I don’t know much about broadband providers so hopefully the wise can help me.

I’m in the G72 postcode area with a pathetic broadband connection, which BT occasionally choose to throttle down to a current 15kbps – for the last three days. This is slower than dial up.

The phone line is also with BT and our internet allowance is 40GB per month. What are my options? I’d rather leave the phone line with BT and just shift the broadband – the phone line is only used by my mother-in-law who lives in a ‘granny flat’, and I can’t be bothered with the pain of rocking her communication channel.

Samknows says the following providers are available:

* BT Wholesale ADSL
* BT Wholesale ADSL Max
* BT Wholesale WBC (21CN)
* AOL LLU
* O2 / Be LLU
* Bulldog LLU
* TalkTalk (CPW) LLU
* Sky Broadband / Easynet LLU
* Tiscali LLU
* Tiscali TV (via Tiscali LLU)

Two questions please – will any of these providers give me a faster day to day speed (my own knowledge says no), and will any of them have the decency not to throttle my connection when it suits them?

P.S. I did look at other threads on this topic, but all the other folk seem to be lucky enough to have cable in their postcode area.

Thanks.

If it slows down at peak times, then you may find moving to someone with a better contention ratio (how many users are sharing a given amount of bandwidth at the exchange) will give an improvement.

If its always slow, its probably the physical line that is the limitation and changing provider is unlikely to make a difference, as it will use exactly the same copper pair as you are on now. Or there could be a fault with the line or ADSL equipment, best thing is to speak to your direct neighbours, if they have better connection speeds then something could be wrong.

If you have any extensions in your house (sky boxes, fax machines, extra phones etc) then you could try the BT I plate/Accelerator plate, it filters out reflections that can interfere with the broadband. I think you can get it for free on the BT website as an existing customer, and if you can use a screwdriver its self install as well. If you have a modern socket with the Openreach beach ball logo (as opposed to the older piper logo (man with trumpet) then the clever gubbins are already built in and you won’t gain anything.

P.S No provider would throttle you to 15kbps, unless possibly you are falling foul of their fair use policy. But then you’d know about it as they’d tell you.

I recently moved back to BT purely to get infinity. The only throttling they tend to do is on torrent feeds as they can identify the one to many nature of the traffic, i have seen my connection throttled down to 10s of Kb from 30 plus Mb in a torrent client.

I reckon that many will start traffic management, Virgin certainly do, but not to the vicious extent that BT do on torrents. This is to service the inreased demand for streamed tv services through their core networks.

Also be aware that BT also intend to start blocking sites such as newzbin2 as a result of recent court action.

There are always ways around these measures, such as vpns, but you will mostly need to pay for those.

with ref to spooky, they do throttle torrents (and to that level) and don’t warn you. It’s in their fair use policy (peer t peer traffic). I find you get away with a couple of downloads before they throttle

I assume Wade meant everything is slow, if its just torrents everything else would still be fine.

Thanks for the comments so far. Spooky, I am pretty sure our basic speed is limited by crap copper from here to the exchange. My first question (“will any of these providers give me a faster day to day speed”) is pretty much rhetorical in that I think I know the answer is no, but others may know better than me.

Eatsdirt, BT are throttling me, I am confident. It is noticeably occurring after periods of heavy (legal) use. There is occasional P2P and bit torrent use, but oddly enough it rarely corresponds with throttling. The internet throttled on the current occasion after a particularly heavy iPlayer session.

Sounds like the key question really is, what providers won’t throttle my already slow connection. Money no object. If a new provider wants to throttle me because of nefarious internet use, I can stomach that, but I’m not putting up with getting throttled for heavy use.

adsl *shouldn’t* sync below about 288kbps, so i doubt it’s the sync speed that is that low. your router should tell you that.

is the speed only bad over wireless? if so you may have channel clashing.

also i’m pretty sure bt manage the options that aren’t unlimited more heavily see here so you could try another option

be aware that BT openreach (who act as the carrier for many isps that are not unbundled in the exchange) also do traffic management but not to the extent that BT retail do

Llu is generally better

Sounds like you have line issues.

what does your phone line sound like?

Buzzy? Crackly?

Filters been swapped to check?

Got any of that shitty ‘ribbon’ type extension wiring?

Ready to slag BT or whoever at the first sign of an issue but if you don’t report a problem how will it get fixed?

Eats dirt

Talking out your ass, son.

I have the same BB package as you waderider, I can easily lose two or three hours to HD youtube and iplayer but have never noticed any throttling. Never use torrents though.

What sort of speed do you get when its all working fine?

No to all cheez0. I’m confident your direction is wrong – do you work for BT? 😆

Interesting comment on llu retro, is that a fact?

Cheez, don’t know what part of eatsdirt you disagree with, but clashing channels could cause this. Also clashing with electrical appliances.

Also the noisy phone line stuff is missleading…you can have a line fault that affects the broadband whilst voice calls appear fine. And vice versa, the phone can be dead but broadband still working. I have a colleague that has approx 256kb connection, nothing wrong with his line, its just too far from the exchange for anything better. (and adsl killing aluminium cable, but that just exacerbates the line loss)

Not sure what kind of options you have available but if any of those you listed are based on fibre optic cable then thats the one you want.

I spent plenty of time surfing/downloading with adsl and its variants, they all suck. Now in Spain I´ve got a nice steady 50mb line for about 40quid a month.
Phone tech is past its sell by date.

If your exchange is BT chances are even if you switch supplier you will just get the same line and just pay someone else for it.

