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BT Infinity 2 - P2P Speeds

Hi All,

It seems that FTTC has now been enabled on my exchange (Blewbury, SMBWY). yay....

After years of being with a small independent ISP I am nervous of going down the BT route. Weighing up the pros and cons I am finding it very difficult to find anything that matches BT Infinity Option 2 (I am out and about a lot, the the WIFI would be really useful).

I use P2P quite alot, I usually get around 500k/Bs on my DSL. I understand the BT will shape/throttle P2P but I am kind of hoping I would at least get that if not better.

Would an existing BT Infinity Option 2 user car to give me an idea as to what they get?

I think I have covered off most of the other FTTC/VDSL providers (someone published a useful GDOCS spreadsheet on here - thanks!) but I am still open to any suggestions...

TIA...

BogBeast
 
From what i have read many say Bit torrent is throttled down to between 100 and 300kbps, some say off peak (ie midnight till 8am) it will give significantly faster rates (IE in the MB range) others say its basically throttled all the time. This would from my experience of how they throttle P2P and bit torrent on their "unlimited" ADSL seem to be about the rates they throttle to.

If you can not live without P2P or bit torrent then i wouldnt recommend BT Infinity option 1 or 2, but suggest you look to another ISP for FTTC. Though its likely to have limits and cost more.
 
No experience of BT Infinity but, from what I read, it's not kind to P2P - my understanding echoes the one above, that an old ADSL service might well be quicker than Infinity for P2P. That's probably a key factor in the pricing of Infinity versus other providers' offerings.

Aquiss, IDNET, AAISP, possibly now Sky might be worth looking at.
 
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His exchanged is not Sky LLU enabled, otherwise their £20 fibre and £12 odd quid line rental/voice package would had been the first thing id had recommended if he wants cheap fibre

IDnet do an unlimited FTTC business package around £90 a month though, i get the impression from his opening post thats out of the equation.
 
Thanks for all the feedback so far.. I am paying more (for less....) with my current ISP, so cost isn't paramount. - but £90 a month is out of the question :)

I can't really understand why other ISP's have such a job getting close to BT..
 
As above, I'd have also recommended Sky Fibre but if you can't get their standard LLU service then you won't be able to benefit from the FTTC solution because they use their LLU platform to handle the bandwidth side of things. TalkTalk also has a fibre solution but they're known to throttle P2P as well, although I'm not sure how strict they are.

The last "cheap" FTTC option would be PlusNet, although they don't promote unlimited usage and also impose Traffic Management, plus they're owned by BT but do have a much better reputation for customer support quality. PlusNet also offer a special add-on that reduces the impact of Traffic Management but I can't recall what its name is or how effective it was supposed to be.

Outside of that your choices are much more varied and usually more expensive as smaller providers have trouble matching the big ISP economics of scale.
 
As above, I'd have also recommended Sky Fibre but if you can't get their standard LLU service then you won't be able to benefit from the FTTC solution because they use their LLU platform to handle the bandwidth side of things.


I suppose there is no way of telling if and when LLU will become available and an exchange.

my budget is 30 > 40 quid - can't really stretch to any more than that..
 
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Sadly Sky aren't very clear about their LLU expansion plans. At present they claim to cover 82% of the UK and this is due to reach 88% by next summer but we don't know what exchanges that will include. I'd probably look towards IDNet or ADSL24 until a cheaper option arrives, both of which have good off-peak flexibility (provided you don't mind leaving big downloads until the night).
 
I suppose there is no way of telling if and when LLU will become available and an exchange.

my budget is 30 > 40 quid - can't really stretch to any more than that..

How much do you download gig wise in a month? For that £30 apart from BT and Sky you are not likely to find a provider which is Unlimited. Most will probably (im guessing not looked at several particular providers) have a monthly cap on FTTC of around 50GB or less for that type of money.

