Infinity torrent throttling

I'm considering a move to BT inifinity. The thing that is concerning me (apart from the foreign tech support) is the possibility of torrents being throttled. Can anyone give me an idea how bad is it. I quite often use torrents at peak time usually only to download the odd <= 1GB file, but I generally don't want to wait forever for them to download. I'm fine with torrents not going at full line speed but I don't want rediculously low speeds of say less than 250KB/s.

So just how bad is it at peak times, its tough to know what throttling means, is it just a marginal reduction from your connection speed or are torrents totally crippled?

I have sky fibre. Which might be an option for you.

If you ring up you can get 80 down 20 up for £30 a month + line rental
No throttling or torrent reduction. Torrents go at 9mb/s

BUT for BT I would say 250 kb/s is quite optimistic

It seems to vary area to area. Some areas are crippled to dial up speeds whereas others go at line speed... It depends how maxxed out the backhaul pipe is at your exchange... & if you live somewhere small people often say 'barely anyone lives here so it'll be fine'... but because barely any1 lives there the backhaul is often insufficient hence throttling is high. Whereas busy built up areas often have lots of backhaul and are not slowed down. It's honestly completely random.

Look for another ISP if you want something guaranteed to be good on torrent. As I say Sky has absolutely NO throttling and they offer 80/20 on the phone.

kb/s & mb/s?
Bits or bytes?

In the context of this thread, and with the OP using KB/s, it matters.

Edited by RobertoS (Wed 01-Aug-12 09:05:40)

There was an article about this in PC Pro in recent months, the author was lambasting BT over his new "Infinity" line which then throttled torrents down to something ridiculously slow. He then got in touch with Sky and had the line installed and there was no throttling at all.

TBH if I had the choice (which I don't) of Infinity BT wouldn't even be on my long list let alone shortlist

TBH if I had the choice (which I don't) of Infinity BT wouldn't even be on my long list let alone shortlist

Just to avoid confusion Infinity is the specific BT Retail product - your choice is of FTTP of which Infinity is one of a number of options.

Specifically for BT Infinity, there is no point in using torrents during the traffic shaped hours. I would download outside peak hours (overnight) if you can or look at Newsgroups where I can confirm I have never experienced any throttling at all.

There are of course alternatives, seed box, VPN etc.

If you are using Utorrent as your client then just use forced protocol encryption in the settings....
Not once was I throttled with Infinity at any time of the day and always went full speed depending on seeds..

In reply to a post by RobertoS:

kb/s & mb/s?
Bits or bytes?

In the context of this thread, and with the OP using KB/s, it matters.

I'm still doing it wrong. It's as I'm quickly typing amongst doing other things. I haven't quite got into the auto-correct typing of this terminology if that makes sense

Yeah know what you mean, splitting hairs but obvious what I meant