My contact with BT

So I rang the number I was given where I got through to BT Helpdesk Newcastle, slighty better than BT Helpdesk India with the accent but not much.

After explaining to them the poor downloads and speeds in the evening and how after weeks of tests the situation was un-acceptable I was told basically you are tied in theres nothing you can do (evil laugh) and he put me through to the UK BT Tech support (nice cop out).
Nice Indian UK BT Technical answered and being an old git Telecoms consultant I very quickly got through the party line to the truth which is BTs ISP is over contended in our area (and others) and there is nothing the technical guys can do about it other than hope sometime this year it gets upgraded. Line is fine, exchange is fine.

So we consented the way out was up, he totally agreed with my reasons for wanting out and I am speaking to a manager tomorrow.

Cross fingers, oh and it seems I am far from the only one complaining, seems they are getting a lot of calls about this issue.

Well overcontention at the exchange could make no odds which ISP you moved to. The issue is also one for BT Wholesale to fix. BT Retail nor any other ISP can do anything about it. All they can do is send e-mails off to Wholesale telling them of the problem. But as it is the most expensive sort of upgrades it does not come cheap nor fast. Saying that my exchange was upgraded fairly quickly just a few days after the target upgrade date.

Pop your phone number into this page and see what it says: http://status.zensupport.co.uk/exchanges/ should say red if their is exchange contention. YOu should also be able to download fine with no problems off peak.

Not the exchange Paul, as I pointed out, nor is there a problem with my line. The problem lies with BT who are my ISP now, I was with ACE Internet before.

He did a check on the exchange, I know for a fact it was upgraded in December and he stated that it was fine.

Right now I have added 4 torrents in a row, one has 139000 seeders and 40000 leechers and the torrent is capped at 12kb/s no matter what I add or pause.

Since they stated that this was a un-capped and un-restricted service subject to Fair usage policy, I called them before migrating to see what the FUP was, it was to restrict those that downloaded alot i.e. the 24/7 lot, the 100+gb gang as I would class them. Since I am lucky to even hit 15gb I wouldnt class myself in that bracket but here I am finding my torrents restricted to 12kb/s in the evening.

I dont count a service so slow at periods in the last 7 weeks that my Barclays internet banking will time me out for security reasons because I havent responded for 5 minutes.

Our incumbent appears to be incumbered, maybe they should stop taking on more customers if they are over capacity, there no better than AOL it seems for that.

And no, BT havent contacted me, another shocker.

wow id kill for 12k, its 6 here!

The FUP just seems to effect everyone, only became really strick in the past week or two aswell. it would be better if it just slowed torrents but for me it messes with everything, tried sending a file on msn?

they must have tons of capacity spare now, i noticed no congestion before it was like this so why'd they have to 'fix' it? probably getting no better service than those on aol, talk talk, pipex etc

Yeah their has been problems with the network. Are you still experiencing page time outs?

Also torrents are shaped at peak time to ensure that internet browsing is no affected all/most ISP's are shaping connections. Some do give you a set cap and then once you hit that too bad kind of thing.

Almost makes me want to download the internet just to prove a point, linux distros here we come eh? oh oh yey its 7 o clock the caps risen to 25k

Depends on the website, the missus is dutch and finding dutch websites are still a problem and UK ones are fine.

However I cant get the downloads going for torrents or the updates needed to finish building my sons new PC.

The local Office of Fair Trading I think will be next port of call, I really will see them done for mis-selling and false advertising.

Check your PM.

I've never had a prob with bt shaping torrents in peak time as i always do that when i go to bed etc but now it's a joke as it's even affecting any http downloads..typical example is a 50meg driver file...starts off at 600k area and after a few secs starts plummeting untill it chuggs along at 40k. Try it before around 5:30pm and after around 11pm or 11:30pm and it comes down at 720k for the whole download.
If this carries on i'm seriously thinking of buggering off to another provider this time next month.......