Moving ISP (FTTC) - worried about congestion

[ed79]

I'm considering moving to plusnet from coms.plc but am worried that I may experience problems with the network being overloaded - as per http://www.thinkbroadband.com/news/6360-no-sign-yet-of-bt-wholesale-congestion-improving.html

Someone I used to work with whose house is connected to the same street cabinet as me had problems not being able to stream video on BT Infinity. I went with ADSL24 and everything was fine, so this again worries me slightly. Guess my questions are:-

1) how can I find out what network coms are using (would tracert do it)?
2) do plusnet use btwholesale?


My Broadband Ping

In use my connection seems fine but my graph above seems to show some packet loss. However I'd hate to commit to an 18 month contract and then end up stuck with a troublesome connection.

 

[ci_newman]

ADSL24 just re-sell BT Wholesale FTTC anyway don't they?

Why do you want to leave coms.plc?

 

[ed79]

Reason for leaving - I'm paying £33 a month for a 40/10 connection and line rental. With ADSL24 it was unmetered 8pm-8am and weekends, Coms are the same but throttle torrents to 5kB/sec ALL weekend and from 8pm to about 2am. Only get full speed from around 2.30am. Also I've noticed Steam downloads only running at 1MB/sec when it should be 4-5MB/sec.

Currently with Plusnet I can get 24/7 unmetered 80/20 and phone for less than I'm currently paying.

I also don't like the way Coms are operating - they've only admitted on a forum that they had started "trialing" traffic management when everyones downloads slowed to a crawl in March, and 2 months on have still not made any official announcement.

 

[KIA]

http://community.plus.net/ping-graphs/

 

[ed79]

ADSL24 just re-sell BT Wholesale FTTC anyway don't they?

This is my tracert from coms, but if before they sold (out) ADSL24 used btwholesale then that's encouraging because everything was fine back then.

Tracing route to overclockers.co.uk [91.151.218.10]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 1 ms 1 ms 1 ms 192.168.1.254
2 10 ms 10 ms 9 ms 109.224.191.53
3 10 ms 10 ms 10 ms 149.6.9.170
4 13 ms 11 ms 12 ms gi8-10.mag01.lhr01.atlas.cogentco.com [149.6.9.169]
5 11 ms 10 ms 10 ms te0-5-0-5.rcr21.lhr01.atlas.cogentco.com [130.117.0.90]
6 12 ms 12 ms 11 ms te0-7-1-3.mpd21.lon13.atlas.cogentco.com [130.117.50.237]
7 12 ms 14 ms 13 ms be2316.ccr21.lon01.atlas.cogentco.com [154.54.73.114]
8 * 12 ms 15 ms te1-1.mag02.lon01.atlas.cogentco.com [154.54.74.110]
9 12 ms 13 ms 11 ms sl-crs2-lon-0-1-4-1.sprintlink.net [213.206.131.29]
10 11 ms 11 ms 11 ms sl-datah1-590215-0.sprintlink.net [213.206.156.150]
11 121 ms 12 ms 11 ms xe-0-0-0-core0.sdld1.uk.as6908.net [62.149.51.102]
12 15 ms 12 ms 12 ms vlan-3996-laggr0.sdld1.uk.as6908.net [62.149.54.50]
13 14 ms 13 ms 13 ms vlan-4012-ltor6.sdld1.uk.as6908.net [62.149.52.202]
14 * * * Request timed out.

 

[ed79]

http://community.plus.net/ping-graphs/

Hmm, those at least look consistent, although the minimum latency seems a bit high for FTTC on a few of them.

This was what mine looked liked on 19th March, the day before the throttling started I think...