Is BT Unlimited Broadband comparable to Sky's?

I may need to change from Sky Unlimited Broadband to BT's Unlimited Broadband, I want to know if BT is any good? Their website says they don't throttle with their 'Totally unlimited broadband', but when it comes to say... torrenting, or other P2P things, are BT safe to use as Sky?

With Sky I never got throttled, never received any letters, is BT the same?

Rules mean if they say totally unlimited there is no throttling

You would only receive letters if you are downloading illegal material and it got picked up - and Sky would do exactly the same. So, no different to Sky from that perspective either.

'Totally Unlimited' means no throttling. Speeds may differ though; what exchange are you on? Is it 21CN?

I have no idea what exchange I'm on, I did a speed test and I get roughly 15mbps with Sky Unlimited right now though.

Okay, if you put your post code in here it will tell you which exchange you are on and I can see if BT is likely to be comparable on speeds.

Sky seem to be going down the route of blocking public p2p sites like piratebay as opposed to lettering (although those sites are still available via proxy), I have never heard of anyone being lettered. Apart from Americans (who are on the strike system) and even then it seems release specific. The most recent I heard of was the sparks release of the new wolverine movie which seen loads of people lettered. I really cant see any UK ISP's sitting on torrent swarms cherry picking out their own IP's. Even if that does happen most will start using proxy's or a combination of a proxy and seedbox then opt for FTP.

I would be most concerned if any ISP was "watching" & closely monitoring internet traffic.

I have found sky to be a devil may care ISP, compared to the likes of pipex and aol who in the past cancelled my service due to excessive downloading, adsl24 (i think that was their name) were also pretty awful.

Even if they do throttle at times almost all torrent clients allow you to set a schedule, combine that with something like auto irssi and you are set. If leaving a PC on all night is an issue then a lot of NAS's can be set up to do the 'biz' for you and you can control your downloads via smartphone.

Legal downloads of course

The big ISPs will be starting to do lettering at some point as that has been agreed with the goverment - both Sky and BT will be doing this.

And Sky only generally block where there is a court order and those court orders are invariably the big ISPs so also hit BT (and Virgin and TalkTalk).

So, for pretty much all of this there is no discernable difference between BT and Sky. The differences are more around specific support incidents / levels and potentially how hot they run their pipes - but again, there probably isn't much to tell between BT and Sky on either of these.

In reply to a post by RossMcG:

Sky seem to be going down the route of blocking public p2p sites like piratebay

Not just seem! They are required to block ThePirateBay by Court Order.

I use the word seem as they are doing a pretty poor job of actually managing the blocks. All it takes is "piratebay proxy" in a google search to get around this.

Incidently I do not use TPB nor do i recomend it.

In reply to a post by RossMcG:

they are doing a pretty poor job of actually managing the blocks

They're doing all that the court requires of them. The fact that there are easy workarounds just shows how ineffectual is the court's judgement.

Incidentally nobody said you did use TPB .

As been with both in the past they are roughly the same

no throttling that i've notice from either.

BT also block Pirate Bay as well as others....

Exactly! It's a Court Order on all major ISPs.

For some reason it isnt blocked by mobile providers. perhaps the courts dont deem them as "major"

It is more likely that the high cost of data on most mobile operators means that it is a limited target as people will be unable to download in the bulk that they can on a fixed broadband line. They target those where they will get the most bang for their buck.

All you need download is the torrent file or even copy the magnet link, then fire into your torrent client remotely and add. They only block access to the site. So really the court order(s) are pretty useless.

In reply to a post by RossMcG:

All you need download is the torrent file or even copy the magnet link, then fire into your torrent client remotely and add. They only block access to the site. So really the court order(s) are pretty useless.

Makes no difference to me as I don't use torrents. I know you can get around the blocks but have no inclination to download from torrents - I have no need to download Linux distros from them and no desire to download copyright material that could be laden with malware/viruses.

In reply to a post by RossMcG:

For some reason it isn't blocked by mobile providers

It is by some. Of the 5 providers ordered by court to block 3, EE, O2 & Virgin, were also mobile providers. It's certainly blocked on EE & O2 mobiles.

Edited by XRaySpeX (Fri 23-May-14 16:49:37)

works on three mobile, i am sure they will soon be hitting the block

Yes, they weren't so ordered. In my post I used '3' as a no. not a firm.

That's what I thought. poor three mobile not deemed big enough lol

2 reasons can think off hand.

Cost is prohibitive on all except Three, and Three seems to have more congesiton issues which is also a barrier.
cg-nat makes the system very diffilcult if not impossible to manage.