ISP & Email issues

My ISP is TalkTalk/Carphone Warehouse and the strength of the connection has been weak for a long time. This affects both email and internet usage, with both often not available. TalkTalk were not much use in offering support so I am going to pay an additional £5.00 per month (six month offer) and go onto the fibre optic cables and see if things improve! Will they?

I use a Mac Book pro and use TalkTalk/Carphone Warehouse as my main email provider. I have had no luck in connecting it to any wireless network away from my home network. I took it to Apple Shop at Bluewater and they couldn't get email to work either. They advised to change email provider to Gmail or similar because they saw the difficulty in having AOL as the third party email provider. (They see Yahoo problems with BT as well.) So if I use a direct email supplier the problems would ease. Do you agree?

I appreciate it's going to be a little frustrating but I'm going to have to start by answering your questions with questions.

I am going to pay an additional £5.00 per month (six month offer) and go onto the fibre optic cables and see if things improve! Will they?

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That really depends on where the problem was. Here are just a few of the reasons. Any one could be causing your issues and without understanding which it is it's impossible to say what will resolve it.
1.the ADSL modem in your supplied router (assuming you were using the supplied one) was dropping it's connection the internet but the router was remaining connected to your Mac
2. the router was dropping it's connection to your Mac but the internet connection the the router was stable
3. your were losing connection to the router and the modem was losing internet connection
(all three of these may point to a poor modem/router but also it may be interference from the surroundings/others routers if you're connecting by wifi)
4. your Mac was dropping it's connection to the router
5. the network settings

Re: email
When you say

. I have had no luck in connecting it to any wireless network away from my home network.

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Do you mean your Mac won't connect to any other wireless network or that you just can't get email?

If it won't connect to any other wireless network and your dropping connections at home try a full reset of your Network settings on your Mac

In Finder go to:
yourMacHD/Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/preferences.plist

Rename the preferences.plist to preferences.old

Restart your Mac

Reconnect to your network and try again.

If that doesn't work then do the same thing but for the whole SystemConfiguration folder

Can you let me know how this goes and if you have the same issues when connecting to the router with a cable