UKOnline customer - Suspect BT throttling connection

Hi all,

I am a customer of the ISP UKOnline which has been relatively trouble free up till lately. I have an unmetered package with the ISP and the ISP have told me they do not employ throttling of connection speeds, but have admitted that it is possible for BT to do so since they lease bandwidth from BT. I have 2MB broadband since our phone lines are very poor in my area.

I have noticed degraded download speed down to around 30K after around 16:30hrs which picks back up to full speed at around 00:00hrs I think (I'm still trying to monitor it). Certainly torrent download and upload is impacted and I seem to have around 30K of bandwidth in total (upstream + downstream). The router of course shows me connected at 2MB with around half a meg available upstream.

There is definately something fishy going on with the bandwidth and I have been noticing an increase in ping times and packet loss when gaming. When playing poker online the connection frequently freezes at times mostly in the afternoon and early evening. Streaming video is frequently a problem. This has probably been going on since around the festive period.

Whats the play here? Would moving to one of the LLU providers in my local exchange sort this out and is it the only option? My ISP tech support guy said that he couldn't do anything about BT choking the connection. Is there anyone I can complaion to about this? I'd rather not move ISP, but the internet connection is very poor at peak times.

TIA

They lease the bandwidth, but nothing other than money stopping them leasing more.

i.e. if others with different ISPs that lease bandwidth on your exchange are OK, then its down to how UKonline spends its money.

The fact that ping and packet loss go up point towards BT Wholesale doing nothing more than allowing the contention to kick in, e.g. UKonline have 34Meg incoming for several thousand access customers and this pipe is filling up.

ukonline guy is pulling wool over your eyes, unless everyone on all the BT based ISP's at your exchange is having issues.

Edited by MrSaffron (Tue 26-Jan-10 11:33:57)

In reply to a post by MrSaffron:

[cough]Not O2. Is UKOnline.

A link to what samknows says about your exchange would be useful.

Oops - applies the same, brain not engaged.

O2 and UK Online behave very similarly with respect to their IPStream products.

But no "O2 guy" is involved in this case .

Can you not get a decent 3G signal - even though our 3G drops in performance at peak times (17:30 when everyone gets off the train I suspect) it never performs that poorly.

I know no o2 guy is involved, fingers typed the wrong thing.

o2/ukonline have a similar poor performance IPStream service.

To make things as simple as possible now I've edited the post.

Seems the best idea.

UKOnline love putting the blame onto BT.

Take a read of http://forums.thinkbroadband.com/ukonline/t/3783952-... .

I'm surprised you've only just noticed it now. It's been going on for well over a year.

Edited by deleted (Thu 28-Jan-10 03:31:35)