http://www.theregister.com/2006/11/21/blueyonder_gets_throttled/

Seems like "Unlimited" means fuck all these days.

I've been having problems downloading from Usenet for a while getting shit speeds, looks like now I've found the answer I'm in the "Trial" area for throttling broadband speeds for heavy users.

My 4mb speed is now at least 8 times slower than it should be, which was a waste of money upgrading to. Just downloading an XBOX360 game and it's taking well over 3hrs when it used to take around 30mins.

It says it's throttled at "PEAK" times but I've never once gone back to my top speed at any time in the last month. I was going to upgrade to 10meg but they can fuck right off if they think I'm paying £35 if they are going to cap my speed.

I've been a Telewest customer for ages (TV, Phone & Broadband) and this is the first time I've had any real problems with them.

NTL/Telewest users throughout the land beware.

I used to be with BT, although about a year ago the download speeds i was getting started
going down and i was getting a monthly snotty letter telling me how much i'd gone over
their download limits.

I switched to bulldog (although id heard mixed reviews of their service) and ive been fine
since. i'm on 1mb broadband and can get full speed depending on what im downloading.
only had one 24 hour outage in 12 months.

bulldogs incompetance is usually on the administrative rather than the technical side.

As long as you make sure they aren't overcharging you and never, ever set up a direct debit with them you should be okay.

I have 20mb spead dawnloud and 780kb/ uploud and i pay 50 $ per month and i had the same problems with the internet provider but i made a complain and now it is ok.

Despite what NTL SAY they are throttling everywhere, and have been for a few weeks, it's only in place in the evenings and weekends though and it's only certain downstream protocols (p2p and SOME usenet servers - Giganews for example is not affected at all).

I just wish they'd been open about it rather than blaming my fucking hardware and getting me to rebuild my FreeBSD router ~5 fucking times with various different bits of hardware so I could troubleshoot


You sure about those figures though? An xbox360 game is ~7Gb or ~7200Mb, I'm on 10mb which is 1.2Mb per second, even at full speed that's 6000 seconds or 100 minutes or 1:40 (ish) some are smaller but it's rare to download a 360 game in less than an hour even on 10mb. ~3 or 4 hours sounds about right to me for a 4mb connection.

I get 10mb at all times barring ~4 hours or so in the evenings. If you're never getting it then there's a problem with your connection, get an engineer out.


I'm not all that bothered to be honest, they're (alledgedly) going to 50mb down / 1mb + up next month / January, if the price of that is some minor p2p shaping, then so be it.

Dependant on your usenet provider, there are workarounds you could try to speed up nntp access

I'm getting the same with NTL too. If it stays like this I'm not really bothered as long as doesn't get worse e.g. capping and 24/7 p2p throttling.

Thanks for the replys guys. But I still don't know whats happening to my connection.



I'm having the problem with Giganews. I have a Unlimited Platinum Single User Account with Giganews. When downloading I'm getting a speed that averages out at about 477KB/s. Is this about the right speed for 4mb as I always get confused with KB/s & KBPS.

If it is right then in the last few months I've been getting speeds way higher than I should have been getting for my connection around 2500KB/s at times, and they've knocked my connection speed down to what it should be.



I don't mind this either it's just that I saw such a huge drop in speed I thought it wasn't worth the upgrade I made. It's good to see that the throttled speed isn't that much different.

477KB/s is about right for 4mb (remember it's megabits not megabytes so you need to divide by 8 : 4094kb = 512KB max)

It's possible you were included in the recent 20mb test which would explain the ~2.5MB/s speeds.

Your connection sounds OK to me in all honesty.

Thanks PC_Arcade thats just what I wanted to hear.

It would be nice if Telewest would inform people if they are included in tests and such. So people don't send snotty emails and make themselves look like a gobshite.

Looks like an upgrade to 10mb might be on the cards, going from a possible 20mb connection to 4mb is hard to get used to.