Throttling

I've noticed that several software download sites seem to be throttled on my home PlusNet FTTC 80/20 connection (synced at full 80/20), including Windows Update downloads, Debian and Ubuntu Linux updates, as well as direct ISO downloads from mirrorservice.org. At present, I'm being throttled to 10 megabits per second across all software download sites, i.e. the total software download bandwidth on the link cannot exceed 10Mbps. Is this a known phenomenon on PlusNet? I'm looking at getting FTTP but this throttling rather defeats the purpose of having even the existing downstream bandwidth of 80Mbps.

I'm not seeing the issue, I hope you don't mind me asking but your not confusing Mbps and MBps as the difference is multiples of 8 which would mean 80Mbps is 10MBps

In reply to a post by PCJM40:

I hope you don't mind me asking but your not confusing Mbps and MBps as the difference is multiples of 8 which would mean 80Mbps is 10MBps

I think you have cracked it - feels too much of a coincidence that 10MBps is the same as 10Mbps and most downloads will be tracked in Bytes not bits.

The user could open up Task Manager and monitor the network rates when doing a download as task manager should in Mbps and so would confirm if this is just a simple confusion of B and b (not uncommon!).

Definitely not a confusion over units. I'm measuring bandwidth usage in two ways - Windows Task Manager and on the OPNsense dashboard. Both use megabits per second. I've also tinkered with CLI monitoring of bandwidth on Linux. I can see other usage beyond the 10Mbits per second, but the software update bandwidth seems to be clamped at 10Mbits per second. The issue also occurred before I put the Plusnet router into bridge mode and started using OPNsense for routing.

Edited by andrum99 (Fri 27-Jun-25 14:08:57)

In that case not seen that before and would be very surprised PlusNet were intentionally doing it - however, you might find that there is an old PlusNet profile in place.

Have you done a speedtest on the TBB website to see what that reports? Also, on the TBB site under tools there are download files - try downloading one of those and see what speed you get (I can max out my 500Mbps line using those).

Sorry I have no idea then, I never get my full 900 Mbps when downloading software updates but its never limited to just 10Mbps

Have you posted on the PlusNet forum? It's always my 'goto' in circumstances like this. Some very helpful folk there ( staff & users).

Thanks - I will try that. I've now noticed that this particular forum for Plusnet seems to be rather low traffic, in terms of the number of posts.

That's because everyone on Plusnet is perfectly happy and have no problems, maybe not strictly correct but their forum is a good place to ask questions. I can safely say they do not restrict downloads to !0Mbps or there would be a lot of complaints.

Are you using firefox by any chance
I have noticed a bug in forefox where if your downloads folder has a LOT of files in it then firefox can only download at between 10 and 20 meg
I get this a lot and always just move all the downloads out of the directory and the speed goes back to normal.