It is not a new policy but is buried deep on the Plusnet site and has been in effect for a long time. It is in addition to the throttling. Even if you download outside of the hours which are specified in the table, a lot of download servers could still be throttled;

The Akamai throttling has the most wide ranging affect as the majority of popular sites use Akamai servers to deliver content. Apple, Microsoft, Adobe, MySpace, Logitech, SunMicrosystems etc etc etc.

http://www.plus.net/support/broadband/quality_broadband/download_servers.shtml

Possibly these restrictions were in place, but unfortunately there is no way to tell if you are affected by throttling of these sites/servers when the throttling is applied, apart from slow download speeds of course.

Edited by deleted (Tue 30-Dec-08 19:35:10)

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Anyway, this sort of restriction has been brought about due to the way that BT Wholesale sell broadband to ISPs.

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In that case why don't the good ISPs like IDNet, Zen, Newnet and O2 (Access) do the same? Even Entanet manages to keep everybody above 2Mbps most of the time, and they have a pricing structure to pull in the bandwidth hogs.

Your statement is precisely the reason there is this argument is going on. See my post elsewhere, and related ones in that thread.

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...rate limited to 50Kbps, which is slower than dial-up,

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With a statement like that, you've obviously never used 'ye goode olde dial-up'.

No matter how high the initial dial-up sync rate was, it would always plummet when sustained data transfer occurred - you needed equipment with real-time line monitoring to see that!

But don't let facts get in the way of a good story.
As you say;

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...'ignorance is bliss'

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-9dBm

I still use dial-up and get a consistent 52Kbps. Perhaps your line was faulty.

its 50/50 from where I sit.

I agree with you in regards to plusnet vs entanet vs zen etc. Plusnet's packages are less generous than entanet yet they have to severely traffic shape to keep their network together this to me shouts out over subscription (too many customers).

I also agree with the other point tho that the way BT wholesale charge for their services affects the contention ratio of adsl max based isp's since BT wholesale have a policy of not charging for burst speed and to subsidise the losses they charge extreme prices for BT centrals.

Basically a decision was made at BTw/ofcom that low usage higher burst is better than high usage lower burst.

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I still use dial-up and get a consistent 52Kbps. Perhaps your line was faulty.

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You're very lucky in that case. We live about 400m from the exchange and get about 6Mbps now with broadband (during quiet periods). When we were on dialup 48kbps was a good speed...

Line distance will make a difference, but so does the quality of the line and quality of hardware. It is possible to attain higher speeds whilst being further from the exchange than someone else.

An ADSL line throttled to 50Kbps will not achieve a full 50Kbps download rate due to overheads, in real terms will be slower than a good 56Kbps dial-up connection.

I solved the problem this week by migrating that Plusnet line to Bethere.

Post deleted by pr100

Did PlusNet ever explain your low speed to you? I can see that they haven't contributed to this discussion, which usually indicates a policy which they are embarrassed about. Most likely the Apple downloads pass through one of the servers which PlusNet throttle all the time; alternatively, they may have an 'infrequent user' policy whereby those connections are constantly throttled since they think they will be able to get away with it.

Any product or package which takes all day to complete automatically initiated operating system updates isn't fit for purpose, however cheap it is. And if the Ellacoyas are treating Os updates in the same way as the other big downloads then there will be a mass exodus.

Simon