BT slams bandwidth brakes on ALL subscribers

News Type: Event — Seeded on Thu Aug 7, 2008 11:43 AM EDT

Article Source: The Register (UK)

technology, internet, web, traffic, network, broadband, bittorrent, customers, torrent, bandwidth, bt, peak, http, capacity, throttling, british-telecom, port-80, bt-internet, samknows

Seeded by coxy

BT is throttling all of its broadband customers' bandwidth at peak times, not just heavy users, according to independent monitoring data.

Early findings from a new hardware-based monitoring project by ISP analysis outfit Samknows show that even customers who use their connection lightly have non-port 80 traffic slowed to about 15 per cent of the normal speed in the evening, when load on BT's network is high.

Port 80 is used for HTTP web traffic. Samknows used tests on other ports to simulate peer-to-peer traffic, so even a casual BT downloader who grabs a TV show from BitTorrent faces the throttle.

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1.1

{"commentId":2390727,"authorDomain":"shade"}

Sam Hemingway

Only 15%?
On Virgin, we get throttled down from 850 kB/s to 300 kB/s in peak periods (~65% less) on ALL ports.
That is, if we download too much in that time. Which isn't hard.

{"commentId":2390727,"threadId":"327564","contentId":"1728315","authorDomain":"shade"}

#1 - Thu Aug 7, 2008 12:25 PM EDT

{"commentId":2398234,"authorDomain":"mattcoxonline"}

coxy

I'm a Virgin customer and haven't had an issue with their throttling. It's only active between 4pm and 9pm... There shouldn't be an explicit need to download immense amounts of data to require throttling - and if you are, just deal. Or leave things downloading overnight.

Last night I downloaded a 100meg file in under 2 mins on Virgin Media. And that was in their 'throttling' peak hours. I have no complaints.

{"commentId":2398234,"threadId":"327564","contentId":"1728315","authorDomain":"mattcoxonline"}

1 vote

#1.1 - Fri Aug 8, 2008 5:13 AM EDT

{"canLink":false,"threadId":"327564","isPrivate":false}

COXY

Backyard

BT slams bandwidth brakes on ALL subscribers

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