As an incoming customer tho I expect/hope for 2 things.

1 - you advertise now the priotisation system as a benefit for the customer with no noticeable downsides yet the off switch costs money suggesting thats the superior option. Indeed for me it is the superior option, if I see slow down on external FTP I will be paying for the off switch.
2 - Now there appears to be some evidence popping up all isnt what it seemed, and you are saying that shouldnt be happening, I hope this gets fixed to reflect what you state should be happening which is silver/bronze traffic at line speed unless there is an outage or fault somewhere causing temporary problems or I guess another IOS update type event..

Hi, if this proves to fix his problems, are you going to check for this problem isp wide and fix any other broken accounts without them having to report?

Hence me asking for Timl to drop back to unlimited and give it a test so we can work out what's going on.

Yep!

Re (1), the point you may not be aware of is that Pro is an historic option for the Allowance products which were heavily speed-reduced for many hours a day. It removed those speed restrictions. It was therefore a paid-for gain in performance.

When the Unlimited products replaced those, all formal speed reductions ceased. The Pro product cannot do what it does for those still on the legacy products, simply because the restrictions it removes aren't there.

The underlying traffic prioritisation, on the other hand, remains in place. For the reasons I'm sure you have been pointed to and read many times.

Taking Pro on these products should risk degrading the customer experience. If it enhances it for all types of use, something is wrong. That is what Kelly wants to investigate.

Kelly by the way is not just a PlusNet support guy trying to help. AIUI he's in charge of this sort of thing, so if anyone can find out what's what, he can.

If you get a slowdown on external P2P on a non-problem exchange, when all you are doing is P2P, then he won't be happy! He doesn't want you to have to buy Pro - that would mean he's not achieving his goals.

If you get such a slowdown whilst your connection also has gaming, browsing, iPlayer/YouTube or similar running, then that should only happen if those other activities are at risk purely because of your own mix of traffic between you and the Plusnet routers.

Based purely on the overnight performance, all 7GB of downloads ran at line speed last night. As have subsequent downloads. I'll keep on trying today.

Great. Hammer it, especially at peak.

Bob tested this to death at the time of launch and we didn't see significant differences in speeds, but that was a year ago and the platform has grown in size so it's possible misconfiguration could have snuck in, or the characteristics of the platform have changed based on usage changes.

As Robertos said, Pro is a legacy add on which wasn't really designed for Unlimited. I just didn't see any need to turn it off, especially as it gives an ability to check the overall platform performance because it has a different management policy to Unlimited. With it all of a users traffic will be in the gold or titanium queues. Therefore there is some potential for it to perform better if we haven't provisioned enough bandwidth, or the balance was wrong. My team and I stare at graphs much of the day which are telling us we've plenty of bandwidth across the platform though!

If people use protocols which are in the lower tiers and want some sort of guarantee that if we cock up on our forecasting their speeds aren't affected, it makes a good add on for them. Providing they are comfortable with their P2P traffic having the same priority as their streaming, of course!

In reply to a post by KellyD:

If people use protocols which are in the lower tiers and want some sort of guarantee that if we cock up on our forecasting their speeds aren't affected, it makes a good add on for them.

When was the last time you cocked up and had a shortage of capacity?

At the start of this year although we had enough IPSC (connectivity for 20CN customers) capacity, our balancing of users across it wasn't good enough which meant that some end points would end up with more users on causing some congestion at peak. It was causing Purleigh some problems over on Community at the time.

We've since then increased our number of end points dedicated to IPSC traffic to spread the load more, planned a little higher for bandwidth per customer and full automated the balance so it works on the number of connected customers, rather than weighted round robin, so it's much improved.

does the priority affect things if peering hits saturation?