Three have now implemted Traffic management (0.2mb-7 days)

Three have now implemented Traffic management that basically turns your device into an modem (0.2mb) for 7 days but they have not disclosed what heavy use is (but i guess the 50gb-100gb users may no longer be be able to do that any more at peak times, that do abuse it a lot)

http://support.three.co.uk/SRVS/CGI-BIN/WEBISAPI.DLL...
http://support.three.co.uk/mobiledocs/Support/Signal...

or google three traffic management
or on the three site > Support. / Signal & coverage. / Network problems. / Traffic management.

I guess this is for the all-you-can-eat plans (One Plan) as others have hard usage caps.

Seems fair enough to me.

Lol they made a mistake in that PDF.

256 KBps

256 kilobytes per second, that's 2Mbps (megabits per second)

be OK if that is the limit thought 2mb is way better then 0.2mb

Yeah but it won't be 2Mbps as that too high so there would be no point in the limit, they mean 0.2Mbps / 256kbps.

you are right as I tend to only get 1mb ish around where i am on three

Just getting a connection that lasts longer than 3 minutes would be an improvement for me. Apparently due to Congestion.

Though a speed reduction to 2mbs would be half what I used to get.

But if this is based upon the theoretical maximum of 24 the system should support, then yes it would be a penalty.

Given 3G is the only broadband option here, when I read the thread title I thought "Yes... finally. Great. We're not going to have half a dozen users running P2P leeching all the limited bandwidth away"

The information at the first link doesn't seem entirely clear to me as to whether this affects us or not (PAYG, using about 7GB per month)

"The vast majority of our customers will not experience this, but we do manage the traffic of the very highest data users (top 5%) in the busiest areas, where lots of people are connecting to our network at once."

I suspect I'm actually one of perhaps three regular users of that cell ("area"?) and potentially the heaviest user overall given that it's our home broadband connection and it's connected 24/7 (though, not downloading 24/7)

Our main usage is during the day 9am - 5pm (web, ftp) and used to be a solid 6Meg down 1.5Meg up all the time regardless of time of day (it can run to 11Meg+ but that would need a HSPA+ router and ours is only HSPA)

The speed has dipped lately down to about 5Meg but today it seems faster than it was, and the latency has dropped back down to the 40ms to 60ms region whereas it was nudging up towards 80. Wonder when this came in, and if it's related.

That explains why my speeds have dropped off. I am on the £15/month AYCE Plan. Any alternatives out there that doesn't have traffic management for the same sort of money?

I only get around 1.2Mb on my landline so have been using the phone for downloads.

Hopefully FTTC will be available here next month

If you are a heavy user, or require very high speeds then wait for FTTC. Sounds like you don't have to wait long at all.

There are alternatives, although designed for M2M applications that can even offer higher usage and even a static public IP however these will be a lot more expensive and use the same network via a MVNO solution.