back to article BT to end traffic throttling - claims capacity is FAT

BT has claimed that it will kill off traffic management on its broadband service and stop capping usage limits on all but its entry-level products. From now until early June, its "Totally Unlimited Broadband" offering will be applied to BT's 16Mbps copper service for £16 a month, while Infinity customers can get their mitts on …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Liars

    So by increasing the prices and locking into another 18 month contract, they offer unlimited. (implicitly acknowledging their previous claims were a pack of lies) and let the exisiting customers suffer.

    Isnt this discriminatory?

    Wankers.

    1. MrT

      What gets me...

      ...is if someone is paying the top price already, why bother with the new contract thing? They should remove the throttling from those customers as a default - there's no extra cash to be gained by insisting on a new contract now, and they may generate goodwill to ensure said contract comes up for renewal.

      I guess that unless a customer requests the new contract, regardless of the price paid, the old one will just roll on unchanged after it finishes anyway. It looks like a nice way of ramping up the load gradually, rather than suddenly hitting a cliff-face and having to either back-peddle on the promise or hurriedly install a lot of new equipment.

  2. Captain TickTock
    Meh

    Unlimited until...

    People start maxxing out the bandwidth with streaming HD film services.

    I give it a year.

    1. teapot9999

      Re: Unlimited until...

      streaming HD doesn't even make my 73 meg connection blink

      1. Captain TickTock

        Re: Unlimited until...

        "streaming HD doesn't even make my 73 meg connection blink"

        Enjoy it while it lasts...

        1. Captain TickTock
          Coat

          Re: Unlimited until...

          downvoters, IANA network engineer, but I do understand that I'm sharing a network...

          Didn't realise it was such a contentious issue... I hear the steak is good, don't forget to tip your waitresses...

        2. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Unlimited until...

          Agreed. Why should I, as a relatively low bandwidth user, subsidise the guys who spend their lives downloading ripped-off movies or running BitTorrent services.

          Would an electricity supplier consider offering an "unmetered" service? Of course not we all know some customers would leave the heating on full blast day, night and when on holiday.

          A smart ISP should try competing by advertising on that basis - promoting "the service for the rest of us" instead of the vocal minority who, frankly, abuse the capacity available and causing slow access for the rest of us. Whan I was getting speeds that ranged from as fast as advertised to so slow you think the line has dropped Virgin Media told me "someone else on your street is downloading movies". To which my response is "throttle their service so we all get a fair share".

          BTW, I've not read the small print but what's the upstream link like? Can I move my websites into the back bedroom instead of paying a lot for high bandwidth commercial servers?

      2. Danny 14
        Pint

        Re: Unlimited until...

        Is this an epeen willy waving exercise?

        http://www.speedtest.net/result/1554849439.png

        Granted it was at work not at home. It had no problems streaming anything. Shame my new job after relocating has a 100th of that.

      3. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Unlimited until...

        "streaming HD doesn't even make my 73 meg connection blink"

        You wait untill everyone in your street starts streaming HD on a few devices. Contention is the bane of all networks...

      4. AndrueC Silver badge
        Boffin

        Re: Unlimited until...

        In throughput as seen at your premises, no. HD streaming as offered by Sky and BBC is only a few megabits a second so barely raises a sweat for a 76Mb/s connection. Even broadcast quality HD streams are only a dozen Mb/s so again would not bother your connection.

        However this article is basically about congestion and the impact on it of HD streaming. That isn't down to your specific circumstances. It's down to the local and/or national usage patterns. You have to realise that if BT know that 1,000 people have 76Mb/s connections on your exchange they won't have allocated 76Gb/s of backhaul (76Mb/s * 1,000). That would be 1:1 contention and you're not going to get that on a residential service.

        No BT will have provisioned somewhat less than that. The trick for them is to decide how much less. It's very much a black art. Just working out the current requirements is tricky. Then you have to account for growth patterns and spikes in usage. This is where ISPs control their profit margin. You never want to have spare capacity but equally you have to accept that for large parts of the day the network will be underutilised. It's a nightmare shared by road planners.

        You wait untill everyone in your street starts streaming HD on a few devices. Contention is the bane of all networks...

