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I don't trust BT as far as I could throw them (Phorm, PRISM, etc) and my web usage seemed to be getting slower and slower, I figured I'd give a VPN a try, read about a few, https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/ seemed to come out with very favourable reviews & uptime and as it was less than £30 for 12 months I figured I'd give it a punt.
Instantly browsing etc is about x100 faster, pages loading almost instantly and upload/downloads from my ftp/webserver are much faster.
So, is it that the VPN gets me around contention ratios or has my traffic been being intercepted, logged and sold?
Mossad, innit
Speculating but,
Could be that the VPN is getting around some sort of traffic shaping / QoS prioritising that BT are doing. The routing software can't see inside the tunnel so can't massage its packets.
Could be that BT's DNS is buggered and taking ages to reply. That's easily tested, drop the VPN and change the DNS setting on your PC to 8.8.8.8.
Can't see how it's anything to do with contention, you're still going through the same hardware.
Do you have a Mac?
Check the Photos Agent isn't flooding your upstream link, causing serious latency issues (easily found - ping 8.8.8.8 from a shell prompy, and you should get RTT of 10's of ms .. if it's hundreds, Houston we have a problem)
Killing that fixed my internetz. But it comes back.. even when your library in iCloud is sync'd up to date. Thinking about cron'ing a kill script during iPlayer hours as it killed streaming dead.
Seriously thinking about migrating to W10 now, numerous other niggly issues with OS X are annoying me now, Photos was before I found this.
EDIT - Only mention this as it was so random. VPN wouldn't fix it, but if the speed drop comes back again with the VPN on it is worth looking into.
I'm going with Cougar's suggestion, been wondering about this myself.
It would be rare to have a domestic user setting any TOS on traffic outbound, and it would be ignored anyway. TOS is preserved across IPSec vpns.
So, BT must have some DPI or layer 7 prioritisation going on- and as it can't see inside the tunnelled packets, it essentially either:
a)prioritises them- is this because its thinking: home worker, better give them a good experience?
or:
b)can't detect whats going on here, lets just [i]not reprioritise[/i] these packets?