Bye BT, Hello O2!

Well, just got O2 broadband after 18 months of BT (and 5 years of Pipex before). Have had enough of BTs traffic meddling (even for HTTP).

Overall I must say BT were fairly decent, especially since initially they did not bother breaking HTTP traffic. However, as I've started to use iPlayer more and more, their shaping has started to annoy me more and more. So not even the �14.99 + new Hub 2.0 could convince me to stay (interestingly they were prepared to drop it to 14.99 from the 19.99 + free Vision because I can't get Vision because of their pathetic speeds - hooray for 3500 synch, when I live close enough to exchange as the bird flies for 6-7000).

Hopefully O2/Be will keep their network management free (and the �7.50 price can't hurt).

As a regular IPlayer user can I ask how bad the shaping got ?

My ISP do not shape and don't count your uploads in the total cap, at �24.99 for 30GB they are not the cheapest, but I wouldn't migrate to any ISP that reduces speeds to the point things do not work.

for P2P/iPlayer from say 5pm till ~1am it would go at pathetic speeds, 50kB/s or so, and before that from say 1pm it would be about 125kB/s. Rest of the time however it would be able to go full speed (up to 350kB/s for my line). Problem is, I'm at home 5pm till 1am during the week, so it makes it utterly useless for me to catch up on thing I've missed without having to download it overnight and watch it the next day.

Add to that that I also like to download certain American shows via how shall I put it, less legal places, simply because I dislike having to wait up to 6 months for them to air in the UK - and also because I can't get American sports, such as NHL, regularly on UK tv.

If you are happy to use the internet/P2P outside peaks hours BT service is fairly good, they do have the ocasional downtime (for some reason it tends to always be about 8 hours everyother Saturday morning for me), but I would not recomend them for P2P use during what they class as "peak" hours. Hence why I'm off to O2 who do not reduce speed.

I find it funny how ISPs sell a service, but then complain when you atually want to use that service during the evenings when you are at home - as opposed to during the day when you are at work.

In reply to:

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If you are happy to use the internet/P2P outside peaks hours BT service is fairly good, they do have the ocasional downtime (for some reason it tends to always be about 8 hours everyother Saturday morning for me), but I would not recommend them for P2P use during what they class as "peak" hours. Hence why I'm off to O2 who do not reduce speed.

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Thanks, I guess I will stay put, I would rather have a fixed cap that is full speed as I am now getting with IDNet than a unlimited cap with traffic shaping, I rarely come close to the 30GB I am allowed as I don't use P2P much, I do use IPlayer a lot and throttled speeds would make it a P.I.T.A to use.

For anyone interested heres a speed test, i get this 24/7.

http://www.speedtest.net/result/310169925.png

You dont have Be LLU at your exchange (I assume)?

Cant say I have any issues with HTTP speeds anytime of day, usually looking if the server can serve the content quick enough just under 600k download speeds, its limited by my line.

Although P2P is slow at "peak" times off-peak I again get great speeds with little to no slow down. In a month we must be downloading 60-80GB.

Went and done a speedtest.net test and here is the result: http://www.speedtest.net/result/310188168.png

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You dont have Be LLU at your exchange (I assume)?

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No mate I live in south Cumbria I think it will be a while before any of the big ISP's do any work here.

Samknows reports we have Orange LLU but I am not gong with them.

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Went and done a speedtest.net test and here is the result:

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Speeds are not bad but a 106ms ping is scary, try it to Maidenhead.

Edited by maxping (Sun 17-Aug-08 16:00:03)

http://www.speedtest.net/result/310198534.png

When I done it earlier I got 45, currently got a Citrix Metaframe session (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citrix_Presentation_Server) running hence the slightly higher ping and slower upload.

I raise

http://www.speedtest.net/result/310200720.png

I had Be for a while and they weren't as reliable as BT but they were a lot faster.

I've never had any problems with the throttling on BT but then I don't do any p2p.

o2 is a much bigger firm than BT so they can afford to sustain losses on broadband for a while. So I hope you take advantage of their generosity.

Makes "maxping" ping seem interleaved

Edited by deleted (Sun 17-Aug-08 16:40:27)

In reply to:

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Makes "maxping" ping seem interleaved

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Heres one ive just done, remember mine is fast 24/7 with no PSP shaping/throttling of any kind.

http://www.speedtest.net/result/310324876.png

Just wait - after a few months of this they will start throttling P2P to ~12KB/s for a good chunk of the day and ~50KB/s the rest and only between around 4am and 8am will you get unthrottled speeds - and if your lucky 240KB/s between roughly midnight and 4am.