        Since the poster appears to have FTTC other people on the street are not the problem (setting aside minor crosstalk impact). It's other people on their exchange (ie; anyone else in the town) that matters. And of course everything from there on back to the ISP. And the ISP interconnects.

        1. Danny 14

          Re: Unlimited until...

          I also assume that infinity will suffer the same as cable in that if the local cabinet has a couple of permanent heavy hitters then you'll get little to no bandwidth out of the cab. The exchange might have the bandwidth but I bet each cab is substantially less.

          1. AndrueC Silver badge
            Thumb Up

            Re: Unlimited until...

            The exchange might have the bandwidth but I bet each cab is substantially less.

            Hmm, that's a good point actually so I'll correct what I posted. You could be impacted by other users in your immediate neighbourhood. But it's unclear I think. Everyone has to use the cab to exchange link (even LLUOs) and BT at one point stated that they would guarantee the bandwidth from cab to exchange. But they have also put a 'best efforts' figure on it. With FTTP on demand being released this year I assume they are confident that the cab to exchange link can easily be upgraded.

            Looking here shows the cab to handover as being 'Direct fibre multiple GigE links' so that's a lot of capacity.

            Didn't realise it was such a contentious issue

            Was that supposed to be some kind of geeky, engineer in-joke? It's not bad if it was :)

            1. Paul Shirley

              are they still using 50:1 contention ratios?

              So how much contention are BT planning for? On dialup and when ADSL started 50:1 was widely believed... don't need traffic throttling when you've oversold that much bandwidth ;)

              1. AndrueC Silver badge

                Re: are they still using 50:1 contention ratios?

                I think they gave up having a specific target figure when ADSL Max was released. Now they just provide 'sufficient'. Of course whether that's 'sufficient for the users' or 'sufficient for the accountants' is the tricky bit :)

              2. Alan Brown Silver badge

                Re: are they still using 50:1 contention ratios?

                50:1 on dialup was all about avoiding busy tones - not an issue in the UK where you were paying through the nose per call.

                In other countries with flat rate calling (or free calls), contention ratios of 8:1 were still resulting on busy tones on flatrate ISPs (20:1 was ok on non-flatrate ISPs and it takes a lot of dialups to make a dent in even modest uplink bandwidth)

              3. slightly-pedantic

                Re: are they still using 50:1 contention ratios?

                BT seem to have decided that contention isn't something we should be worrying about anymore: on the business broadband pages they've replaced the term with "throughput" that you measure with their speedtester!

                http://btbusiness.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/11592/

          2. Elmer Phud

            Re: Unlimited until...

            It's just BT slagging off Virgin and Virgin's 'yeah, but no, but yeah, but no, but . . .' reply to throttling.

        2. itzman

          Re: Unlimited until...

          Its not actually a black art. You simply look at traffic stats and when the peaks start clipping, then it time to add more.

          One of the better features of online video, is that you don't HAVE to download it in real time. That only happens for stuff like sporting events. That spreads the peaks out a bit.

          And another option exists for real -time traffic of that sort: proxy serving from the exchanges or multicasting.

          The technology is mostly there. By wont deploy it until it needs to. though.

          1. AndrueC Silver badge
            Happy

            Re: Unlimited until...

            Waiting for peaks to clip - I suppose that's okay if the lead time is short but it usually takes time to enable capacity during which your customers start to get arsey. I'm not sure about being able to spread it out either as that's reliant on the public being prepared to watch that way. The stats on PVR usage suggest most people don't want to record things first and would rather watch it immediately.

            Multicasting would help with the current situation where most people watch live and BT have built it into FTTC which is good but I don't think any ISPs are using it at the moment. But time will tell. The indications are that broadcasters want to switch to IPTV and shut off transmitters (even Sky seem keen on the idea).

          2. Alan Brown Silver badge

            Re: Unlimited until...

            until the peaks start clipping or the average b/w hits 30% of link capacity.

            The really hard part with "peaks clipping" is that unless you're sampling every 1-5 seconds you'll never see congestion until it's severe.

    2. Jedit Silver badge
      Joke

      "I give it a year."

      I don't think many people will be streaming that film in HD.

  3. Neil Barnes Silver badge
    FAIL

    A nice lady rang me up the other day...

    offering the infinity service.

