BT Infinity & Torrents

Associate
Joined
22 Mar 2012
Posts
1,162
Hi guys,

I'm moving into my new house on Thursday.

It's a bad area for ADSL -between 2-5MB and Virgin Cable/Fibre is not available so that leaves me with BT Infinity.

I download a fair amount of stuff using torrents so I want to know;

If I go with Infinity then will I struggle to download torrents? What kind of speeds can I expect?

What other options do I have?
 
Associate
Joined
4 Aug 2008
Posts
1,778
Location
Waterlooville
personally, if its my equipment i cant be sure, but I can get up to full line speed download, however it takes an age to get up to speed and my upload is lucky to reach more than 200kb/s for my 800kb/s something is going on.
 
Man of Honour
Joined
20 Sep 2006
Posts
33,887
Sky fibre will be up on their site on the 12th April. I don't think upload will be higher than 2MB though.

I mainly download using usenet, but the one or two times I've used torrents, speed has been fine.

If you are concerned, you could always get a VPN.
 
Associate
OP
Joined
22 Mar 2012
Posts
1,162
Sky fibre will be up on their site on the 12th April. I don't think upload will be higher than 2MB though.

I mainly download using usenet, but the one or two times I've used torrents, speed has been fine.

If you are concerned, you could always get a VPN.

Well I move in on the 12th so i'll wait and see what happens with Sky.

If not then i'll get Infinity and see how it goes.
 
Associate
Joined
2 Dec 2010
Posts
771
Location
Edinburgh
Between 4PM and midnight it goes down to about 200 KB/s for me. All other times I get the full speed (about 4.6 MB/s in my case). Sometimes it doesn't get throttled though and I can keep downloading throughout the evening, figure it depends on grid load.
 
Associate
OP
Joined
22 Mar 2012
Posts
1,162
Between 4PM and midnight it goes down to about 200 KB/s for me. All other times I get the full speed (about 4.6 MB/s in my case). Sometimes it doesn't get throttled though and I can keep downloading throughout the evening, figure it depends on grid load.

That's more encouraging.

200KB is ok at peak times I guess.

It's not a particularly built up area so hopefully won't be too limited.
 
Man of Honour
Joined
20 Sep 2006
Posts
33,887
For the record, I've had nothing but superb service from BT so far (6 weeks I think maybe...). Less can be said of Virgin.

In saying that, I have not heard a bad work about Sky broadband. I guess it depends on the upload though since prices have already been announced.

https://fibre.sky.com/shop/broadband-talk/broadband-options/sky-fibre-broadband/

I personally don't think it will be completely unlimited, as in, downloading 24/7 at full speed without repercussions. I just don't see it happening IMO. Would be great if they did allow it though, as I would switch come the end of my BT contract, more-so to do with simplifying my bill, as my TV is through Sky.
 
Soldato
Joined
18 Oct 2002
Posts
3,803
Location
Bristol
Regularly getting 4.4Mb/s on torrents, it does occasionally slow down to dialup speeds but ive not bee able to pin point if it does this at any specific time (im guessing it does though). but 90% of the time its full speed ahead captain
 
Man of Honour
Joined
13 Oct 2006
Posts
90,820
My experience of BT and traffic identified as P2P: 4pm to midnight = 200kbit/s MAX so about 20-25KByte/s at the very most - sometimes its even 3-10KB/s. For 2 hours either side of this its capped at 2MBit/s (~200KByte/s) but outside these times - so basically 2am til about 2pm its fully unlimited 10+MBit/s (so if you leave big downloads going overnight they will get full speeds).

It seems these days a lot depends on global traffic levels in the BT network, exchange congestion levels, etc. and sometimes its hardly limited at all and other times more severely.
 
Man of Honour
Joined
16 May 2005
Posts
31,299
Location
Manchester
My experience of BT and traffic identified as P2P: 4pm to midnight = 200kbit/s MAX so about 20-25KByte/s at the very most - sometimes its even 3-10KB/s. For 2 hours either side of this its capped at 2MBit/s (~200KByte/s) but outside these times - so basically 2am til about 2pm its fully unlimited 10+MBit/s (so if you leave big downloads going overnight they will get full speeds).

It seems these days a lot depends on global traffic levels in the BT network, exchange congestion levels, etc. and sometimes its hardly limited at all and other times more severely.

Are these experiences on the FTTC product or an ADSL product?
 
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