Best Fibre Optic ISP For Torrents?

Overslop said:
I won't have to download my Steam collection again (I hope!) so my average monthly downloads should become much lower. Ordinarily I would average about 300GB a month which I don't imagine being a problem?
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Still very high comparatively, it would put you in the top 5-10% on any given month and generally would mean you aren't a profitable user for the ISP if you sustained that level. It's worth noting that most people (around 70% most months) use less than 100GB.

The break even point for profitability varies because it depends on how 'bursty' the data is and time of day (it's more likely to be profitable if you have short bursts of high usage (5 minutes at 18Mbps in the middle of the afternoon is far easier to loose in the average than consistent usage of 10Mbps all evening - it's that consistent usage, even at a lower level which costs us money as billing is based on 95th percentile). Generally, 250-300GB a month is financial trouble no matter what the profile, if it's consistent torrent or newsgroup traffic then even 150-200GB is an issue.

I appreciate the marketing is unlimited and that's not good (we don't use it and I don't like it but I can't change the entire industry) but the fact is the price your paying doesn't support your usage (in fact, twice the price wouldn't). It's up to you whether you consider downloading so much that other's are subsidising you to be abusive at the end of the day (in the nicest possible way).
 
bigredshark said:
Still very high comparatively, it would put you in the top 5-10% on any given month and generally would mean you aren't a profitable user for the ISP if you sustained that level. It's worth noting that most people (around 70% most months) use less than 100GB.

The break even point for profitability varies because it depends on how 'bursty' the data is and time of day (it's more likely to be profitable if you have short bursts of high usage (5 minutes at 18Mbps in the middle of the afternoon is far easier to loose in the average than consistent usage of 10Mbps all evening - it's that consistent usage, even at a lower level which costs us money as billing is based on 95th percentile). Generally, 250-300GB a month is financial trouble no matter what the profile, if it's consistent torrent or newsgroup traffic then even 150-200GB is an issue.

I appreciate the marketing is unlimited and that's not good (we don't use it and I don't like it but I can't change the entire industry) but the fact is the price your paying doesn't support your usage (in fact, twice the price wouldn't). It's up to you whether you consider downloading so much that other's are subsidising you to be abusive at the end of the day (in the nicest possible way).
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Do you work for an ISP, or in a data centre? (I remember you saying somewhere but can't remember now!)
 
Pretty sure bts fttc fup is ~ 300gb, although talktalks llu has an fup of 450gb and those of us on Be have no fup (there's a couple people who've been passing 1tb for years without issue :p) but really, 300gb isn't that high once you factor in a 4 person using various on-demand services, downloads etc. sadly.

Anyway, I'm curious why the op would need to switch, if his current service is sufficient. As I pointed out above, there are quite a few llu isps which have higher caps than fttc has currently - not to mention better pricing. Unless it's something other than a mild impatience then stick with adsl24. Fttc will only come down in price while caps rise the longer you wait really.

Anyway, there are very few fibre isps, although fibrecity begin the largest (although iirc then the owning group is have some issues with the fraud department atm :).
 
Azuse05 said:
Pretty sure bts fttc fup is ~ 300gb, although talktalks llu has an fup of 450gb and those of us on Be have no fup (there's a couple people who've been passing 1tb for years without issue :p) but really, 300gb isn't that high once you factor in a 4 person using various on-demand services, downloads etc. sadly.
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Can you link me to where TT's LLU policy is 450gb please, i think the figure you quoted it very wrong an di would love to see something in there T and C's that state its 450gb a month
 
bigredshark said:
Snip snip

The break even point for profitability varies because it depends on how 'bursty' the data is and time of day (it's more likely to be profitable if you have short bursts of high usage (5 minutes at 18Mbps in the middle of the afternoon is far easier to loose in the average than consistent usage of 10Mbps all evening - it's that consistent usage, even at a lower level which costs us money as billing is based on 95th percentile). Generally, 250-300GB a month is financial trouble no matter what the profile, if it's consistent torrent or newsgroup traffic then even 150-200GB is an issue.

Snip snip
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Out of curiosity how much less does it cost to send traffic in the early hours like 1-7am in rough terms comparing to say evening traffic at 6-10pm?
 