    "Have you checked the line?" I asked.

    "But we've got fibre now," she said.

    "Iit's copper from the cabinet to me. Have you checked my line?"

    taptaptaptap

    "Yes sir, we think you'll be able to get 3.6Mb/s..."

    "Call me back when you have fibre to the doorstep."

    1. chrisf1

      Re: A nice lady rang me up the other day...

      BT infinity (FTTC) - coming to me in next three months - just like the last eighteen months or so! I need to move out of London for a better connection...

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: A nice lady rang me up the other day...

      How far are you from your cabinet?!?!?! 4 miles? Well if you will live in the sticks......

      1. Neil Barnes Silver badge

        Re: A nice lady rang me up the other day...

        600 metres from the cabinet. Versus the Virgin fibre at the end of the garden.

        1. AndrueC Silver badge
          Boffin

          Re: A nice lady rang me up the other day...

          Virgin fibre at end of garden? You mean you have an actual VM node outside your house? Or were you not aware that VM's offering is no more 'Fibre to the premises' than BT's? Both services terminate the fibre some distance from your property then rely on copper to connect to your premises.

          VM's uses a coax loop which is good because it can carry more data but bad because it's shared by multiple properties.

          BT's uses twisted pair which is bad because it is more bandwidth limited but good because you're not sharing it with anyone.

          VM's system also has issues with upstream signalling and that's why they can't compete with FTTC on upload.

          1. Neil Barnes Silver badge

            Re: A nice lady rang me up the other day...

            It's a virgin coax delivery to the house. The terminating cabinet for the area is at the end of the garden - all of ten metres.

          2. PatientOne

            Re: A nice lady rang me up the other day...

            "VM's uses a coax loop which is good because it can carry more data but bad because it's shared by multiple properties."

            Don't know where you are, but most of the cable network deploys from cabinet to house through SID (string in Duct). That SID carries my coax - it isn't shared with anyone.

            Back at the cabinet: That's the fiber connection. So at no point do I share Coax. All I do share is the fiber.

            The bulk of this infrastructure was put in the ground by separate cable companies (Telewest where I am) which later got bought up and merged into Virgin Media, but it all seemed to be following the same basic design philosophy so I can't see how you get this 'shared coax' from. Unless you're in flats?

            1. TheVogon

              Re: A nice lady rang me up the other day...

              If you follow the co-cx back to the cabinet - you will find that it goes to an amplifier that also feeds all your neighbours - and that has one co-ax input back to the headend splitter - so you do share co-ax.

            2. John Brown (no body) Silver badge
              Childcatcher

              Re: A nice lady rang me up the other day...

              (Telewest where I am) which later got bought up and merged into Virgin Media,"

              FWIW, Virgin Media is just a trading name of NTL:Telewest.

              IIRC, NTL:Telewest paid Virgin Holdings £10m + shares for a 10 year licence to use the name, branding and Branson.

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: A nice lady rang me up the other day...

        "Well if you will live in the sticks......"

        Well BT gave me a max of 1Mbps on ADSL and promised me a max of 15Mbps on Infinity. The exchange is half a mile away and the area is about 5 miles north of M25, about a mile east of the main A10 trunk down from Cambridgeahire, that's a 25 min drive to central London. Hardly the the sticks for me and it's still utter shite! When I complained all I got was the "Sorry, the exchange has been over sold, nothing we can do."

        Virgin gave me 60Mbps to my door on 20:1, for an extra £25/month they can give me 120Mbp ( my old man has seen 132mbps to his desktop on one occasion ).

        BT you ain't got a Snowball's chance of even playing on the same field let alone the same game!

        1. Danny 14

          Re: A nice lady rang me up the other day...

          id rather have 10mb that works then 120mb that doesnt. Virgin are shite.

          1. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: A nice lady rang me up the other day...

            Virgin are great - fastest speed you can get on a standard connection and minimal contention - you can max out the connection even at peak hours if you make sure you encrypt all your traffic and use the right port numbers to avoid shaping.

        2. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: A nice lady rang me up the other day...

