O2 Traffic Management

Soldato
Joined
12 Jun 2005
Posts
8,395
It was only a matter of time before they did it, got this today by email:

We’re making some changes to help your O2 Home Broadband flow better in October ’09.

The internet is busiest between around 8pm and 11pm, when most people are at home and online. This can slow it down for everyone.

To stop that happening, we’ve introduced a traffic management policy for our Access package on O2 Home Broadband.

From now on, we’ll give first priority to those things most people want to do in the evening – like emailing, looking at websites, watching things on sites like BBC iPlayer or YouTube, or using programs like Skype or Messenger.

We’ll give lower priority to peer to peer programs and newsgroup services, find out the details. So you’ll notice them running slower when our network gets busier. We’ve done this because some people use these programs to download large files (like movies and TV shows) all day long. And that slows everything else down.



How traffic management works

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We’ll only do it at the busiest times (from 8pm to 11pm or whenever our network is congested).
*
You can still use any kind of program, whenever you want. But peer to peer programs and newsgroup services will run slower when our network is busy.
*
Audio and video streaming (like BBC iPlayer and YouTube) will work as normal – or even faster.
*
We won’t limit your actual connection speed – only the speed of peer to peer programs and newsgroup services.

Regards,

Felix Geyr
Head of O2 Home Broadband

********s.
 
Soldato
Joined
6 Feb 2004
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20,598
Location
England
well this only applies to o2 access - the service where they don't have their own equipment in exchanges. the costs for bandwidth from BT are prohibitively expensive, it's no wonder they can't afford to offer "unlimited" access for 18 quid a month. most access users complain of really poor perfomance in the evenings where they can't even game because of poor pings that are caused by congestion. this will hopefully address that and most o2 access customers should be happy with this news. i'm only surprised it wasn't introduced much sooner.
 
Soldato
Joined
9 May 2005
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4,524
Location
Nottingham
I had their Access package from Aug 08 - 09 as it's all I could get in my area and the speed was terrible in the evenings, impossible to stream video after 6 a lot of the time and gaming was not a good experience. When 90% of the other providers on the same infrastructure are traffic shaping it's the only thing that can be done to improve the experience as O2 can't touch the equipment.
 

wij

wij

Associate
Joined
27 Dec 2006
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-
Was only a matter of time really, and that is the main reason why I would never sign up to a 12 / 18 month contract with an ISP like O2.

The only people who are going to whine about this are for the most part going to be the ones causing the issue anyway.

Out of all the P2P / Newsgroup traffic that they see on their network I'd be willing to bet that the portion of "legitimate" traffic is probably less than 1%.
 
Associate
Joined
30 May 2007
Posts
853
Location
Yorkshire
This isn't exactly a massive deal surely?

3-5 hours of traffic shaping to combat the slow speeds and poor latency as of recent is probably a good thing (O2 Access only). When I was back at home pings were 100-130 constantly when it got busy so I would rather have traffic shaping sorting this out than lag around everywhere. Web browsing was also noticeably slow so sorting this out is also great.

I myself use peer to peer a fair bit and see nothing wrong with it. We are still free to rack up gb after gb outside of peak hours...
 
Soldato
Joined
19 Oct 2002
Posts
6,961
Location
Stoke on trent
If this sorts out the poor pings then i will be very happy as i'm not a big bandwidth user.

EDIT: Considering the traffic managment is now active its doing **** all!

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Can anyone recommend me an isp, non LLU please :)
 
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Associate
Joined
11 Aug 2007
Posts
425
Location
Preston, Lancashire
Phew, I'm safe. I actually forced my parents to change from Sky's internet package to O2 because of the rubbish traffic management from 5pm - 12pm. We couldn't even open YouTube videos. :( Dude, update your package!
 
Soldato
Joined
19 Oct 2002
Posts
6,961
Location
Stoke on trent
Phew, I'm safe. I actually forced my parents to change from Sky's internet package to O2 because of the rubbish traffic management from 5pm - 12pm. We couldn't even open YouTube videos. :( Dude, update your package!

Can't move to llu, i live in a village and the exchange will prob be updated in 30 yrs lol

I think the traffic management hadn't kicked in until today so i'l see what i get later.
 
Associate
Joined
10 Dec 2007
Posts
1,677
http://forum.o2.co.uk/viewtopic.php?t=27566

"just off the post to customer services and they advised that it was due to be rolled out as of today 01/10/09 but has been put off till 05/10/09. Im hoping this isnt just another promise of improved service that never appears!

Was also told the throttling was 5pm till 11pm which is certainly the worst times from my experiance"
 
Don
Joined
21 Oct 2002
Posts
46,744
Location
Parts Unknown
I'm on Virgin, and tbh, I don't care about traffic management, if I've got things to download, I just limit it during the day and set it to full rape speed at night

Dead happy with the service as I always good pings for gaming
 
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