Are iPlayer downloads throttled?

Apologies if this has already been discussed, but searching both on here and on the PlusNet forums didn't give me an answer to this. (Or to be more specific it didn't give me answer I understood).

My question is whether or not iPlayer downloads (not streaming) are throttled at peak times?
We are on PlusNet Broadband Your Way Option 2 - with 15Gb per month download limit (which we have never exceeded).

I tried to download a 45 minute programme on Monday evening (around 8pm) and, although it initially started by saying it would take approximately 2 hours to download, it soon changed to around 20 hours!
I gave up after a while and retried the next morning (at just before 7:00 AM) - at which time it came down in around 45 minutes.

Is this what I should expect, or is there something else going on here?

Thanks,

Hi there,

iPlayer downloads are served by Akamai/Limelight and as such is treated as "download servers" in this link.

http://www.plus.net/support/broadband/products/archi...

In reply to a post by Metronet_James:

Hi there,

iPlayer downloads are served by Akamai/Limelight and as such is treated as "download servers" in this link.

http://www.plus.net/support/broadband/products/archi...

Thanks for the clarification. Looking at that it suggests that there was a problem somewhere, possibly at the BBC, when I tried the initial download. (We are close enough to the exchange that we get around a 3-4Mbps connection in the evenings).

I get about 4Mbps with get_iplayer on the BBC.
I'm on the BBYW3 Plusnet product, though

You'd be limited at that time of night to 1Mbps so it doesn't really matter what your normal speed is. I was on BBYW3 but have swapped to Pro because even though it tells you in the chart what speeds you can expect at certain times of the day I found that mine fell well short of these and the only way round it was to change product