          Time for some fact busting. Bandwidth to exchange is a non issue, you are on your own copper pair to the exchange (or to cab for FTTC). There is no contention or oversubscribing here and your connection speed is entirely dependant on the copper quality and distance from cab/exchange. BT contention only comes into it on the handover from the exchange to the ISP own network. (Bt broadband itself does not have its own network and instead throws its customers from the RAS server straight out into the core BT network.)

          1. feanor

            Re: A nice lady rang me up the other day...

            Time for some fact busting.

            - ?

            Bandwidth to exchange is a non issue,

            - so the characteristic impedence of the line has no effect on sync speed of the ADSL modem? Sync speed is an absolute bandwidth limit. Weather you are rate-limited internally to the ISP is dependant on your connection speed. If you are connected at 1M, and a great many people are, you will likely never see a rate-limit as there would be no point.

            you are on your own copper pair to the exchange (or to cab for FTTC).

            - a large proportion of the country is on aluminium, a piss poor conductor compared to copper but installed when the GPO sold the copper lines after the war.

            There is no contention or oversubscribing here and your connection speed is entirely dependant on the copper quality ( or aluminium) and distance from cab/exchange,

            - and joint quality and weather shielding quality, and modem compatibility and the quality of the cable run i.e. how close to inteference etc.

            BT contention only comes into it on the handover from the exchange to the ISP own network. (Bt broadband itself does not have its own network and instead throws its customers from the RAS server straight out into the core BT network.)

            1. Anonymous Coward
              Anonymous Coward

              Re: A nice lady rang me up the other day...

              I think you understood just fine what I meant by bandwidth. Hence why I mentioned connection rate. The copper, or Ali if you want to get into it dictates the connection rate to the exchange. The bandwidth as people are talking about it here is actually throughput. There is no point thinking in terms of contention and overbooking when talking between the modem and dslam. Its not applicable.

    3. orb8

      Re: A nice lady rang me up the other day...

      ^^ That is soooo correct.

      I'm sure BT and others are trying to make everybody believe that because they're installing fibre to cabinets. This then is the best broadband possible, when it's not! Until BT gets their thumbs out of their butts and start installing FTTP problems will arrise for those that have long lines, degraded copper and in out case copper, or a cabinet that is affected a couple of days after rain.

      FTTC is just a temporary measure, until they can be bothered to spend some of their massive profits renewing copper wire that the dinosaurs connected up!

    4. orb8

      Re: A nice lady rang me up the other day...

      ^^ That is soooo correct.

      I'm sure BT and others are trying to make everybody believe that because they're installing fibre to cabinets. This then is the best broadband possible, when it's not! Until BT gets their thumbs out of their butts and start installing FTTP problems will arise for those that have long lines, degraded copper and in out case copper, or a cabinet that is affected a couple of days after rain.

      FTTC is just a temporary measure, until they can be bothered to spend some of their massive profits renewing copper wire that the dinosaurs connected up!

    5. Wibble
      Unhappy

      Re: A nice lady rang me up the other day...

      >"Yes sir, we think you'll be able to get 3.6Mb/s..."

      I dream of getting anything faster than 1Mb/s.

      Living in the heart of Sussex and sod all bandwidth:-(

  4. ElNumbre
    Joke

    1pt *

    I'm desperately looking for the * for the further terms and conditions attached to this 'unlimited' allowance. Have they put it in 1pt white font somewhere?

    1. wowfood
      Go

      Re: 1pt *

      No, it's hidden in a comment in the source of the web page.

      So people place your bets, how many weeks before we have an article of "ASA sinks gums into BT over Unlimited offerings!"

      1. Spoonsinger

        Re: ASA sinks gums into BT over Unlimited offerings

        Ahh!!! but the term is "Totally Unlimited". The lawyers would argue that it's a special BT term, because we all know that Unlimited is, err, unlimited, and the addition of the word 'Totally' would be redundant in normal circumstances. What "Totally Unlimited"(tm) can mean is anything they want it to mean as it's just the product name. (a bit like Fairy washing up liquid, or Flash).

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Windows

    The only reason

    they can offer this is because people are leaving BT in their droves due to poor fair use policies, poor service and guesstimations of download speed. Thats why they suddenly have more bandwidth.

    Oh, lets not forget the cost of the bloody thing....