Gammawolf said:
Out of curiosity how much less does it cost to send traffic in the early hours like 1-7am in rough terms comparing to say evening traffic at 6-10pm?
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The ISP will need to purchase sufficient capacity to keep the performance level they've decided upon. So if in the evenings they're finding that they need more capacity to keep up with the average demands of their customers then it'll (naturally) cost a chunk to upgrade & pay the higher rental for higher capacity links.

With these links in place, any usage off peak won't require any capital expenditure to upgrade them, so.. effectively it's as near as makes no difference free.

Consider it a bit like the M25 - it's very crowded in rush hour, so if we wanted to get the average speed up we'd need to add yet further lanes at great cost. Having done that, it wouldn't cost any much more to send a few hundred more cars around it at 4am.
 
blueacid said:
http://community.plus.net/blog/2008...e-charged-for-broadband-the-cost-of-ipstream/ <--actually, this explains it better than I could hope to.

EDIT: That blog post is from 2008, so the pricing is, naturally, a few years out of date. Nowadays it's (so I gather) still not far off what they quote!
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That's very interesting, thanks for the link.

In particular it makes the motivation for ISPs to disincentivise downloading during daytime through the use of fair usage policies quite clear. Most of my substantial bandwidth usage is overnight (I'll often push 150GB in a night) for precisely this reason (Edit: I push about 1TB/month on average and I've never had any complaints from my ISP, Virgin Media) :)
 
Al Vallario said:
That's very interesting, thanks for the link.

In particular it makes the motivation for ISPs to disincentivise downloading during daytime through the use of fair usage policies quite clear. Most of my substantial bandwidth usage is overnight (I'll often push 150GB in a night) for precisely this reason (Edit: I push about 1TB/month on average and I've never had any complaints from my ISP, Virgin Media) :)
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I always try and avoid posting this sort of comment but 1TB a month dear lord what are you downloading, surely even TV and movies dries up eventually and more to the point when on earth do you get to watch it all!
 
Anyone here have any experience with Virgin Media and their 30MB line and torrent sites/ clients was like?
 
Gammawolf said:
Out of curiosity how much less does it cost to send traffic in the early hours like 1-7am in rough terms comparing to say evening traffic at 6-10pm?
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The link posted explains most of it, basically the cost issue is that we're charged (and must plan for) peak usage which means capacity is basically free at other times as a result because it remains below the usage level which we've already paid for with our peak usage. Indeed I spend increasing amounts of time dreaming up schemes to fill these troughs in our usage because if we can find bandwidth intensive services to sell in those time slots then the bandwidth is free to us (or more accurately we're already paying for it anyway) but we get to charge the customer for it.

It also tickles another issue which is that it's slightly cheaper to provision a user in the band 1 exchanges. Which means effectively, because no ISP is yet differentiating their pricing on geography, users in big cities are more profitable.

Also, usenet and torrents basically can't be contended without a speed drop, unlike say, http and mail, traffic. Contention tendsw to be viewed as a bad word but it's perfectly legitimate for http in particular because people want to load a page really fast and then view it. The loading to reading time ratio is pretty good (1 second loading, 20 seconds viewing minimum) which means, as the exact time people want to load pages averages out over tens of thousands of users, 20:1 contention on the connection is fine for browsing like that. That has to change with video obviously which is a problem 'politically' as people have become used to pricing based on a model which is only effective for browsing.

blueacid said:
Do you work for an ISP, or in a data centre? (I remember you saying somewhere but can't remember now!)
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Both actually, I run a network architecture consultancy for ISPs and service providers and I've worked for both in the past. My big clients are actually past employers in general but I have a good variety of clients and some big names in both sectors.
 
Overslop said:
ADSL 24
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Overslop said:
Yep, C&W LLU sold by ADSL 24.
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I can't make up my mind? :rolleyes:
I am looking to move to new ISP and like the sound of ADSL24 LLU on C&W as No throttling which is key for torrents, also for under £20 a month :)

but FTTC has just been enabled on my exchange with speeds up to 36 D/L and 7 U/P :eek: which sounds great but its looking a bit of a mine filed with FTTC ISP as all have caps and a lot are throttled :mad:

Best price i have found for FTTC is Plusnet at £21 with 120GB cap but as its owned by BT im guessing i would not gain any thing speed wise with torrents?

So my question is should i go for the slower LLU speeds with ADSL24 and know for sure that my torrent speeds will be good all day or risk joining plusnet FTTC for the fast speeds then risk finding no benefit with torrents and being locked in an 18month contract?

