BT packet shaping/speed throttling is a joke

Am I the only one experiencing excessive packet shaping on port 80 (aka http)?

It's becoming a bit of a joke. I sync at near maximum speed (8mb) as I'm only 100 or so metres from the exchange but after 4pm and until around 11pm my speeds stink when browsing or downloading the odd file over http. FTP seems fine and the speedtester on thinkbroadband works perfectly (it measures my download at ~6.5mb) until I chose the port 80 option and then it gives a download of 0.8mb.

Obviously bittorrent is throttled too (it took me ages to download WoW and its patches) and I'm sure all the other P2P protocals are too.

My exchange isn't exactly a busy or overloaded one either as it only serves 3 small villages out in the middle of nowhere.

So why are BT throttling traffic like they do? Surely the network can't be that overloaded.

Well, the persistent dial-up slow browsing and poor download speeds around the same times each day leads me to believe that they are either experimenting with, or have already implemented some form of traffic management on the network. Sub-standard service has become the norm rather than rare exception sadly.

Yup. I'm convinced they are crippling certain types of traffic during peak times especially after seeing that I only get terrible speeds on certain ports at certain times or protocols whereas others work more or less perfectly.

Is there anything that can be done to combat this as a consumer? I understand that BT are probably opperating well within their rights as a provider but the level of service I and many others are experiencing is unnacceptable.

I've had some pretty bad shaping on HTTP on the odd day (hard locked at 30KB/s) at those times P2P and other protocols fluctuate anywhere from 6-22KB/s which possibly suggests contention at the exchange kicking in, but VP status is currently green and the hardware doesn't seem to be overly stressed with most of the DSLAMs showing 70+Mbit free capacity.

Whatever they are trying to achieve, performance the last few days has been an absolute joke. My 12 months is up so I'm looking at the alternatives because right now, it's completely unacceptable. That is probably the only thing that consumers can do that will influence it. I'd like to see Watchdog take a close look at the situation though.

Today my connection is utter joke........................slow as snail....

I still have approx. 6 months contract to go -_-...But I don't think I can tolerate further...

This is a complete joke. I called last night to cancel and request my MAC as my 12 months are up. First they tried to tell me I should only be getting speeds of 1mb - even though my speedtests give me 4.5. When I download a file from HTTP I only get speeds of 0.7!!! [censored] joke.

Of course requesting a MAC was like pulling teeth, this is how they tried to keep me:

1. Reduce my cost by

Edited by megabit30 (Thu 19-Apr-07 19:00:20)

Trying to watch some news reports on You Tube, the connection is so throttled I cant actually watch it stream, it keeps stopping.

This is a joke, only got until Monday before migration, it cant come to soon.

I am so threatening them with Watchdog when I speak to them tomorrow. Hello BE Unlimited!

Not Be There!! Some teenage kid hacked their routers well he just found a back-door and exploited it and found company details or something like that.