    1. dogged
      Thumb Down

      Re: The only reason

      "plus line rental".

      So add £15 to whatever the bastards are quoting you.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Re: The only reason @dogged

        And add an extra £4.80 a quarter if you do not pay by DD for 'payment services by BT Payment Services' or some such.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: The only reason @dogged

          And add another £7 a month if you don't make 12 outbound qualifying calls on the line per month, because you had the line installed under one of their "installation offer" schemes, which wasn't actually a scheme as such, it was just that was the terms when you installed.

          Well, I say installed. The line was already there. It had been used. It had dial tone. They just had to reactivate it.

  6. arrbee
    Meh

    data may go up as well as down

    No point talking about cloud storage without giving the upload speed available.

  7. Vince

    Just so we're clear then, BT are really worried about Sky?

    Sky have a few temporary capacity issues in a few areas which they're working to improve, for the rest of us, for £7.50 or less in some cases, we get unlimited broadband without any shaping etc etc etc. And always did.

  8. Peter 26

    BT were the worst, I tried to get round their throttling only to find on forums that they throttled anything that wasn't port 80, even 443 SSL!

    It's a minefield trying to find a decent provider who doesn't throttle. I'm coming to the conclusion that paying extra for a VPN with real unlimited bandwidth may be the only way to go to get past the deep packet inspection throttling on certain protocols. That still leaves the data caps though, but at least they are some what known entities.

    1. TheVogon
      Mushroom

      Forcing encryption on and using Port 554 works for me on 120Mb/s Virgin Broadband - I can max out the connection most of the time without difficulty.

    2. AndrueC Silver badge
      Go

      > It's a minefield trying to find a decent provider who doesn't throttle

      Nah, it's easy. Look for a package that costs more than £30 a month. IDNet, AAISP, Zen.. It's only a minefield if you are also looking for the cheapest ;)

    3. Cucumber C Face
      Black Helicopters

      @Peter 26 VPN

      Don't know why you're copping downvotes on this. I have to use a VPN on BT ADSL at my parent's place to get access to certain ports >at all< never mind BT's throttling, the obvious monitoring of URLs you attempt to visit etc.

      I also use the VPN to get past T-Mobile oh so helpfully reducing image resolution and rewriting all the javascript on web pages you visit through their 3G service.

      FWIW I use VyperVPN. Being a US company this probably also saves the CIA the effort of requesting my traffic logs from gov.uk ;-)

      1. Vince

        Re: @Peter 26 VPN

        ...or you could turn the accelerator off?

        http://accelerator.t-mobile.co.uk

        ...when connected to them.

    4. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      @Peter 26

      Eclipse does not throttle. They have data limits during 'peak hours' (during the day and evening, but anything after 9pm is free), but the service is not bad.

      Disadvantage though is that tech support (if you need them) sign off at 9pm (or is it 10) and when your connection goes tits-up, you don't know what's wrong until the next day.

    5. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Easy to find, but not so cheap...

      http://www.idnet.net

      *Always* 55+mbps on a line profiled at 68...

      Nothing throttled or blocked, but caps apply.

      I prefer to do my own traffic management than have BT "help" me.

      1. itzman
        Trollface

        Re: Easy to find, but not so cheap...

        IDNET here as well. £10 line rental. PAYG phone cos I barely use it an a 26 quid package that has more than enough data transfer cap for my needs.

        Sadly only 5-6Mbps cos the exchange is a long way away.

        If you are prepared to pay there is always a better service than BT somewhere else.

    6. PGregg
      FAIL

      Guess you didn't try very hard.

      BT throttle P2P ports. I tunnelled all my traffic through a ssh tunnel to my VPS in the US - no throttles on any of the traffic, or by several-GB backup dumps.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Tunnel to VPS

        Trouble with that kind of set-up is that usually you have to pay for data transfer volumes at the VPS as well. A bit of P2P or even normal downloads can get very expensive.

  9. mrs doyle

    wrong headline...

    Considering that most people look for the cheapest deal, it stands to reason most people are on the cheaper packages, so the headline should have been 'BT continue to throttle and cap their customers unless you pay more' ???

  10. h3

    What I really want is 76 BT Infinity / ipv6 and 8 ipv4 addresses. Dunno who to go with though.

