jamjar said:
right ,well they do slow down the service to 2mb at certain times ,which is sort of throttleing ,otherwise why would they do it ? seems kind of strange to me ?
At times I think IS perhaps the most accurate way of saying it, but they do it to everyone on the same central as you, and the speed limitation is dependant upon the load of the central. They do it to keep ping response time low, so you may lose a % of your download speed, but you dont start getting huge packet loss and delay, which you do with a lot of ISPs at busy times, also, as its based on central load, as soon as enough people are done and stop heavily downloading, your download rates will rise, and your pings will have been mostly unnaffected during this period, perhaps rising somewhat, but nothing like would have happened elsewhere. The most obvious example would be WoW. On pipex, during peak periods, my ping used to go upto 300-600, more if I was especially unlucky, due to a glued up network and packet loss. Meanwhile, on Enta, my ping generally stays 200 or below, even at peak periods, and considering my line usage, I'd rather have a more stable ping, than a huge speed target, which would be limited by network load and never achieved at peak periods anyway.
Its not perfect, but it works a hell of a lot better than blanket rate caps, or pretending nothing is wrong and turning a blind eye to the issue (which usually happens at certain periods of the day).
Its KIND of throttling, but not throttling in the way other ISPs use it (blanket rate caps between certain time periods).
Tuesday night I was still geting 9ms to bbc.co.uk during the maintenance. 