In reply to a post by darquorze:

It states on one of those links that they slow the downloads from newsgroups down between 6pm and 11.30pm, but my downloads are stopped completely and i have tried up up 1am and still beenn unable to download anything

Orange will slow down your speed to a crawl slower than dial-up speed between 6pm to 11:30pm on weekdays and 5pm to 11:30pm on weekends, if you are using Peer to Peer (P2P) or file sharing.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_sharing

http://help.orange.co.uk/orangeuk/support/personal/b...

Its not Orange that do this, since the networks are all BT based (IPStream, WBC etc) it is a feature of their own making. Designed to curb the amount of people hording the bandwidth for downloading illegal movies, applications etc in favour of those who wish to browse more than 1 page every 10 minutes due to others abusing the download rates.

It is simply a way to alleviate the clogging of the network during peak times. If you want to avoid this happening there are workarounds but you are only creating problems for the network that are difficult to track down to specific areas, especially for support staff when someone calls in moaning about slow speeds in the evening and can see nothing wrong - it might not even be them, might be someone else hogging the bandwidth in the area.