    (As long as it costs less than Virgin with all the TV channels and the highest speed broadband (At list prices) I am happy).

    1. SMabille

      Try A&A (Andrews and Arnold), they offer ipv6 and ipv4 blocks on FTTC.

    2. Vince

      If you want "BT Infinity" you have to go to BT. Infinity is the brand name of BT's Retail offering, and not the name of the Fibre capability many ISPs can offer.

      if you want "FTTC/FTTP" you have much more choice.

  11. jezbod

    Infinity Option 2

    Is already unlimited (no "fair usage" policy), just traffic shaped for p2p at peak hours.

    1. Wize

      Re: Infinity Option 2

      They probably still have some kind of fare use policy but call it something else, in the same way they re-wrote the definition of Unlimited in the first place.

      1. Steven Raith
        FAIL

        Re: Infinity Option 2

        I had a call yesterday, and questioned whether or not there was a FUP.

        No, catagorically no limits on use.

        Well that's fine, I don't want to go on an ISP that lets people abuse it's service willy nilly - which is what a FUP is there for when done properly.

        Perfectly happy with IDNet thanks...!

        Steven R

  12. Halfmad

    Unlimited for how long?

    BT have a habit of changing T&Cs at short notice or with little consultation, "free" web space was recently removed from all home users, but that's dented my confidence in using any of their free storage they now apparently offer, not that they're interested in telling me as I'm an existing user.

    As customers of BT Vision will be aware, what they say and what they do are entirely different. Just check out the "new" second on any of the on demand services, some of the products there have been "new" for a year.

    Until March when Superfast broadband is available and they won't see me for dust.

  13. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Seems the rabid bunch are out again

    There seems to be a cabal of people who pounce onto forums whenever certain companies (BT, BA, Microsoft etc) are named to pour tales of their issues that have obviously never happened with other providers.

    Personally, i've been on BT Infinity for about 6 months and never experienced any throttling / traffic shaping. My average is running at something over 450GB/month, so i'd be as likely a candidate as anyone. I was previously with Be and they were the same (with the exception of their well-known iplayer issues).

    I choose to pay £25 a month as I can't see how these £5/£7.50 deals can possibly be unlimited and the providers still make a profit.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Seems the rabid bunch are out again

      Hehe, thank you, sir, for saving me the effort and time of typing the same thing.

    2. Afflicted.John
      Thumb Up

      Re: Seems the rabid bunch are out again

      The BT slammers need a reality check. I pay for BT because I want a quality product. I signed up to a 40GB plan and hit it twice. BT said "no no no" and I upgraded to "Unlimited". I am not caning the hell out of it but know that I need that fabled "Unlimited" as a safety net. But getting a BT package is about more than that - Openzone WiFi being a major plus point for someone addicted to the Android tablet and coffee.

      I'm sorry but I cannot really complain about BT apart form acknowledging that they are not cheap as chips. You pays your money...

      1. Alan Brown Silver badge

        Re: Seems the rabid bunch are out again

        "I pay for BT because I want a quality product."

        Oddly enough I moved away from them for exactly the same reason.

    3. Vince
      Pint

      Re: Seems the rabid bunch are out again

      OK well that's cool, which is why we have choice.

      Personally I'll take my extra £210 a year saved by going for the actually unlimited, always works, pretty reliable service from Sky, and go down the pub with it.

    4. G Murphy

      Re: Seems the rabid bunch are out again

      well I'm with BT on Option 2, and it's really not that amazing - throttling definitely occurs, you can visibly see the difference as the clock ticks towards 12:00am, this doesn't affect me much at all because I don't generally use the services which are throttles (p2p), but I can clearly see it occurs.

      In addition even streaming services can be flaky, they are generally ok, but most evenings I'll hit a buffer or two even on iPlayer. That's on a wired network too. I assume it's because I live in a pretty densely populated area of south london and contention really is an issue, but I am paying a fair wedge for super-duper broadband, which really isn't much different to the speeds I got on my old Be ADSL.

      If it's not the line, it's the homehub/modem, both of which were supplied by BT.

  14. KroSha
    FAIL

    Still worse service and speed than Be, for roughly the same cash, over copper. Fibre is still a white elephant, unless you live right next to the cabinet.