I also get constant reconnections while using iPlayer (streaming not download) during peak times.

Sometimes during peak times videos in youtube just won't play - the pages load but theres 0 throughput on the video - if I try it via VPN to my dedicated server it works fine... strange that.

Edited by deleted (Mon 18-Aug-08 15:36:22)

Ouch rroff, I currently get capped at 60kb/s to 240kb/s at peak hours 5-12 then speeds return to my normal 840ish kb/s. I don't p2p but use it for wow and open software Which worked at normal speeds during off peak. Are you on a even heavier restriction cap as not being able to even stream iplayer or YouTube is just plain bad. Will the move to adsl2 help bt to throttle less or are the only benefits cheaper costs? I would love to leave bt but my dad won't hand it over to me till we move house also been loyal to them for years hard to leave as they have been very reliable connection wise.

Given some of the early BT based ADSL2+ prices (from adsl24 I think), I doubt it.
http://www.thinkbroadband.com/news/3559-retail-pricing-for-wbc-adsl2-service-starts-to-emerge.html
If that is anything to go by the pricing is pathetic.


I'm not holding my breath for BT to offer a competitive service. From my past experience with BT it usually takes them 2-3 years to catch up to the pricing and sevice of others, and they then maintain it for about a year before everyone else races ahead again.

EDIT: This is a quote from the news linked above
"Though at �49.99 for around 160GB a month, the pricing is around the same as the original 500Kbps service BT launched some eight years ago if you ignore inflation."

The thing is, ADSL2+ is NOT new technology, it has been around for I think 3-5 years now, meaning the prices should be far lower than what the likes of BT/ADSL24 are offering.

Edited by BSD (Mon 18-Aug-08 16:54:52)

Personally I don't mind a bit of throttling here and there. I would much rather have good HTTP speeds all the time than great torrent speeds all the time. Leaving the PC on overnight while it downloads is not really a big issue for me, getting webpages up when I click them is and thats what BT provide.

What do BT Retail have to do with ADSL 2+ pricing? Or BT Wholesale for that matter?

The news article you link to is for pricing released by ADSL24 nothing to do with BT Wholesale or BT Retail. To date BT Retail have not revealed their pricing for the ADSL2+/WBC product.

Well last month my brother accidentally left a script* running when he went on holiday for 2 weeks that (needlessly) downloaded ~120gigs on top of our normal amount - which seems to have resulted in even heavier throttling than normal this month :S


* Something along the lines of an rss parser that was supposed to download certain filtered files from the announce feed on a certain site - but was infact downloading every new announced file.

Edited by deleted (Mon 18-Aug-08 19:34:04)

ADSL24 are running on WBC, as such it is probably a decent indicator of what other ISPs will charge. I never said it is BT's pricing, I said "if that is anything to go by".

Edited by BSD (Mon 18-Aug-08 20:22:35)

Surely BT should provide a service that works irrespective of what protocol you are using as long as it is a "legitimate" use. There is no difference in the last mile between me using iPlayer at 300kB/s and me downloading the same file over HTTP at 300kB/s.

I say Ofcom need to make the ISPs adhere to network neutrality.

And I disagree that BT provide a good web browsing speed - here's a current speedtest, while earlier in the day I got 2500 (which in itself is a joke as this line used to get 4000-4500 18 months ago, and nothing has changed).
http://www.speedtest.net/result/310667094.png

Edited by BSD (Mon 18-Aug-08 20:29:00)

Thats traffic throttling and I agree they don't provide a good web browsing speed... unless you like to get up very early or stay up very late... and unfortunatly theres no one to stop them getting away with it and not all of us have the luxury of changing ISP.

I used to get close to 8Mbit back in the day - now even with a 6+Mbit profile I rarely get more than 3Mbit even at 3am.

yeah but some of us get good http and torrent speeds good capacity planning can allow for both.

Not sure I would call throtting speeds down to 30% and below as a 'bit' of throttling, to me thats quite heavy.

get nasn for all of your american sports needs

I player works fine for me and i only get same bras profile as you ????

I just looked on Samknows and my exchange was O2 enabled. When my contract is up i will be trying them out.

Figured I'd post a last entry in this thread.

Turns out my O2 broadband was just activated early (was upposed to actually be Tuesday).

It's syncing at 6400 as opposed to BT which was at 3200. So ADSL2+ is giving double the speed, not bad.

Just ran a speedtest.net test, and well you can see the results for your self below:
http://www.speedtest.net/result/312850052.png


I must say, I'm happy now

Edited by BSD (Sat 23-Aug-08 19:23:10)