With regards to your exchange i would not hold my breath on any LLU provider rolling out to your exchange. Talk Talk are the biggest (in terms of exchange % coverage) in the UK and they dont even appear to be available at your exchange, so chances Sky will be anytime soon are unlikely, though i guess you can live in hope. Im guessing as your exchange only has 1,000 odd connections to it you live in either a rural area, village, very small town, or outskirts.
 
during peek times you will be lucky to get anything near 500k/bs you will be lucky to get 50k/bs this is on p2p sites. however you could always sign upto a vpn service which BT will not be able to tell where you are downloading from, so in peek times you can get upto 3mb depending on the download source.

some vpn services cost around £10 a month but well worth it as it also protects you
 
With more and more site blocking, throttling and traffic type restrictions, it would be nice for this site to do some type of guide to the myriad of VPN services available out there.

I have no idea if MarkJ or any others at ISPreview towers have experience of such services but if so maybe a round up of them and a guide in the articles section of the site would be a nice addition :)
 
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I actually covered that a little bit already on page 4 of this recent article:

http://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.ph...te-and-browse-the-internet-anonymously.html/4

I'll jot that idea down though and see what we can do. As with ISPs you really need to test the services in order to know which is truly best, but that's not easy when the ones you need to use are paid solutions (ISPr is a free site so we can't go around buying lots of services to test). Also some VPN's are better for watching content in the USA, while others are better at downloading from UK servers.. it's all a bit hit and miss.
 
HI i use anonyproz and have been for about a year, i find very good for downloading have faced no restrictions. you need to be careful as some VPN companies also restrict. but after searching around i found this one to be the best
 
I actually covered that a little bit already on page 4 of this recent article:

http://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.ph...te-and-browse-the-internet-anonymously.html/4

I'll jot that idea down though and see what we can do. As with ISPs you really need to test the services in order to know which is truly best, but that's not easy when the ones you need to use are paid solutions (ISPr is a free site so we can't go around buying lots of services to test). Also some VPN's are better for watching content in the USA, while others are better at downloading from UK servers.. it's all a bit hit and miss.

I had not seen that Mark, thanks for the link :)

Maybe you could contact those companies, and any other suggestions of pay for VPNs people have, explain the site you have and try to blag as many free trials for a few months to do a compare. Im sure some of them when they see the site would love to also have their service promoted :D

I know you are busy, but would be a interesting write up :)
 
HI i use anonyproz and have been for about a year, i find very good for downloading have faced no restrictions. you need to be careful as some VPN companies also restrict. but after searching around i found this one to be the best

Not seen that service before and don't trust their website, looks very shacky, but will check it out if ever we do a study.
 
How much do you download gig wise in a month? For that £30 apart from BT and Sky you are not likely to find a provider which is Unlimited. Most will probably (im guessing not looked at several particular providers) have a monthly cap on FTTC of around 50GB or less for that type of money..

I never had much cause to measure what I download, but I am guessing 80 GB. Its a fair point, perhaps I am focussing too much on the 'unlimited' aspect..

during peek times you will be lucky to get anything near 500k/bs you will be lucky to get 50k/bs this is on p2p sites. however you could always sign upto a vpn service which BT will not be able to tell where you are downloading from, so in peek times you can get upto 3mb depending on the download source.

some vpn services cost around £10 a month but well worth it as it also protects you

Hmm. That is something I hadn't considered - I will look into that..... Out of interest are you using BT Infinity ?

Thanks....
 
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I never had much cause to measure what I download, but I am guessing 80 GB. Its a fair point, perhaps I am focussing too much on the 'unlimited' aspect..

Maybe consider Zens Fibre Active product 100GIG a month usage...
http://www.zen.co.uk/business/broadband/fibre-broadband.aspx

Just over £35 a month for 100gig... Not as cheap as Infinity from BT but not mega expensive either, gets you the UPTO 76Mb download and 20Mb upload, unlikely to be throttled on anything and a trusted, well reviewed company. Dont think you will find any "unlimted" product for around the £30 a month mark unless its Sky or BT.
 
yes i am using BT Infinity, just upgraded to BT Infinity 2 yesterday. there is another way round the download restriction, you can sign up to a business connection just giving a company name, this i think is around £10 extra a month but you get UK support and no restrictions

That information is NOT correct BT business packages also slow down p2p traffic as detailed here...
http://www2.bt.com/static/i/btretail/panretail/terms/pdfs/Traffic_Management.pdf
 
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