Mine is Sky unlimited / BT, went down to <50k just yesterday for no good reason, left the router unplugged for 15 minutes and went back to usual 6Mb. Presumably got assigned a different IP on reconnection.

Can you get into your router settings and info and see if you are getring erroring?

Any loss of synch? How often?

How long have you had slow speed? What speed do you normally expect?

How far from your exchange are you?

Wireless channel clashing has nothing to do with slow ADSL connection

Is the OP using wireless or cat5?.

I read somewhere to go with companies with their own equipment in the local exchange (LLU?). It certainly worked for me, I was with Tesco for years (not sure who they piggyback) paying for their premium service, said they could do nothing about my piddly 1mb speed. Switched to Orange broadband/phone and now get 17mb and pay a fraction of what I was paying BT/Tesco.

Waderider, switching broadband/phone is completely seemless IME, she need not know.

tinribz, I’m fairly sure it depends on what kit your BB supplier has installed at you local exchange. See my experience^

Spooky,
I hear what you say about noisy lines but the op didnt say one way or the other.

With the wireless channel thing, its not worth considering if rhe op is using a cat5 connection

my point is that downloading at 15 kbps says theres a fault somewhere, not service provider throttling.

cheez thats exactly why i was trying to establish if he was on a wired connection and why i also told him to check his sync speed in the router. if i was talking out of my arse, please let me know on what bit,always happy to learn more 😉

You can check your echange for supplier equipment here:

http://www.samknows.com/broadband/exchange_search

What is Local Loop Unbundling (LLU)?

Local Loop Unbundling is the process by which third party network operators are able to install equipment in to BT telephone exchanges in order to provide their own services without having to touch BT’s network. Only the copper pair from the exchange to the premises, which remains the property of BT, is used by the third party.

There is a guy at work who moaned about crippling speeds for months, spent hours on the phone to BT, downloaded dozens of anti-spyware programs, formatted his hardrive etc before calling out a PC repair woman who unplugged his router for ten mins and fixed the problem. Heh.

Virginmedia. 29Mbps. 30Mbps. 29Mbps. 27Mbps. 29Mbps… Cable though.

Similar probs here. Been at our new place for a few months now. Nobody else with equipment in the exchange (which is about 100 yards down the road), so went for BT. Initially fine, 6 megs plus consistently, which is good enough for me.

Then all of a sudden, started dropping to < 200 kbps every evening at peak times. Throttling? Catch-up TV, PS3 online, stuff on the cloud, work VPN, Apple TV all pretty much useless.

Weeks of groundhog day calls to customer services. They keep blaming my wiring, my wireless, my computers etc. but I’m running speed checks with an Ethernet-connected laptop with the ADSL modem/router directly connected to the test master socket.

Just to rub it in, sat here on my hols in Spain and getting a nice stable 2 megs over 3G.

Interesting stuff, IME you can hit a 40GB limit pretty quick if you go at it with the downloads/streaming etc. As folks have stated, if 15k is the speed of the line, then no other service provider will help. Not sure of the details, but unless you’re 200km from the exchange i’m pretty sure you either have a fault or throttling. Getting BT to check for a fault is pretty straight forward, if they are throttling you there are still things you can do.

Getting a (nominally) unlimited data package should stop them from throttling you for going over your limit, while changing the port on your bittorrent client ‘may’ dodge the torrent restrictions.

Still, fibre to the home and 10G for everyone should be maybe 2020? Can you just wait a bit?

Many problems can be sorted by unplugging the router from the power lead and letting it reset. Try this before anything else, works for me.

Had a rant, changed my mind, edited it away. Thanks for the responses – the useful ones anyway.

Waderider – Member

No to all cheez0. I’m confident your direction is wrong – do you work for BT?

Interesting comment on llu retro, is that a fact?

I should have qualified my comment with ‘in my experience’, but I was on my mobile and was being lazy. 🙂

I’ve switched my own (home) connection, a friends and three at work to various different LLU services and in each case there has been a dramatic improvement. My understanding is that their equipment is significantly better than BTs.

On my own connection, I went from a ropey 3mbit unable to watch iPlayer, youtube etc and dropping 2 or 3 times a night. To a rock solid 8mbit connection with 90day connection uptime.

Let’s get back to basics here.

The OP needs to rule out domestic or controllable local factors that might impact on throughput rates. Google the obvious culprits, e.g. using extensions, rather than plugging the router into the master socket (aka “NTE 5”), microfilters in every available socket, whether the NTE 5 or any extensions, domestic wiring issues like sentral heating thermostats, really old TVs with terrible RFI. Even car alarms have been known to cause issues. Also, ditch the wireless and plug straight into the router to see if that makes a difference.

Yes, check if there are any audible faults on the line (hissing, crackle). This can knacker syncing.

If nothign domestically comes up, contact the CP (BTR, right?) to determine whether there are line issues between the OP and the exchange. Also ask the CP to check whether there are any issues in the exchange (I’m thinking MSAN/DSLAM issues).

Then, and only then, is it worth examining other CPs. TBH, all of them will do some traffic management, whether they are network owners or just resellers. It’s the nature of the product these days.

BT may have fibre (which they sell as Infinity) at the exchange, but I’m guessing that G72 is a long way out of Glasgow, and given how slow the Openreach rollout is, I doubt it’s available. If fibre is available from BT, it will be available from any other CP selling it (e.g. TalkTalk don’t actively sell it yet, but it’s available).

Apologies if I’ve got any of the techy stuff wrong – I’m not an expert..!