BT infinity first impressions

On Friday I had BT infinity installed. Engineer arrived very early with no prior warning, was finished and up and running within an hour. First speeds test come down at 75Mb down and 18Mb up. i'm very close to the Cab, under 300 metres. Impressed initially with the speed.

Now, the gripes! I know torrents are traffic shaped, as they were on adsl but the upload is throtlled to sub 1Mb 24/7. I think thats not really acceptable, especially not in the early hours of the morning.

FTP uploads to my server are throttled at 8Mb 24/7. Don't get me wrong, this is fast but not using the line to it's full potential.

Home Hub 3, the crappiest router I've ever ever used. Port forwarding seems to be nearly totally broke. The router also keeps router 161 permanently open. Not acceptable. Security risk. Will be ordering a new ASAP.

I'm going to try and get out of my contract and probably sign up with Virgin. I know they traffic shape too, but from researching apparently not to the same extent.

Thanks for this post. I have been looking around for some torrent impressions from people on infinity.

Just out of curiosity, what is the download throttled down to ?

Peak times torrents are unusable. Roughly 4pm to midnight and all weekend. Dial up speeds or slower. Outside peak times, downloads do not seem to be throttled. I have achieved well over 40Mb on a download so no gripes with that. But 1Mb upload 24/7 will affect your download speeds on many sites as you need to maintain a 1:1 ratio.

If your main use if for P2P I would look at another ISP, Sky, O2, Virgin cable. They are all better for P2P. Sky I know do not traffic shape at all, the others do but to a much less extent than BT. Or subscribe to a decent VPN provider as I do now to bypass the nazi p2p shaping. (strong VPN)

I do not consider myself a very heavy user, normally around 40-60GB a month but when I want something I want it fast and at full line speed. Too much too ask for I guess.

You need to sign up to a VPN service or equivalent. It costs, but overall I am paying less than with previous ISP despite this additional cost.

There is no way the great wall of BT can determine the traffic through a VPN.

Depends on the VPN service as to the speeds through that and it will rarely max out your connection, but i typically get around 4000 Kbit/s during peak times and more outside them.

Again, far from ideal, but I have to remember not to be gready, my previous connection was max'd out at about 1100 Kbit/s before, so even though I am not pushing my line limit I am still downloading at 4 times faster.

In reply to a post by danman7_200:

I'm going to try and get out of my contract and probably sign up with Virgin. I know they traffic shape too, but from researching apparently not to the same extent.

Most people in the Virgin forum on here are desperate to get away and to Infinity.
http://forums.thinkbroadband.com/virgin_cable.html

In reply to a post by danman7_200:

I'm going to try and get out of my contract and probably sign up with Virgin.

I beg you to reconsider that choice, from one BB user to another i have had near constant issues with VM, if you however decide not to take my advice, do much research before signing up to anything, keep a look out for any mass advertising in your area and any "local promotions" these generally indicate that your area is currently under subscribed and you are likely to get increased take up of VM product.

Go to VMs customer forums and look for issues in your local area. i wish i had before i signed up as for the first year of my contract i have had near constant issues, high latency and jitter have meant my gaming hours are reduced to 1-3am, which is obviously unacceptable. i have however (after being told for almost a year that there was no issue with my line or any issue have been resolved even though my connection was still bad) finally had something done after 6 weeks of arguing with the CEOs office. So far(2 days) most of the bad issues have gone. but i anticipate a return as this has always been the case in the last 12 months VM do shape torrent traffic and you will have limitations on peak time allowance. causing bandwidth throttling if you go over, unless you are on their top packages where the daily peak allowance is very HIGH. torrent traffic is shaped during peak hours still.

I hope this shines a little light on VM and their behavior as a company.

John

Edited by deleted (Wed 25-Apr-12 18:57:11)

My partner had Virgin at her place. Terrible product, terrible customer service.
They overcharged her and despite many calls they kept doing it. Inevitably they cut her off as she stopped paying .
The superhub is definately not super. Her's required several restarts to get the wireless working and the wireless coverage was poor. Never got round to getting it replaced.
She'll be going back to ADSL broadband.
Definately need to take a closer look at their service before signing up.

In reply to a post by Ribble:

Definately need to take a closer look at their service before signing up.

The only people I know with VM cable service are those around here where ADSL would only work at 256kbps if at all.

In reply to a post by danman7_200:

Peak times torrents are unusable. Roughly 4pm to midnight and all weekend. Dial up speeds or slower.

Except that it isn't throttled at all if you actually set up your torrent client right.

http://i.imgur.com/qO6pN.jpg

Ouch, I didn't realise the problems Virgin has. Certainly made me think. My street is full or Virgin Media subscribers going by amount of Virgin AP's I pick up. This is mainly due to sub 4Mb speeds on ADSL.

If I can find a fast VPN provider, to bypass traffic shaping, I'd have no faults with the service. Currently fasted I have found has been StrongVPN (downloads around 8Mb but upload limited to again about 1Mb). Going to research VPN providers to see who provides a faster service. Anyone recommend one?

Yes, the P2P shaping is nasty and often targets legitimate traffic by mistake.

Can you show evidence of the FTP shaping? Have you tried multiple threads?

Don't need a VPN on BT

>but i typically get around 4000 Kbit/s during peak times and more outside them
Which VPN?
TIA

It's not just p2p which is being shaped, I can't even get single thread http stuff (downloads, speed tests, TBB test files, etc.) to go faster than around 4Mbps per thread between around 7am and midnight.
The only thing which will push the download speeds right up to maximum are multiple threads (and we're talking 20+ simultaneous threads needed to get full 80Mbps line speed).

In all honesty, if you can get close to 15Mbps+ on ADSL2+ or don't really need the higher upload speed (of FTTC) forget Infinity and stick with ADSL2+.

I'm still reasonably happy because I switched from a very long line which could only do around 4 to 4.5Mbps on ADSL2+.
If I'd have switched from a 16Mbps line I'd be seriously p'eed with BT.

In reply to a post by orly:

In reply to a post by danman7_200:

Peak times torrents are unusable. Roughly 4pm to midnight and all weekend. Dial up speeds or slower.

Except that it isn't throttled at all if you actually set up your torrent client right.

http://i.imgur.com/qO6pN.jpg

Orly... Impressive mate.. Any advice tips on setting up the same torrent client and BT Infinity user ... Cheers !

Rolfy

Install utorrent and change utorrents port to 80 and force encryption on.

Signing up to VM will not help you

Hope you like the congestion.

is it really that easy ? I am tempted to get infinity 2 , but am put off with all this throttling.