Choked.

Hi, I've a pretty irritating problem and hope somebody here could shed some light on it.

As of the last fortnight my connection has been rendered pretty much useless. From 6pm onwards it's reduced to the point where my max download speed is 50k; not just torrents, all traffic. Seeing as this is a recent problem I was curious to know if BT has implemented some sort of all-incompassing throttling policy.

Thanks to anyone who can assist.

Yep, BT are throttling users, no matter what their usage. Port 80 (http) and torrent and other file sharing ports seem to be the ones throttled to 45kB/s.

And contention isn't the reason?

No, I highly doubt it. BT have a throttle going on, It starts at 1600 and ends at 2359. For me it kicks in at ~1605 and ends ~0005, I can sit and watch it everyday drop to 45kB/s at these times. If it was contention, it would slowly change over a period of time, not one minute at max speed, and then the next at 45kB/s at set times everyday.

I'm on a business account at home as well, so contention ratio is lower for me.


Go to http://www.samknows.com/broadband/phoneno.php and see the status of your exchange. Mine is green so it is not over capacity or have faults.

Edited by deleted (Fri 20-Jul-07 12:08:06)

Thanks for the responses.

My local exchange is green, so I think that rules out contention issues.

It's disappointing that this is effecting other users, I suppose there's little recourse other than change isp or stick it out and hope this is a temporary measure.

Is it connected to BT Vision.

There is lots of discussion in earlier threads about BT policy, T & C statements about traffic shaping and possible reasons why they are doing it.

Use the search function here and you will learn a lot.

Give the BT FUP (fair usage policy) team a call 0800 707 6044 they'll tell you if you

Nope - contention and congestion are two different things.

Contention certainly wasn't the issue when I was with BT. I had the same problems as everyone else. HTTP capped to around 50kbps. The day I was activated with my new ISP I went from downloading files on HTTP at 20-60kbps, to 860kbps.
Obviously BT are using some kind of traffic managment, or there is a fault, or they simply have too many customers.

Edited by deleted (Fri 20-Jul-07 17:52:23)