Awful Traffic Shaping on Fibre Unlimited

I feared returning to PlusNet due to their terrible traffic shaping on their ADSL service which made me leave, but on the promise of unlimited Fibre having little traffic shaping which should not be noticeable unless your line is maxed (i.e everything is gold and wont be dropped and games/voip is titanium) I hesitantly returned.

Seemingly it was a mistake , whilst PlusNet may claim everything is gold - at peak times Gold doesn't seem to apply to everything.

Usenet - (yep that old service!) is strongly shaped on PlusNet fibre more so than anything else (although I guess P2P is equally knobbled by PlusNet).


I have a 80/20 service and sync around full speed 77Mb ish, usenet is usually used outside of peak periods (10pm onwards or 9am - midday) and I get full line speed - its amazing 8MB/s+ downloads - excellent.

So imagine my surprise when about 6:30pm tonight I get speeds of 1.2MB/s from usenet... ran a speed test which shows 60Mb connection so a bit low - but not bad, restart usenet - 1.2MB/s still. So I try a 1Gb download file from this site - that downloads at 8Mb/s - but usenet still 1.2Mb/s. Hrrmmmm.........

Reboot router to change pipe
62Mb speed test
7.8MB/s 1 Gig file download
2.6MB/s usenet


Something seriously wrong here - so start logging pipes and speeds.

PCL-AG08
Speed test = 60/16
1Gb test file = 8.03MB/s
Usenet = 2.93MB/s

Links:
Speedtest
pcl-ag08-1gb.png
pcl-ag08-usenet.png


PTN-AG03
Speed test = 53/16
1Gb test file = 7.22MB/s
Usenet = 1.14MB/s

Links:
Speedtest
pcl-a03-1gb.png
ptn-ag03-usenet.png


PTW-AG01
Speed test = 63/18
1Gb test file = 7.61MB/s
Usenet = 1.78MB/s

Links:
Speedtest
ptw-ag01-1gb.png
ptw-ag01-usenet.png

PCL-AG04
1Gb file = 7.54MB/s
Usenet = 1.43MB/s

PCL-AG07
Usenet = 1.41MB/s


I think its fair to say its not exchange contention as speed tests are good, and other file downloads are good.
I think it has to be usenet traffic shaping taking affect making speeds so low when compared to other downloads, the question is why? If everything is Gold - then why is usenet affected and other services are not affected?


Thoughts from others would be most useful. - but this is clearly not what PlusNet have said would happen on their unlimited service.

FWIW - the best gateway was PCL-AG06 which was an average of 4.10MB/s

Just to clarify a point - Usenet is listed as Bronze in the traffic shaping guide not Gold - but anyway - if you read posts from PlusNet reps like this one
http://forums.thinkbroadband.com/plusnet/t/4231472-r...

Then what they say is :
"With the Unlimited product, there are no rate limits, and we scale the network to support bronze queue traffic. This means your P2P should be at line rate, and game misidentification matters a lot less. "

Can you test a different usenet server to rule out server-side congestion?

You are downloading copyright protected material.

In reply to a post by 5km:

You are downloading copyright protected material.

You are making assumptions.

No I'm not. One download is Rush BluRay RIP.

Tried multiple different files from easynews - both for eu servers and usa servers - speeds are the same... so that rules out external links/servers - as they are from different server farms in different locations. All screens shots were taken from the same file download as it was the easiest - but different files and server farms tried.

In reply to a post by 5km:

No I'm not. One download is Rush BluRay RIP.

It's unlikely a Usenet download of Ubuntu would run any faster though.

Downloading and downloaded - two different things.

Pick a large file - well populated and use that as the test file - its the best way to make sure you dont have bandwidth limits are the far end - but you already know that right?

Are the traceroutes to each server completely different then?