[UK] Are there any UK ISPs that don't throttle speeds?


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ok,

 

I've been a virgin customer and they DO throttle speeds on pretty much everything.  You won't notice unless you are a heavy downloader but they do.

During a weekend I downloaded in excess of 200gb and noticed my speeds dropped from 130mb (have a great connection where I live) right down to 50mb.  When I stopped and waiting 24hrs it went back to 130mb but then soon dropped down again,

 

Sky on the other hand have ZERO throttling.  I have downloaded at my maximum rate (79mb) for nearly a full week full belt and had no drop in speeds.

 

Sky!

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+1 for Sky.

They don't slow you down at all. I'm actually quite surprised how good they are.

Before i was with Plusnet but their fair usage policy was terrible.

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+1 for Sky.

They don't slow you down at all. I'm actually quite surprised how good they are.

Before i was with Plusnet but their fair usage policy was terrible.

Plusnet's download cap (MB) was absolutely awful until six months ago, when they finally released unlimited packages (and for no extra cost, it seemed).

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Where I am, and that's only about 200m from the telephone exchange (as the crow flies) Sky can only offer a maximum of 17Mbps whereas on VM I'm achieving over 62Mbps.

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Virgin Media are the absolute worst for throttling.

 

BT, Plusnet are good, from experience.. No limiting.

 

Also Sky are supposed to be good but haven't used them

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I've just had a look at their updated policy and it's less clear than it used to be although this is the important bit:

 

http://my.virginmedia.com/traffic-management/traffic-management-policy-30Mb-or-higher.html

 

In effect they're saying that they'll only throttle P2P traffic because that's the activity that's most likely to exceed their fair use policy.  They're old policy was much clearer and explicitly stated that web traffic including streaming video wouldn't be shaped. It's a shame they've switched to vaguer terminology.

 

Anyway, in practice I've never bumped up against these limits or haven't noticed a significant slow down.  From memory my 120Mbps service gets shaped to about 75Mbps and it only lasts for an hour so it's not that big a deal anyway.

 

 

No - virgin throttle everything based on throughput.

 

If you download the 1 or 2 hour limit, your download speed will be reduced by 40-45%. Whether you download via torrent, usenet, http, https, or whatever. It doesn't matter- its based on throughput.

 

Usenet and torrents are also subject to further shaping, whether you've hit any limit or not. 

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No - virgin throttle everything based on throughput.

 

If you download the 1 or 2 hour limit, your download speed will be reduced by 40-45%. Whether you download via torrent, usenet, http, https, or whatever. It doesn't matter- its based on throughput.

 

Usenet and torrents are also subject to further shaping, whether you've hit any limit or not. 

 

That seems to directly contradict their policy though.  Here's the relevant bit again as it was stripped out of your post:

 

 

Also, speed is only reduced for the direction a threshold is exceeded ? if you exceed your threshold with downloads, your speed will only be reduced for downloading.

 

Now I'm assuming that downloads refers to P2P downloads - maybe that's an incorrect assumption - but that's the way their throttling worked up until recently when they changed the wording of the policy.  For example, the old policy included an example where P2P traffic would be throttled but iPlayer would be unaffected.

 

As I said earlier, it's a real shame that they made their policy less clear :/

 

Anyway, in practice I find that this is less of an issue than it appears to be when you read the policy.

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This is the link to VirginMedia's traffic management policy for 30Mbps and above...

 

http://my.virginmedia.com/traffic-management/traffic-management-policy-30Mb-or-higher.html

 

They only slow down p2p and newsgroups between 4pm and 11pm during the week and 11am to 11pm at weekends.

 

Pete

 

I like the "S5" packages fair use amount is "250MB" - not that ive ever seen that offered, must be a legacy package for really light users.

 

Virgin Media are the absolute worst for throttling.

 

BT, Plusnet are good, from experience.. No limiting.

 

Also Sky are supposed to be good but haven't used them

Oh indeed Virgin are an absolute joke with throttling, downloading 5gigs on a 120mbps connection is hardly heavy usage in this day and age... especially with games been upwards of 10gigs+ these days.

 

Still even when Virgin throttle my connection to 72 Mbps, that's still 70Mbps more than I would ever get from another ISP in the area, so cant really complain. Could always be stuck on 2Mbps ADSL.

