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This doesn't appear to address the two main issues I encounter when choosing UK broadband, which are that (a) advertising of upload speeds seems entirely unregu

by gmac 8y ago

This doesn't appear to address the two main issues I encounter when choosing UK broadband, which are that (a) advertising of upload speeds seems entirely unregulated, so that some providers offer ridiculous deals (e.g. 38Mbps down, but 1Mbps up, with the latter figure hidden in small print on another page), and (b) unless I choose Virgin, I will have sporadic disconnections sometimes for hours at a time depending on the interaction of decades-old copper, weather conditions, and random chance.

Blackstone4 8y ago
Completely agree on the upload speeds...I had Plusnet 17MPS but in actual fact it was ~6MPS download and 0.5MPS upload. The bad part was if I did an upload of say ~20MB it would throttle my download speed thereby slowing everything to a halt.
- dspillett 8y ago
  > upload of say ~20MB it would throttle my download speed This is not directly due to the technology involved, it is due to congestion on the upstream side slowing down IP control packets (ACKs and such) as they are queued with the rest. When you have a slow upstream pipe it is very easy to see this effect. It is even worse when there are multiple upstream connections trying to use as much as they can (as seen in torrent transfers and similar), and it affects interactive traffic like SSH connections significantly too. You can work around this by shaping your upstream traffic to reserve a little bandwidth for small interactive/control packets. If your router runs Linux there are a number of simple scripts to setup the basics (wondershaper is one I've used successfully in the past) or you can be more specific to your needs by setting up your own config with the appropriate tools. If you usually only use one PC then you can run the shaper there instead, of course, but running shaping on one individual machine on a crowded network will have no useful effect. (see http://louwrentius.com/how-traffic-shaping-can-dramatically-improve-internet-responsiveness.html http://louwrentius.com/how-traffic-shaping-can-dramatically-... for an example of using wondershaper)
  - Blackstone4 8y ago
    Thank you for this. Super interesting to hear about what's happening. At one point they told me there was a problem with the copper which meant my packets where getting dropped. In the end, Plusnet increased their prices by £1 and in the small print of the email, they said I could cancel my contract within 30 days...I was 3 months in so I cancelled. Now I'm using my phone (tethered + 20GB of data for £20 a month from BT) and BT-FON free wifi for Youtube videos.

by gmac 8y ago

Blackstone4 8y ago

Completely agree on the upload speeds...I had Plusnet 17MPS but in actual fact it was ~6MPS download and 0.5MPS upload. The bad part was if I did an upload of say ~20MB it would throttle my download speed thereby slowing everything to a halt.

dspillett 8y ago
> upload of say ~20MB it would throttle my download speed This is not directly due to the technology involved, it is due to congestion on the upstream side slowing down IP control packets (ACKs and such) as they are queued with the rest. When you have a slow upstream pipe it is very easy to see this effect. It is even worse when there are multiple upstream connections trying to use as much as they can (as seen in torrent transfers and similar), and it affects interactive traffic like SSH connections significantly too. You can work around this by shaping your upstream traffic to reserve a little bandwidth for small interactive/control packets. If your router runs Linux there are a number of simple scripts to setup the basics (wondershaper is one I've used successfully in the past) or you can be more specific to your needs by setting up your own config with the appropriate tools. If you usually only use one PC then you can run the shaper there instead, of course, but running shaping on one individual machine on a crowded network will have no useful effect. (see http://louwrentius.com/how-traffic-shaping-can-dramatically-improve-internet-responsiveness.html http://louwrentius.com/how-traffic-shaping-can-dramatically-... for an example of using wondershaper)
- Blackstone4 8y ago
  Thank you for this. Super interesting to hear about what's happening. At one point they told me there was a problem with the copper which meant my packets where getting dropped. In the end, Plusnet increased their prices by £1 and in the small print of the email, they said I could cancel my contract within 30 days...I was 3 months in so I cancelled. Now I'm using my phone (tethered + 20GB of data for £20 a month from BT) and BT-FON free wifi for Youtube videos.