Traffic prioritisation/QoS != throttling, they're very different concepts. Plusnet don't, to my knowledge, arbitrarily throttle traffic a la Virgin's old 'we'll kill your speed after x megabytes' policy, which does still apply on the upstream.

Provided a network has sufficient capacity to avoid regular degradation of service, QoS is a perfectly sane thing to use; if e.g. a transit link hits saturation, it's not going to ruin anyone's day to see a small reduction in torrent download speed, whereas completely dumb traffic handling could likely see things like streaming, gaming, VoIP, etc getting severely impacted.

That's exactly what Plusnet describe - they're not just limiting download speed for the fun of it, rather they will try to give critical packets priority to avoid serious problems. Again, provided they have sufficient capacity to ensure they're not regularly hitting saturation on links, I don't really understand why anyone would have an issue with that. It would also surprise me if other large networks don't do this to an extent - it seems almost careless not to. Plusnet are just open about it, but I think people see 'traffic management' and associate it with the arbitrary throttling we've seen from the likes of VM. It really isn't the same though, and I even use QoS on my own router to ensure things like file uploads don't kill real-time applications/streaming. It's not doing any harm in the background, but it simply lets everything work a bit more harmoniously when the link gets maxed.

Although TBH I'd even take VM's arbitrary throttling over the issues I've been having lately. I've just been struggling to hit 2Mbit/s on some Linux updates...

Edit: Nice! http://www.thinkbroadband.com/speedtest/results.html...

Edited by deleted (Sun 27-Mar-16 22:25:52)

Yes, I'm fully aware of the systems that Plusnet have in place with regards to QOS... It was one of the reasons I originally signed up to them, however it never seemed to work too well, I always had streaming problems.... on Radio of all things too...

Virgin's system they use on the upstream should probably of never been removed from downstream, they should of just increased the allowances, it would certainly reduce the issues such as ones described in this thread.

streaming never had any problem with plusnet over the years!

I thought you wasn't talking to me anymore.....

Also don't remember saying you did...