    1. Tom 7

      Fibre is still a white elephant, unless you live right next to the cabinet.

      I'm only a mile and a half away from the cabinet as the cable flies so I'm looking forward to getting maybe 8Mbps when FTC comes but I don't know what I'm going to do with it - well in terms of IT and not watching shit.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      But duh, THAT'S the point - most people DO live near the cabinet. People generally live a damn sight closer to the cabinet than they do to the exchange.

      If you choose to live so far out in the middle of nowhere that even your local cabinet is a 15 minute drive away, then, I'm sorry, but you're limited in your broadband options, in the same way I choose to live in England, and accept I won't see much of the sun.

    3. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Not necessarily

      If the cabinet is 5KM from the exchange and you are 6KM from the exchange, that is going to make a big difference in your attenuation and give you a better speed. The ideal is FTTP though.

      I'm on TT living only 500M (lucky eh ?) from the exchange and get the full 22meg, if I were to change to BT I would only get 16meg over 21CN as they are doing sweet F... ALL regarding FTTC in my area.

    4. Timmay
      Facepalm

      Graph below of up/down speeds against the distance from the cabinet with VDSL2 (ie. BT's Infinity product):

      http://i55.tinypic.com/2qd2wkp.png

      I wouldn't exactly describe 60Mbps/22Mbps at 2km from the cabinet a white elephant.

      1. David_H
        Headmaster

        U nit

        Kft not Km

        1. Timmay
          FAIL

          Re: U nit

          D'OH! Egg on my face. Oh well, still not bad, given how close people normally are to their cabinets.

        2. AndrueC Silver badge
          Trollface

          Re: U nit

          I hate 'Kft'. It seems to me that if people want to stick with ancient non-metric systems that have more than one unit for length that's their hard cheese. If they want the convenience of having only one unit to measure the same type of quantity they should go metric. They should prolly also be banned from using decimals. Make them use fractions like wot their grandpappy did. That'll learn 'em :)

        3. Captain TickTock
          WTF?

          Kft?

          WTF?

          Nice attempt to make attentuation look over 3 times better than it is...

          1. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: Kft?

            Im on FTTC 2K from Cab, and I'm getting 41/12 - happy days.

      2. trickie

        Your graph seems to be in Kft rather than Km so your 2000 feet is about 609m. According to Wikipedia at 1.6Km VDSL2 speed is the same as ADSL2+

    5. fatrat
      Go

      BT also over FTTP in some areas. That's very nice indeed.

  15. Mystic Megabyte

    The usual tricks

    When BT upgraded our exchange from a half megabit to an eight megabit connection they did not tell anyone. This included my ISP that rides on BT wholesale. I had been monitoring SamKnows and rang my ISP to inform them of the speed increase.

    The reason was that BT cusomers where paying more for an inferior service. Way to go BT!

    1. Afflicted.John

      Re: The usual tricks

      Similar thing happened to me when I changed package to unlimited infinity last year. I was informed I could now get 73MB but would have not known otherwise.

      That said, I generally have no issue at all with BT.

  16. JohnG

    Welcome to this century, BT

    Here in a small town in Germany, my Internet and phone service of the last 5 years has no limit of any kind and (according to Glasnost at http://broadband.mpi-sws.org/transparency/bttest.php) the ISP does not shape traffic. I pay 25 euros a month for telephone with flat rate national calls and VDSL with a measured 30M down and 10M up. With the wife watching TV and films in Russian all day, we shift about 120Gbytes per month. Oh - there's no 18 month contract - I can cancel at any time with one month's notice.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Welcome to this century, BT

      Oh, hello, welcome to a little concept which I snappily like to call "different countries, different economies, different markets, different prices".

      While you're singling out BT, the vast differences you're describing relate to virtually all British ISPs, due to the simple fact of "that's just how it is over here" at the moment. Yes, Europe has traditionally seen very competitive broadband deals, and Britain has traditionally lagged some years behind, but as I say, "different countries, different economies, different markets, different prices".

      Thanks,

      Britain.

