speeds

since moving to BT my download speeds seem to vary from in excess of 5mb/s at quiet times to less than 1mb/s in evening - variablity seems worse than when i was previously with UKFSN altho no figures to support that- is this normal and can it all be due to exchange congestion? BT/BT resellers are only option locally
thanks

In reply to a post by highet:

since moving to BT my download speeds seem to vary from in excess of 5mb/s at quiet times to less than 1mb/s in evening - variablity seems worse than when i was previously with UKFSN altho no figures to support that- is this normal and can it all be due to exchange congestion? BT/BT resellers are only option locally
thanks

From what I have seen is that it is typically normal on an ISP which does not have enough bandwidth to support its users during peak times. For decent ISP's no it isn't normal

It's BT Retail itself. You are connected to exactly the same equipment at the exchange as you were with UKFSN, so exchange congestion seems unlikely. Though a coincidence of it arising when you migrated is possible.

when you mention your download speeds are we talking about p2p torrents newsnet ?

or say the latest drivers from nvida ?

if we are talking about the former then welcome to the world of traffic management

In reply to a post by geordiekris:

when you mention your download speeds are we talking about p2p torrents newsnet ?

or say the latest drivers from nvida ?

if we are talking about the former then welcome to the world of traffic management

Almost all of the above. My sister is using BT and it can be shocking. It is an option 3 business line and would die for all types of traffic.

At one stage we had a BT / BE in the same house. Both syncing at 15-16000+ kbits. Actually the BT line was typically higher but was made lower because of the ip profile.

P2P 10kbytes/sec vs 1200kbytes/sec for a torrent (the same torrent)
Iplayer not watchable vs could stream multiple programs concurrently.
youtube - the same
web traffic. 512kbytes/sec vs 1200kbytes/sec

Off peak traffic speed testing eg 4am both were around the same at 1300kbytes/sec

From my IT support days I have dealt with many isp's for more serious faults eg exchange / line not syncing etc.. Minimum fix times I have seen when an engineer is involved.

BT 5-7days (since it crosses a weekend).
BT Based 2days.
LLU typically 1day.

Some rare faults involving line cards BE have fixed faults within 2-3 hours since their support team can and will reset the line card in the exchange remotely.

Figures are approx across over 1000 lines and multiple years.

I by no means blame BT for their issue. I blame ofcom for making it next to impossible for them being able to operate effectively by jerking them around consistently.

TBH ive used BT for years now and as long as you understand the traffic management its fine. I.e. dont try and download torrents or p2p or from newsnet allthough i understand some newsnet servers give better speeds than others fro some reason. mon fri 3pm ish - midnight ish and from around 10 am ish till midnight on a sat and sund and your ok. My live streaming for i player has allways been good even when the world cup was on and the network was maxed i still streamed reasonably well gamming pings are good for both pc and ps3 and streaming on you tube etc is allways pretty good ok every now and then more then than now you can tell the network is pretty maxed but not that often here. I just download my stuff over night checked my usage for the month this month and so far as of 10 pm last night around 180 gig or so