resolve the problem.

Note: When changing the MTU to 1432 the 'actual MTU' field showed as 1400. In theory either of these settings should work fine - problems are normally seen if the MTU is set to 1500 on TalkTalk broadband.

After much head scratching and Google searching I couldn't find any other reasons for the the problem. TalkTalk support had already been called many times and had not been any help - but they were aware of the required MTU settings.

The problem still existed on the TalkTalk connection for quite a few sites - mainly secure pages, eBay and Tesco online shopping were found to be unusable.

The FIX:

After changing the MTU settings with no luck I finally found the problem was due to the TalkTalk supplied Huawei SmartAX MT882 router/modem being connected via USB. The router has one USB and one LAN (Ethernet,CAT5) port.
Removing the routers USB lead and connecting via a network cable sorted out all the problems!
I hope this fix helps other TalkTalk ADSL users  that find themselves in the same very frustrating situation.

MTU = Maximum Transmittable Unit

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