Posted: 29th Jan, 2010 By: MarkJ
ISPreview community member and editor of the
BE Usergroup, drsox, has posted an interesting video that compares the broadband speed of a BT Total Broadband connection with that of Be Broadband during peak usage hours. The test highlights how serious the impact of Traffic Management (Throttling) can be on a BT connection for even basic non-P2P downloads.
Drsox commented:
Test performed at 6:51pm on 28th Jan 2010.
For months I have been frustrated by the performance with downloading Flash Player on BT Internet. Today I finally got a chance to test them side by side and record the results.
For your interest, the same test performed earlier in the day at 2:30pm (not peak time) resulted in the full line speed on the BT line. Just in the evening when traffic management kicks in, performance for p2p and (as you see) even legitimate downloads becomes terrible!
It's not clear from the video precisely which BT and Be Broadband packages are being compared. Likewise this is not a completely fair comparison because you cannot have two broadband ISP connections on the same phone line. Never the less it does appear to show that BT's traffic management is too restrictive.