BT Broadband Unlimited - P2P Speed at peak time?

I'm considering moving to BT for my broadband and they offered me their £26 unlimited deal for £10 a month for the full 18 months. Sounds good, a bit worried about an 18 month tie-in but the price sweetens it. We do about 35GB a month, mostly streaming and a handful of downloads.
Most downloads can be scheduled overnight (Im used to that), but I am curious to know just how hard they throttle P2P during peak times? Is it at all usable? What are their peak times?

Thanks.

In reply to a post by mouthrush:

how hard they throttle P2P during peak times? Is it at all usable? What are their peak times?

All the official spiel is here: http://bt.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/10495...

Look under section B 3 'Traffic management key facts indicator', there are two drop down tables with all the network management information in them.

Oh and by the way BT's peak times are 4pm-12pm weekdays and 9am-12pm weekends.

A lot of streaming is not throttled: for example iPlayer and Spotify. People still sometimes get issues with them on Infinity, but people sometimes get issues with them on most ISPs,

Throttling of 'pure' p2p can be quite brutal, it depends on circumstances. On the rare cases I have tried I haven't seen any sign of throttling even at peak times, but it is clear from other posts that it can be really bad. I can't remember what the peak times are: check the ts&cs, I seem to remember peak covers quite a lot of the time.

Justr trying a torrent linux download at 17:30 on Saturday, certainly peak. Speed around 2MBps (16Mbps) ... just gone up to 2.5MBps (20Mbps). So, far from saturating a 70Mbps connection, but possibly not because of throttling, and certainly not the severe dialup speeds that people sometimes report from throttling.

Edited by StephenTodd (Sat 08-Dec-12 17:34:06)

Thanks - I shall read their "formal" info!

Peak is 4-12?

i would argue is more like 8-11 (well thats when my p2p slows anyways)

I have done 'some' testing on glasnot tests and live torrents.

glasnot keeps failing with 'internal failures' it worked about 3-4 times out of 20 so sadly it hasnt gave me much data.

all the times but 1 it said all my p2p up/down was shaped this included tests in mid afternoon on a weekday and evenings. A test at 7.30am'ish said port 6881 was throttled still but torrent traffic on other ports was not (both up and down). After that 7.30am result I tested a live torrent and got full line speed.

The live torrent tests only the 7.30am test got me unthrottled speeds, so far any tests I have done in afternoon's or evenings have been throttled to around 3mbit/sec max.

Thanks for the tests - surprising it was port-based in this instance.

I got glasnot debugging the errors with me right now. if we get it fixed I will do more tests.

just now looking very severe on the download, not sure why others have said they had no shaping.

Is your upload traffic rate limited?
Your ISP appears to rate limit your uploads.

Details:

Your ISP appears to rate limit your BitTorrent uploads. In our tests, uploads using control flows achieved up to 16674 Kbps while uploads using BitTorrent achieved up to 992 Kbps.

Your ISP appears to rate limit uploads on port 6881. In our tests, uploads on port 6881 achieved up to 16674 Kbps while uploads on port 57718 achieved up to 997 Kbps.

Is your download traffic rate limited?
Your ISP appears to rate limit your downloads.

Details:

Your ISP appears to rate limit your BitTorrent downloads. In our tests, downloads using control flows achieved up to 51669 Kbps while downloads using BitTorrent achieved up to 11 Kbps.

Your ISP appears to rate limit downloads on port 6881. In our tests, downloads on port 6881 achieved up to 51669 Kbps while downloads on port 57718 achieved up to 9 Kbps.