Any one with plusnet FTTC?

Thanks for your time. :D
 
most of the fibre isps offer unlimited overnight usage, for reasons explained earlier in the thread. Therefore if you leave a laptop or NAS on overnight to get your downloads in, you'll be laughing. This works very well when twinned with RSS feeds - at 4am when a new download is available your client will dive on and get involved right there, when you pay far less for the usage than if you'd waited until 6pm the following evening to download it.

For me, therefore, I'd be happy with unlimited overnight and fast access during the day/evening. If you too could live with that, get fttc. If you'd rather download whenever, albeit at a slower rate, go llu.
 
Virgin is Fibre to you house pretty much how ever, I have heard that in the Future they maybe offering Fibre to the modem (how true this is i dont know i just heard it from some one who works at VM but he did tell me about the TIVO box about 2 years ago and its now out so i have no reason not to trust him) but Virgin is By far the Fastest out there, I have 50meg and i get 50 meg all day every day, i can also have 100 meg if i want to but tbh 50 is fast enough, They do have a Fair use per day i think if i download over 10gb or somthing i get throttled to about 15meg which is still faster than a lot of BT lines so yes the limit is there but even when your slowed down its still faster than most BT lines. where i live i can only get 1 meg on a BT line so virgins 50 meg appealed some what more than copper :D but it is Coax into your house but my Ping is about 9 lol
 
bigredshark with the increase in the use of youtube, BBC iplayer and other streaming services of HD content like that, has their been a significant increase in the monthly bandwidth usage of the 'average' user from what it has been in previous years?

If there has been a significant growth in the monthly bandwidth usage of the 'average' customer, from the companies you have worked with is there any sign of a proportional increase in infrastructure to cope with that growing demand? or are companies just letting usage rise to the point where something will eventully just fail?
 
bigredshark said:
I appreciate the marketing is unlimited and that's not good (we don't use it and I don't like it but I can't change the entire industry) but the fact is the price your paying doesn't support your usage (in fact, twice the price wouldn't). It's up to you whether you consider downloading so much that other's are subsidising you to be abusive at the end of the day (in the nicest possible way).
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Really though it could be argued that heavy users are just making use of the unused bandwidth that light users have paid for and haven't used, so as long as an isp is making an overall profit they shouldn't complain and cap people, but that doesn't mean i support extreme usage.
 
blueacid said:
most of the fibre isps offer unlimited overnight usage, for reasons explained earlier in the thread. Therefore if you leave a laptop or NAS on overnight to get your downloads in, you'll be laughing. This works very well when twinned with RSS feeds - at 4am when a new download is available your client will dive on and get involved right there, when you pay far less for the usage than if you'd waited until 6pm the following evening to download it.

For me, therefore, I'd be happy with unlimited overnight and fast access during the day/evening. If you too could live with that, get fttc. If you'd rather download whenever, albeit at a slower rate, go llu.
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Thanks for the post, i think FTTC is the better option as ADSL24 say i will only get around 8meg on their LLU service. But just had a quick chat with Plusnet and still not sure as asked them do they just throttle during peak times and was told its all the time for P2P and newsgroups torrents ect :(

Want to go FTTC but worried that after all the full i will not gain any decend speeds on my torrents and be locked in contact for 18months :confused:
 
Randall8686 said:
Virgin is Fibre to you house pretty much how ever, I have heard that in the Future they maybe offering Fibre to the modem (how true this is i dont know i just heard it from some one who works at VM but he did tell me about the TIVO box about 2 years ago and its now out so i have no reason not to trust him) but Virgin is By far the Fastest out there, I have 50meg and i get 50 meg all day every day, i can also have 100 meg if i want to but tbh 50 is fast enough, They do have a Fair use per day i think if i download over 10gb or somthing i get throttled to about 15meg which is still faster than a lot of BT lines so yes the limit is there but even when your slowed down its still faster than most BT lines. where i live i can only get 1 meg on a BT line so virgins 50 meg appealed some what more than copper :D but it is Coax into your house but my Ping is about 9 lol
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Haha might stop ****ing about and pay the extra to get 50mb line with Virgin for £35? :rolleyes: What speeds do you get with your torrents? Does it get better out of peak hours?

Cheers
 
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