OK People I had this from Paul @ Coms today that I thought I would share with you on my question as to why even after midnight and also during the day time traffic was still be throttled and this was his reply.

Hi Steve

Just a quick update with some info.

Firstly the Network team have come back with the following regarding the P2P outside peak hours:

I�ve reviewed the policy � it appears that the prioritisation classes used may be the culprit here as the only max bandwidth policy in place for P2P is between 18:00-00:00 (Mon-Fri) and 10:00-00:00 (Sat-Sun). P2P is always one class lower than everything else.


I hope that is of interest to some of you.

Steve

I did PM Paul and asked about this and this is what he answered.

Hi Steve

You signed up to a the Ultra 30 Fibre product on 10-10-2013 so your contract end date is on 09-10-2014.
You are free to leave with 30 days notice however you will be billed for the remainder of the term as you entered into a 12 month contract when you signed up in October.

Thanks,
Paul



Steve

Edited to remove a now void comment

I will add one other point into the equation. ADSL24 used BE a lot for their lines etc. With them the ISPs had virtually unlimited bandwidth themselves so weren't bothered by heavy users. With the demise of BE, this has changed for a lot of ISPs to some extent. That may be 1 reason why some of the changes have been bought in. Thats not to say I'm supporting the at all, just explaining.

Edited by ukwoody (Tue 08-Apr-14 19:37:20)

In reply to a post by stevepressman:

I did PM Paul and asked about this and this is what he answered.

Steve

Coms have altered the terms and have voided your contract, I would be seeking to leave in your position and I would expect them to waive any charge. Even if they argue they haven't altered the terms, the product clearly isn't fit for purpose at the moment and so you should be able to seek to break the contract on that basis.

Wasn't that back when it was ADSL24? Was it a 12 month contract back then?
Even if it was, I'd argue that introducing the crippling throttle, FUP and the total lack of official communication from Coms institutes a breach of contract and that you should be able to leave without penalty. I guess someone with more legal knowledge that I might be able to advise better.

COMS are signed up to this adjudication scheme:

http://www.cisas.org.uk/

Might be the place to start if coms try to enforce contract.

Well, i shall bid ye all farewell. For i am now with Plusnet.

One last thought to add to this thread after going over the whole situation and after a few PMs back and forth with PaulComs....


After speaking to Paul and with a bit of hindsight, I can understand why they used the methods they did, However, the communication could have and should have been better, and I think Paul knows that tbh. I dont think they are the 'badboys' they have been maybe made out to be..



Thats all I'll say as this could run and run.

Edited by Cruncher (Fri 11-Apr-14 14:25:47)

Yup I am for the off too been with ADSL24 for over 7 years and was totally content with them till Coms.com took over. But the horrible service and throttling of certain protocols is just unacceptable to me.

I understand a small number were downloading the internet over bit torrent and usenet protocols but that is NO excuse to punish all users that use those protocols. I use usenet, not a huge amount (in my 7 years at ADSL24 I have never exceeding 30gbs either peak or off-peak. So whilst I am sure coms.com will be celebrating at losing heavy users they are also losing light users like me that use these protocols "responsibly".

Ah well such is life. I voted with my wallet which is about all I can do. Now I have to see what Xilo is like (the ISP I have chosen). They offered the same service as Coms.com and they are cheaper. I really think coms.com need to look at their packages they are not competitive compared to the competition.

I don't think many people actually think that Coms would want to go back on their promises with their service and after probably a significant investment buying out ADSL24, they'd want to put their best foot forward. Still, at throttling to 5kbps, that's borderline victimization in my eyes and seems that the message is loud and clear of what they want their heavy users to do.

I downloaded less than 30GB peak last month. I downloaded a couple of Steam games off-peak. As far as I remember, I haven't scheduled any off-peak downloads for quite a while. I expect Coms class me as a 'heavy user' though.

Anyway, this evening, I queued a few things to download off Usenet. At first, my download speeds seemed good at over 800KB/s (my connection speed allows me a max download speed of just over 1150KB/s), but an hour later I went to close down my Usenet client thinking that the downloads would be finished.

Was I wrong. My download had completely stalled; and I mean completely. I was not receiving one single bit of information from Giganews. I restarted my Usenet client and tried again... nothing. At first, I thought Giganews were down. Nope, no problem there.

Being the sceptical person I am, I fired up my VPN. With an encrypted connection to a random IP address, My Usenet client magically resumed it's queued downloads immediately at over 1000 KB/s!

And people thought throttling to less than <30KB/s was bad. From my point of view, I was actually being blocked.

Go Coms