Bt 8 meg problem

twist3d0n3 said:
i'm on bt at the moment, they definitely aren't throttling me during the day...
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It depends on where you are. It's a postcode lottery. If your exchange is remote and has limited backhaul bandwidth to it then you'll be throttled more heavily. Likewise if your exchange serves an area with a lot of subscribers who all subscribe to faster packages, stricter throttling will apply.
If you are on an exchange that has recently been upgraded but lots of subscribers are still on older slower services you'll more than likely not be throttled as there's plenty of bandwidth.

almost all domestic connections are on 1:50 contention. Which means you're competing with up to 50 people for your allocated bandwidth. If lots of people decide to watch iPlayer at once then you're only guaranteed 1/50th of your allocation. 8meg over 50 isn't a lot. (Works out at about 160Kbit)
 
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Skidilliplop said:
It is true. The fact you're on a contention ratio means you're being traffic shaped. Somewhere along the line there will be a QoS policy that dumps your consumer grade traffic below something (or indeed everything) else and or limits it to less than wirespeed throughput. Such is tantamount to traffic shaping. But without it video and audio streaming wouldn't work. If you run a packet dissector while listening to spotify you'll probably see the IP TOS is slightly higher than that of a HTTP session.
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ISP congestion is far worse. The next place for congestion is probably the exchange if a BT product is in use. In general people should be able to max out their lines 24/7 as long as they go for a decent BT-based product (Zen Pro) or LLU (Sky Unlimited).

We have Zen FTTC and we're able to get the full 40Mb/s almost any time of the day apart from the evening when it slows to 10Mb/s due to exchange congestion.

There's no need to make folk paranoid. You get what you pay for. :)
 
3dcandy said:
That's because Sky connect IS BT! Sky is better but honestly you ARE still get shaped/managed/throttled. You just don't see it as much because they have so much more capacity. In about 1998 I was the first user in Stafford for NTL's (now Virgin) cable service. I was encouraged to download as much as I could. A CD's worth took 5 seconds. A gig took 10 seconds. The modem quite often reported stats that my network card in the PC couldn't cope with (100 meg PCI Intel based NIC). Then as the time came to launch the product properly I was issued with a firmware upgrade, and I was then stuck on 512 meg. Flashing the modem back to stock still stuck me at 512 meg and you could see the traffic management in use...nothings changed, you still get shapped by all suppliers, just some shape/filter more than others. Some choose to shape torrents, some shape iplayer. If they didn't everyone would complain because every type of traffic would crawl. I bet Sky shape iplayer so that their Skyplayer is better! I know I would if I was in the same boat as them. BT shape torrents so badly because they have so many more customers to keep happy over a broader spectrum, many of whom wouldn't know what a torrent was if it bit them on the bum. Changing ISP's is then your only option, but just beware that they know what you're doing and you risk the case of being prosecuted if the torrents are illegal...
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Implying you had a ~1Gbps connection :confused::confused:
 
fluff said:
ISP congestion is far worse. The next place for congestion is probably the exchange if a BT product is in use. In general people should be able to max out their lines 24/7 as long as they go for a decent BT-based product (Zen Pro) or LLU (Sky Unlimited).

We have Zen FTTC and we're able to get the full 40Mb/s almost any time of the day apart from the evening when it slows to 10Mb/s due to exchange congestion.

There's no need to make folk paranoid. You get what you pay for. :)
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Hell yeah of course you do. However don't kid yourself, your traffic is still shaped mate. Exchange congestion will trigger traffic shaping to keep it all ticking along at a fair rate for everyone...bet torrents crawl during those times...everyone is shaped is some form or other!
 
3dcandy said:
Hell yeah of course you do. However don't kid yourself, your traffic is still shaped mate. Exchange congestion will trigger traffic shaping to keep it all ticking along at a fair rate for everyone...bet torrents crawl during those times...everyone is shaped is some form or other!
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The exchange congestion is never protocol specific, everything continues to operate but at a reduced speed.
 
AFAIK BT's throttling depends on several things, one being overall traffic levels in the network and another seems to depend on how heavily your exchange is loaded, regardless of individual user useage.

Since the FUP increase (to 300gig) tho I've not seen anything too silly with throttling, P2P slows down to 2Mbit/s during peak times, but everything else is full speed and outside of 6pm-12am even P2P does 10Mbit/s.

If you do exceed the FUP tho... welcome to hell... you will get <50kbit/s P2P at peak times and <2Mbit/s for 2 hours either side of that, plus throttling on other protocols at peak times and you will get these kinda conditions even as a light user it seems when your exchange is nearing capacity.


EDIT: Oh and BT's useage monitor is not that accurate at all, when they had the 100gig FUP I was carefully monitoring my combined upload/download use at the router using a flashed firmware - and I'd get the "You've used 80gig" warning around 50-60gig actual useage and the "100gig welcome to throttle hell" email around 70-80gig so they are probably right about it rounding up - also throttling would kick in on the first email despite the email stating it wouldn't happen until you exceeded the FUP (100gig).
 
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Rroff said:
EDIT: Oh and BT's useage monitor is not that accurate at all, when they had the 100gig FUP I was carefully monitoring my combined upload/download use at the router using a flashed firmware - and I'd get the "You've used 80gig" warning around 50-60gig actual useage and the "100gig welcome to throttle hell" email around 70-80gig so they are probably right about it rounding up - also throttling would kick in on the first email despite the email stating it wouldn't happen until you exceeded the FUP (100gig).
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I have never in the 10 years or so ive been with BT had an email or letter regarding usage.
 
3dcandy said:
Yup. For the trial it would certainly appear I did. I was one of less than 50 people connected via their fibre network at that time however....
Trial lasted 3 months, and then down to 512 meg
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Even if you had gigabit capability through the cable network at the time, very few hosts back then had over 100Mbit/s connections and even with servers equipped with gigabit its extremely rare to see more than about 40% of that over any distance of public internet. Not to mention that at the time the version of DOCSIS they were using on the trial capped out at 50Mbit/s or 38Mbit/s depending on which part of the trial you were on.
 
NightSt@lk3r said:
I have never in the 10 years or so ive been with BT had an email or letter regarding usage.
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Dear Customer,

We thought you'd like to know that your broadband usage in April is now above 80GB.

In accordance with our Fair Usage Policy, and to protect the online experience of all our customers, if your monthly broadband usage goes over 100GB, we'll restrict your broadband speed at peak times (typically this is between 5pm and 12am, but these times may change depending on the demands on the network) to 1Mbps for 30 days.

Please note: your service won't be affected in any other way - we'll restrict only your speed, not the amount you can upload and download.

We'll email you again to let you know if your usage exceeds 100GB. For more information, please see our Fair Usage Policy.
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^^ What they used to send out :S its possible if your exchange hasn't been upgraded to WBC the old limits are still in effect which is why your seeing <1Mbit speeds at peak times.
 
Well had an engineer out this afternoon, said he found a fault on the line, did some trickery with the box where the line comes into the house as well as put a new phone socket in and now its nearly 5pm and my internet has not slowed down at all.

Strange how a fault with the wiring can only effect my connection between 4pm and 12am everyday:confused:
 
lol... not to be discouraging but give it a month or 2 and I bet traffic management kicks in again.

If your out of contract might want to look at the likes of idnet and andrews and arnold and see if they have offerings that suit you - they can be a bit expensive tho if you use bandwidth a lot during business hours - but cheap for off (business) peak bandwidth - as their primary focus is business customers.
 
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