In reply to a post by bpullen:

@Zildjian285, I know a couple of the gateways are pretty busy at the moment during peak. Not sure which ones off the top of my head...

Exactly my thoughts, packet loss. Once the allocated bandwidth for the traffic type is reached,ie Usenet, packets will be dropped, introducing artificial latency and therefore slowing down the connection in addition to rate limiting.

I notice some of the gateways running at over 11% packet loss, a huge difference from when rate limiting was introduced and it was averaging 1% for non-interactive traffic.

A sign that traffic is generally increasing, or that the Ellacoya is being tweaked, yet again, to preserve latency for higher priority traffic.
Hence, why I will not sign an 18 month [!] contract, there is no guarantee that the Ellacoya is not constantly tweaked to reduce bandwidth for lower priority traffic.

In reply to a post by tobykim:

I'm on option 3 as well, I have noticed that there is sometimes a lag before it gets up to full speed, if I start a download at midnight sometimes the speed doens;t increase till 30 minutes later, have you checked the plusnet site there might have been a problem

I have noticed the delay but it was like it for about 4 hours until I gave up. Speeds were 0 - 10 kB/sec from about 4pm to 8pm when they should have been a lot more. It even completely stopped downloading a few times and was stuck at 0 kB/sec.

In reply to a post by tobykim:

Another thought did you check your billed usage, is it possible your billing date is today and you had gone over your quota

Yeah I did check, my billing date isn't until the 2nd and I am nowhere near my quota. It is fixed now anyway, it only seemed to be that day.

In reply to a post by bpullen:

@Zildjian285, I know a couple of the gateways are pretty busy at the moment during peak. Not sure which ones off the top of my head although you might want to try a reboot of your router to get on a different one.

I did try that and jumped to a different gateway but it made no difference. I don't think it was caused by packet loss because it stopped working completely a few times, I was unable to connect to Usenet at all. It's also weird how all the Usenet websites (Giganews, Easynews, Astraweb) were running incredibly slow and tracer routers were showing latency of 3000ms and timing out.

It's happening again. It was working fine earlier but now Usenet is completely blocked, can't download at all.
Both Astraweb and Giganews websites are also incredibly slow again.

The Giganews speedtest is running at an absolute crawl.

Can you please run the speedtest at the Giganews website and tell me if it's also slow for you?

http://www.giganews.com/performance.html

Choose the news-europe.giganews.com speedtest server.

10469 on Sky Max LLU.

171kbps on Option 2 whereas the speed test here gives 6186.40 Kbps.

3946 kbps on Pro. I previously found Option 2 would be throttled for that speedtest, although when raised through the Plusnet forums, an adjustment was made which removed the throttling, for a short time at least.

150kbps giga (done wirelessly) took an age for the page to load although it's a bad time to do it now as throttling is in place, option 3

BBYW throttling in case you haven't got it http://www.plus.net/support/broadband/products/archi...

Just checked and Astraweb is page is loading fine as is Giga, any reason why you need to connect to giga using the eu server did the speed test on .com and speeds ok
Don't use giga myself but use Astra on secure server

Edited by deleted (Wed 25-Mar-09 23:15:03)

I think it is something to do with the throttling but it shouldn't be throttled to below dial-up speeds on Option 3 or in my case almost completely blocked and unusable.

According to the "expected speeds" page Usenet should be capped to 320Kbps between 6pm and 10pm (on Option 3) but I'm not even getting a 10th of that speed during that time, something isn't right. I will keep checking until I find out what is causing it because not being able to use Usenet at all between 6pm and 10pm is a bit of a pain.

Try a different server Astraweb have a few and I'm sure Giga do, there might be a problem with the euro servers