      1. Danny 14

        Re: Welcome to this century, BT

        Competetive germany? Shame you cant play computer games with blood in them though.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Welcome to this century, BT

          I just spat blood over my monitor, thanks

    2. feanor

      Re: Welcome to this century, BT

      We'll not have any of your foreign type competion here! This is a local country, for local people! I'll have you know that we jolly well enjoy being shafted by our monopoly communications provider, it's the British way dontcher know. Must protect the precious things of the telecoms network.....

  17. PGregg
    Happy

    For all the bitching and whining at BT...

    I don't see any other providers doing much to roll out services these days. They aren't building networks. At least BT is (albeit with Govt "assistance").

    I live in the sticks, my line was 11km from the exchange. Had Satellite for a couple of years then BT, somehow managed to make 512kbps (old) ADSL work over this 11km. Awesome, I was happy.

    Then they put a FTTC cab 2km from my house - excellent - couldn't get Infinity as I could "only" achieve 14Mbit - wow - I'd have been happy with 2Mbit. Now 1 year later (and a new BT homehub 3 Type B - cos it is better) and I'm reliably getting 16Mbit. So on Friday, I called up and asked about the new deals - They are upgrading me to the Unlimited Infinity 2 package at £22.65pm on a 12 month contract. Existing customers get it cheaper than the £26pm and can get a 12 month contract, not an 18 month one. I may not go much or any faster than the current 16Mbit, but I'll be paying a couple of quid less, so yay for that.

    Still, the nearest alternative network (Virgin) is over 25 miles from my house, so why should I bitch at BT? At least they're doing something.

    1. feanor

      Re: For all the bitching and whining at BT...

      Not around my way they're not.

  18. adam payne

    There is that little bit of small print that says they can change the T&C at anytime without notifying anyone? it must be around here somewhere.

    I think i'll stick with my business ISP with it's in house call centre.

  19. Silverburn
    Happy

    Unlimited

    "Our service is unlimited" (What this means: 20gb per month @ 2mb/sec)

    "No really, our service is unlimited" (WTM: 40gb per month @ 4mb/sec)

    "Serious though, we mean it - our service is unlimited" (WTM: 60gb per month but capped at 8mb/sec)

    "ok, we really, really mean it this time - our service is definitely unlimited" (WTM: Full cable speed...but 40gb per month)

    "ok, when we mean unlimited, we mean full cable speed, all the time, no limitations" (WTM: Hell has frozen over)

  20. This post has been deleted by its author

  21. koolholio
    Megaphone

    Blame BT Wholesale

    Most ISP's use BT Wholesale products, so what are they on about?

    Talk about blowing your own trumpet!

  22. DEAD4EVER

    bt total unlimited yea right

    So they're claiming they can give unlimited broadband without any restrictions yea right even if they did I would still not go back to bt there a joke and a pain to deal with they overcharge for the packages they have. I am happy with the sky's unlimited package for 7.50 hehe though would be nice for a bit more upload something like 5mb but I am sure sky can do something. In terms of my unlimited package I have been fine with it no problems at all just wish it had more upload that's all. As for bt forget them there for rich boys who can't be bothered to shop around for the best or lowest price deals like rich footballers who like to get set up and are away and up and running. I'll never go back to bt ever.

  23. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    BT are so full of shit.....

    "The national telco claimed that its offering would not be hampered by bandwidth issues like the ones that recently crippled BSkyB."

    Oh really? So what's the matter with most of (all?) your FTTC enabled exchanges in Leicestershire then? Its not oversubscribed backhaul that's causing peak speeds of under 5Mbps on BT Retail?

    BT are totally full of shit. Sky may be tossers but unlike BT they at least admit when they've fucked it up.

  24. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Self limiting bandwidth?

    A couple of factors working in boradband providers' favour:

    Not much mention of contention: if you share bandwidth with 20 other houses that might drops a cap on you, esp if neighbours are heavy users.

    As "everyone" seems to be going wireless they begin to find there's wireless congestion as every household is sharing the same small bunch of frequencies - so the reduced service is their own fault, bandwidth delivered to the router is as advertised but to the device it may br limited by your own equipment/lcircumstances.

    A friend was thinking of moving to BT and found all the marketing bumph was about the wireless router - she had to specifically ask "does the router have Ethernet ports too?" (BTW: yes)

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