BT - Throttling

jp_bl_68

jp_bl_68

jp_bl_68

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Joined
3 Jan 2009
Posts
8,037
I'm with BT, up to 8mb, no download limit.

Over the course of an average month I'll usually only download system and software updates which, to my knowledge, have never totalled more than 1gb in any given month. But over the last 4-6 weeks I've started to download a lot more, maybe a couple of gigs a week. Now I notice that my downloads are taking much longer than they used to. I'm pretty sure it's not a virus as I use a Mac and virus scans haven't revealed anything of concern. Could BT be throttling my connection?
 
Yeah i have the same thing. I rang them up and they insisted that there was no throttling. Yet strangely, after the phone call my connection suddenly got better, how coincidental...
 
I hate ringing BT. The last time I called them I ended up speaking to a woman with a very thick Asian accent whose solution was to 'google it'. That's not really tech support.

I'll see if there's any change over the next week.
 
I had terrible issues with BT and throttling. Phonecall after phonecall. Awful customer support.

I eventually changed ISP's they annoyed me that much.
 
Switching to Plusnet solved my problems with throttling/gaming. The home hub is terrible, the latest firmware causes it to reset whilst downloading at high speed to. And not to mention the terrible customer support, those call centres are horrendous.

They told me one day I had a fault on my line, then called me back and said I didnt. And about a year ago I couldnt play WoW for about 3 months because I kept getting DC'd, BT chanrged me over £200 for repair bills and it didnt even work till the 3rd time, they suck ass.
 
TBh I've never really had this problem unless it's P2P traffic and I've been with BT for years, with regards to this type of traffic they usually stop throttling that from 12 midnight until 9am, as these are the main hours I use BB I don't find it too bad tbh, but if I was a daytime user I wouldn't be able to cope on BT, on my day off I'll use BB in the daytime and it's practically unusable during peak hours for anything other than just web browsing, even standard definition uTube videos with struggle during peak hours.

With regards to your package having 'no download limit', that is not strictly the case, a lot of unlimited BB packages full under a fair usage policy, I found this email in my inbox this morning,

Dear Customer,

We thought you'd like to know that your broadband usage in September has reached 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.
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Which tbh I thought was quite fair, 100gb a month is not too bad I suppose, and it's also quite handy that they email you at 80gb so you don't accidentally go over your 'unlimited cap' :p

Unless your a night owl like myself BT is a very poor ISP imo.
 
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2 weeks ago I switched from BT to Sky's LLU service and I have not looked back.

The speed with BT in the evening were poor, the customer service was poor. BT would not reset my profile or even give me the time of day to see if they could increase my line speed. 5 years I was with them.

I am now with Sky, have 14mbps instead of the 6.5mbps with very little slowdown anytime of day or night and pay less.

I'm very happy with it. :)
 
I hate the shaping they put on in the evening.
keep phoning up and asking why I'm being limited this way when I'm on their top package, they say I'm not but when midnight comes around my connection speeds back to 100%
also the hub keeps rebooting! AHHHHHHHHH
 
This has happened to me, except i got the email for 80Gb AFTER they had cut my bandwidth for going over 100Gb.

you think 100Gb is fair for 'Unlimited'?

In this day and age with ESD (Steam etc) for buying games at 15Gb a time, HD movies being 8-15Gb compressed. iPlayer, iTunes etc and working from home on remote networks it is VERY easy to hit.

I believe Virgin and o2 do not have this draconian policy of hitting you for 30 days during the time you need fast internet.

I work with American clients, and the way that they restrict this bandwidth means my Citrix clients and VOIP just do not function.
 
Junk said:
what do they do? do they reduce your bandwidth to 1Mb for everything?
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Notice that BT only restrict it to 1mb during peak hours, I've just rang BT up and they say that they only do this if you go over your fair usage policy for two consecutive months, I know BT's BB options aren't that great but being that I only really use it at night it's really not that bad as after midnight they don't throttle your line at all, if my local exchange had LLU available then I'd switch ISP but unfortunately it doesn't.
 
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its just peak, unfortunately they do more than just reduce speed, the quality is so poor when it kicks in that i cannot work with my american clients when working from home. I need to do this until about 11pm so it's causing me a major problem!

I'm very angry to be honest as they wont listen to reason, and wont offer a product suited to my needs.
 
jp_bl_68 said:
Who did you switch to and did it solve the problem?
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I switched to Talktalk. Constantley get fast connection speeds and I always seem to be on 8MB.

Have no complaits with Talktalk. Customer service seems great, you can request support directly from the their own forums and they are fast too.
 
Some of you guys must live in areas with ridiculously overcrowded exchanges; I have never once had any sort of throttling with BT, and I regularly download 60+Gb a month. To be fair, I am thinking of switching to another company just to see what they're like (and also to lower the price) but I since I haven't had a single problem with the connection I'm having a hard time justifying it... But each to their own, of course :)
 
Even if the exchange was "overcrowded", nothing BT Retail could do would fix that. This is something that's applied at a much more general level.
 
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