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That seems to directly contradict their policy though.  Here's the relevant bit again as it was stripped out of your post:

 

 

Now I'm assuming that downloads refers to P2P downloads - maybe that's an incorrect assumption - but that's the way their throttling worked up until recently when they changed the wording of the policy.  For example, the old policy included an example where P2P traffic would be throttled but iPlayer would be unaffected.

 

As I said earlier, it's a real shame that they made their policy less clear :/

 

Anyway, in practice I find that this is less of an issue than it appears to be when you read the policy.

 

 

 

 

Brian is correct, you can also get around the newsgroups shaping by changing to an SSL port, but if you go over the threshold for downloading or uploading then your relevant speed gets reduced. I tend to download over night outside the threshold hours and use SSL which then means i don't also get shaped.

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Where I am, and that's only about 200m from the telephone exchange (as the crow flies) Sky can only offer a maximum of 17Mbps whereas on VM I'm achieving over 62Mbps.

 

 

At 200m you should have synced at the full 24meg

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Eclipse are more expensive but are very clear on their usage and throttling policies. You're guaranteed 12MBit on certain Fibre connections (Although I've never had below 30-35MBit on a 40MBit connection) and other packages (See business fibre) offer truly unlimited/truly non-throttled packages. 

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I like the "S5" packages fair use amount is "250MB" - not that ive ever seen that offered, must be a legacy package for really light users.

 

Oh indeed Virgin are an absolute joke with throttling, downloading 5gigs on a 120mbps connection is hardly heavy usage in this day and age... especially with games been upwards of 10gigs+ these days.

 

Still even when Virgin throttle my connection to 72 Mbps, that's still 70Mbps more than I would ever get from another ISP in the area, so cant really complain. Could always be stuck on 2Mbps ADSL.

 

Yeah that isn't bad at all, I can't get fibre to the area I've just moved so had 13mb normal broadband with them, I got throttled to literally less than half a meg.

 

Moved with BT, never get throttled. Just wish I could get fibre, but not rolling out in my area any time soon!

 

- I posted on their Facebook page showing the speeds and how much I'm getting throttled, they're reply was "We absolutely do not throttle speeds, however we do have a traffic management policy in place"

 

.. So you throttle speeds then lol - Also youtube streaming is a joke with VM

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Yeah that isn't bad at all, I can't get fibre to the area I've just moved so had 13mb normal broadband with them, I got throttled to literally less than half a meg.

 

Moved with BT, never get throttled. Just wish I could get fibre, but not rolling out in my area any time soon!

 

- I posted on their Facebook page showing the speeds and how much I'm getting throttled, they're reply was "We absolutely do not throttle speeds, however we do have a traffic management policy in place"

 

.. So you throttle speeds then lol - Also youtube streaming is a joke with VM

 

I would be very tempted to switch to fibre if it was available around here, mainly for the much greater uploads speeds. Apparently sometime in summer 2014 it will be rolled out in my area.

 

In regards to YouTube apparently if you bock Virgin's YouTube cache then it works great, have a look at: How to fix youtube on Virginmedia by blocking cache proxy. Never really had any problems with YouTube, only the 1080p content is slow to at times sometimes.

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That seems to directly contradict their policy though.  Here's the relevant bit again as it was stripped out of your post:

 

 

Now I'm assuming that downloads refers to P2P downloads - maybe that's an incorrect assumption - but that's the way their throttling worked up until recently when they changed the wording of the policy.  For example, the old policy included an example where P2P traffic would be throttled but iPlayer would be unaffected.

 

As I said earlier, it's a real shame that they made their policy less clear :/

 

Anyway, in practice I find that this is less of an issue than it appears to be when you read the policy.

 

 

Downloads = downstream bandwidth. Uploads = upstream bandwidth. 

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Also youtube streaming is a joke with VM

 

That's because they outsource a video caching service for youtube, and it's almost always got corrupt videos on there. Trying to save money by keeping the large majority of the internet bandwidth on their own network, and should in theory help speed things up no end too. Unfortunately, if the cache you're on is broken, it can take weeks before it's refreshed and VM support will keep you waiting with 'updates' on the issue via their forums until then, low and behold they announce it's fixed.

It's a stupid system, but one they need to do in order to keep the costs down... at least we've not go transparent cache forced on ALL webpages like we used to have... Although I do have a sneeking suspission they do still cache some pages from the same weird error message I get every now and then.

 

Either way, there are ways around the youtube problem but we shouldn't have to fix problems our ISP is causing.

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Just spend literally a few pounds on a VPN and not worry?

 

If you're using torrents you should be already any way.

Why?

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