In reply to a post by RobertoS:

and apologies to adebov if I've unintentionally upset him

That's not possible Bob

In reply to a post by RobertoS:

On re-reading it, it looks a bit like I'm trying to shoot adebov down. My intent was far from that!

Feel free to do that anyway - especially where I've got my facts wrong (it did pass me by, that BT and Sky removed the "hidden" FUP limits - in the form of deleting the usual "if you take the p*** and download too much, on your unlimited product, we'll cut you off" fine print).

I still say what BT are doing to effectively rate limit p2p downloads off-peak (by applying 24/7 upload rate limits - which has the effect of reducing p2p download speeds) is somewhat "shady".

In reply to a post by adebov:

I'm not sure you are right about "you'll likely suffer less p2p throttling with Sky" when compared to Plusnet.

Basically I assumed that as Sky claim to have no limits (other than the FUP, which I wasn't aware had been recently removed) and claim to have no traffic management in place, that there's a lesser chance of having p2p speeds affected with Sky than with Plusnet.
True; Plusnet do not apply rate limits to "Fibre Unlimited". However; they have produced a nice table (published, and still live, on their own website) which states they have a "Traffic prioritisation" system in place.
This table shows their unlimited products "standard/fibre" has five different levels of traffic prioritisation (p2p & Usenet occupying the lowest level).
They do say " at busy times, higher priority queues will take bandwidth from the lowest queue(s) currently in use (but never enough to take the lower queue below its minimum bandwidth allowance)." although this is a fairly ambiguous statement...
Where is the "queue"? Is it a per customer queue (i.e. does your p2p traffic take a lower priority over your own streaming traffic), or is it a global queue (i.e. your p2p traffic takes a lower priority over streaming traffic from some family in Devon)?

Did you read the article I linked to?

The system works on both the individual connection, where it is clearly of considerable benefit, and "across the platform", (that being the phrase they use), where it all comes down to capacity v demand. What has recently been stated by the chap in charge of monitoring that is that he and his team are checking the (publicly available) network loading graphs daily to see if there is a capacity problem looming.

So overall it looks to me like a good and openly declared system. As opposed to the shady () BT method and the completely unknown Sky setup.

VOIP, live streaming and such get priority. P2P gets as much as it wants until it threatens those. It isn't "capped" as such.

If the network capacity is insufficient, then that prioritisation is still good, and potential network congestion is a separate issue for any ISP, including Sky. I imagine it is safe to say that Sky have some similar monitoring system in place. Not to have would be lunacy - not something I would accuse Sky management of. What the budgeted capacity per customer is for BT Retail, Sky and Plusnet I have no idea. (AIUI that is how basic capacity planning is done). I believe TalkTalk is amazingly low.

In reply to a post by adebov:

In reply to a post by RobertoS:

and apologies to adebov if I've unintentionally upset him

That's not possible Bob

Wanna bet? What if it was ever intentional?

In reply to a post by RobertoS:

Did you read the article I linked to?

Yes.

In reply to a post by RobertoS:

The system works on both the individual connection, where it is clearly of considerable benefit, and "across the platform", (that being the phrase they use)

So 'global' then.
Agreed; on a per customer/connection basis, traffic prioritisation (by the ISP) would be useful - provided they waited until your connection was running flat-out before reducing p2p.
To work correctly they must be actively looking at all protocols going in & out of every single customer connection (otherwise how would they know there's any point reducing p2p priority, if nothing else is going on anyway).
If must be a fairly complex system (to be able to reduce p2p priority by just the right amount, so that you still maintain full throughput - the extra made up by speeding up other apps, and not leaving you with a massively reduced speed because they've de-prioritised p2p too much).

I have to say a lot of my anti-Plusnet bias comes from personal experience, when I ended up migrating away from a Plusnet unlimited DSL connection when they were truly, truly awful to the point my connection was running little faster than dial-up speed and Plusnet were throttling pretty much everything - Usenet ports/protocols were throttled - even http traffic to Easynews (which, at that time, had a mostly web-interface - so all downloads were done in the same way as downloading files from any other website - Plusnet ended up throttling port 80 traffic to the Easynews servers so much, it took literally minutes just for the Easynews website to appear).

It's difficult to shift the memory of that kind of experience and difficult to believe there could be such a massive turn around in the performance of Plusnet (how is it possible for one of the worst ISPs, that throttles practically everything, to suddenly become one of the best, that throttles nothing?).

Edited by adebov (Sun 20-Jan-13 00:15:58)

In reply to a post by adebov:

(how is it possible for one of the worst ISPs, that throttles practically everything, to suddenly become one of the best, that throttles nothing?).

Change of ownership.

In reply to a post by hitachi:

Change of ownership.

Normally makes things worse (e.g. Eclipse being taken over by KCom, BE being taken over by O2, Bulldog being taken over by Tiscali).
It seems the norm (certainly in communications) is for companies to be taken over for asset stripping or for the purchasing company to gain extra infrastructure.
It's almost unheard of for a company to be acquired by another for the reasons of making it better

Thank you everyone for your answers
it seems this got a little more complicated as to be expected.
I guess I am still shooting for Sky but plusnet has come into the possible options.
I still would like to know something about Xilo.
A thing that stumps me is that the companies that claim to give you fiber always give speeds well below what fiber can offer.
Sky writes 40Mb and then they will settle the speed with some time depending on how far you are from the exchange point.
So if they start off at 40 and then you are quite far you might go down to 20? That woulb be a complete waste of a FTTC.

I hope i didnt write any nonsense.

In reply to a post by clang:

A thing that stumps me is that the companies that claim to give you fiber always give speeds well below what fiber can offer.
Sky writes 40Mb and then they will settle the speed with some time depending on how far you are from the exchange point.
So if they start off at 40 and then you are quite far you might go down to 20? That woulb be a complete waste of a FTTC.

That's the way FTTC works - the longer the distance to the DSLAM in the cabinet, the lower the achievable speed.

Not nonsense, but either you are very lucky where you are at the moment, or need to read up some more . What service and speed are you on at the moment? Some sort of fibre, or some sort of ADSL?

In reply to a post by RobertoS:

Not nonsense, but either you are very lucky where you are at the moment, or need to read up some more . What service and speed are you on at the moment? Some sort of fibre, or some sort of ADSL?

Your question is already answered in the OP: "My initial thought was Virgin since they have a 100Mb connection and even if they throttle it half the way it's still 5 times faster than what I have now!" i.e. 10Mbps.