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.

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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