Going into battle with BT over "shaping"

Ever since I made the worst decision of my life and went to BT for my broadband I have had nothing but hassle. I wont go into detail here suffice to say its been a stressfull experience.
My connection has actually been performing OK over the last few weeks, then I noticed severe slowdowns between 5pm ish up to midnight. I ran a few tests and im obviously getting "shaped".
Im on option 3 and agreed to " being supplied with the best possible speed" and "unrestricted".
Im not a perticularly heavy user, last month was a busy month at 30gb, last two weeks I have only managed 2gb download.
Now I find my 4 meg ip profile line hitting 0.8- 1meg peak from its usual 3.7 meg.
My intentention is to document my battle here for the benefit of others. I already have an active case at BT high level complaints so at lest i dont have to deal with the hopless Delhi call centre.
Wish me luck chaps, Im going in!

http://www.speedtest.net/result/146436225.png

Thats from my 7.15mbit ip profile line.

I Have been using it quite heavily the past few weeks although the stupid thing is its been mainly NON HTTP traffic and they've throttled http port 80 but i can still use the BT newsserver with 3 x 512kps connections like normal.

Also i can hit FTP at full speed to.

So basicly although my usage is high and i expect to be throttled to some extent what i can't quite fathom is why are they throttling HTTP yet not the ports i've actaully been shifting the majority of the data though don't appear to be throttled.

Edited by dragon2611 (Wed 27-Jun-07 21:21:32)

Good luck!

*sniff* it's all ways the good ones who die young

About time someone took BT to task about this... To date I have raised two formal complaints and they were put down to cookies ( even thou xbox was affected ) and fault on line ( still waiting to hear results back from that ). So annoyed. All I want is to leave and go elsewhere. I would rather pay double and get a connection I could actually use rather than this POOR excuse for broadband.

In sweden at the mo for work and so disgusted with 20Meg connections with no throttling etc. And BT are supposed to have a mission statement to be " one of the best telecomm companies in the world ".... Try to stop laughing now...

The problem i have is that, that useless indian call centre give me a different excuse, sorry solution for the problem. If I had of listened to them I would have re formatted my pc twice by now, all the while when I was complaining about xbox live issues....lol

I give up... Ah well only 14 months to go.....

they have fixed my problems no end of times but it still comes back, i would also love t get out of contract

if we were in japan we would be getting 45 meg instead of a pathetic 1

I am on the same boat as you guys with the shaping, I have also complained about this many times now and they just deny it and blame it on our computers, I have been trying to get some answers from them and I know paul has been consistantly on to them over the past couple of months but I certaintly havent had any luck with them, I strongly believe as ive said before that all isp's will be going down this same route as the internet is becoming a very busy place and not enough bandwidth to keep everyone happy.

I would love a happy ending to this guys dont get me wrong, but I dont see BT budging with this one.

In reply to:

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I strongly believe as ive said before that all isp's will be going down this same route as the internet is becoming a very busy place and not enough bandwidth to keep everyone happy

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I don't think 'every' ISP will go down this route, at least it'll only be ones that claim 'Unlimited' that will. ISP's that still give the end user a "Capped" (i..e Set limit) per month shouldn't need to do this as they will simply charge for users needing extra bandwith once they've used up their allocated monthly bandwith.

so what your saying phantom is we are better off just getting a set amount every month then we shouldnt get the shaping? perhaps option 2?

Not with BT, as if you are being too heavy on "Option 1" or "Option 2" they'll force you onto the unlimited "Option 3" service or terminate your contract.

To follow this route, you'd want an ISP that has no 'unlimited' packages for residential users and one which catergorically states that extra bandwith per month will be charged for.

Good luck, but I don't think you will get anywhere. Best bet is to just leave BT and go for someone with a download cap. I think 99% of "Unlimited" ISP's use traffic shaping of some sort. It's the smaller ISP's with download caps who have better customer service and no traffic shaping.

Edited by deleted (Fri 29-Jun-07 14:59:11)