Stuttering cable broadband

Alscaff

Totally agree JR. VirginMedia have been playing big brother for some time now, tracking your usage and slowing your connection to a virtual halt if you access any p2p sites. They give you the usual guff about traffic and it being busy but that is a nonsense IMO. If you can offer 50Mb+ in an area yet folk are struggling to stream video via Youtube or Veetle etc. that's just a cop out. They are simply strangling the connection to save costs yet charge us more.

aliEnRIK

So long as your not using P2P or newsgroups then you should get full speed all the time
http://help.virginmedia.com/system/selfservice.controller?CONFIGURATION=1002&PARTITION_ID=1&TIMEZONE_OFFSET=&USERTYPE=&VM_CUSTOMER_TYPE=Cable&CMD=VIEW_ARTICLE&ARTICLE_ID=2781
If your not your well within your right to complain to Virgin to get them to sort it

Jolly_Roger

I had a look at their terms and conditions and you may be right. Bizarrely, I shifted over to cable from telephone broadband because of the poor connection being offered for people who want to watch live sport on line. I was told my new service wouldn't be throttled. However, it looks like they are deliberately mucking about with the signal to stop P2P users. Odd that, since this is what I mostly use the internet for! Is there any way around this or are there providers out there not throttling? I pay £30.00 a month just for cable broadband. I think that should buy me one game of American Football a week without it being throttled. Do you agree?

aliEnRIK

If you use P2P I would suggest leaving it running from midnight through till 10 in the morning to avoid throttling. Otherwise, soon as you hit the limit youll be throttled (Although you can upload as much as you like)
The only ISP I know of that doesnt 'appear' to throttle is SKY. Although the person I know that has it might just be lucky

Jolly_Roger

I use P2P to watch live matches, otherwise your idea would be great!

aliEnRIK

Jolly_Roger wrote: »

I use P2P to watch live matches, otherwise your idea would be great!

Well youve had it then
Although they are going to upgrade your 30mb to 60mb and the download limits too, so you 'may' get to watch one then

copier_guy

I used to have this problem with that stupid super hub.

I switched back to my old modem and router and got the old MAC address made live and i have had about one reboot in 2 months - full speed most of the time

thescouselander

I don't think you can blame vm - I can get a perfectly good stream on my 10mb connection. With p2p streaming you're really at the mercy of the other people in the network and sometimes the stream won't be that good due to other peoples connections. You can have the fastest connection in the world but if the p2p network can't send the data fast enough you're screwed. You could try increasing the buffer size more to see if that helps.

TimothyEBaldwin

What streaming service is this? In particular what quality of stream are you trying to use? What application are you trying to use?

Is the flow of data on the network bursty or just the display? On Windows pressing Ctrl+Alt+Del then using the network tab of the task manger will show graphs of network usage.

If the server operators wanted to limit bandwidth yet still provide the service they would use a low bandwidth encoding. Furthermore intentional bandwidth limiting is not bursty.

TCP global synchronization could be the cause of the busrtiness. Another possibly is intermittent failure of network equipment somewhere.