Can you get faster internet speeds mid-contract?

onomatopoeia99

JohnDinton wrote: »

Also where are you getting these high speed streams from? A few weeks ago PlusNet at long last moved my line to ADSL2+. The speed has more than doubled. My router says the sync speed is 22Mbit/s and a speed test shows I can download at 19Mbit/s. I have not noticed any difference. At times (even 2am!) I still struggle to get even 1Mbit/s downloading from iPlayer. Streaming is even worse. Yesterday I watched an iPlayer programme in HD. The jerkiness of the picture suggested the frame rate was about 2 frames/s.

That sounds like the ISP being rubbish then and giving priority to traffic to speed test sites when over capacity on their external links, I should think.

Note - that would be the ISP doing this, not BT wholesale, who have a policy of increasing capacity in their internal network to prevent them from being the point of contention in any wholesale service they provide (and what's more, actually achieve it by the account of someone I would trust to know).

System

Plusnet have a history of throttling protocols, that's why I left them 8 years ago and never went back

JohnDinton

What I find frustrating is that I am not aware of any tools available to me which will show where the bottlenecks are. Whenever I have complained to PlusNet about speeds the response has always been that I do not have many dropped connections, which is true.

I have always assumed that slowness in the iPlayer was the fault of the BBC. When the iPlayer was first introduced I spent ages on the forum trying to persuade them to improve the buffering. YouTube buffers the whole clip as fast as it can. iPlayer buffering is only about 1 minute ahead. Anyway dropping frames while maintaining audio is preferable to the circle of dashes.

I also use 3 mobile broadband with a Mifi device which will only go up to 3.6Mbit/s. Web browsing on PlusNet, including PlusNet's own website, is far far slower than on 3. To be fair I mainly use 3 in a different location which may not be as congested.

JohnDinton

onomatopoeia99 wrote: »

That sounds like the ISP being rubbish then and giving priority to traffic to speed test sites when over capacity on their external links, I should think.

Note - that would be the ISP doing this, not BT wholesale, who have a policy of increasing capacity in their internal network to prevent them from being the point of contention in any wholesale service they provide (and what's more, actually achieve it by the account of someone I would trust to know).

Apologies for reviving this thread after a long delay. According to the BT Wholesale speed tester I am now getting 17Mbit/s from PlusNet. That is about 6 times the highest HD data rate from BBC iPlayer (2.8Mbit/s). What actually happens is that it starts at 1470kbit/s and quickly reduces to 800kbit/s then 500kbit/s and sometimes even 350kbit/s. I am now trying to take this though PlusNet's complaints procedure (which I have yet to find). The latest response is that my email was being answered by someone who was not trained to deal with the issue!

Are those of you who say you get fast speeds from other ISPs able to use the iPlayer at its maximum 2.8Mbit/s data rate? (If you right click on the image while it is playing it shows the data rate.)

I have just seen that Netflix has complained to the FCC about Verizon over a similar issue.

brewerdave

My measured ADSL2+ speed is ~ 16Mbps.
I am recently suffering the same experience with live streaming on BBC I-player with PN eg Breakfast news prog. -However, don't think it is a Plusnet issue as I stream live SkyGo perfectly well -I'm watching live cricket at this moment at full size/quality SD - not sure what rate its streaming at as it doesn't detail on the app.
ALSO, just checked watching a less popular BBC prog. on catch up -thats is maintaining 2.8Mb/s on HD stream!

JohnDinton

Thanks, that's interesting. This morning I watched part of the repeated BBC4 progamme about Rome on the iPlayer at 2.8Mbit/s. I can also play 1080p video from YouTube, although I had put that down to YouTube's more sensible buffering.

It sounds as though the problem is with the BBC rather than PlusNet.

There is another thread about PlusNet fibre started by Quicky. It has some links to the PlusNet forum which has some more helpful comments than I have had from PlusNet support.

He is complaining about getting 8Mbit/s instead of 75Mbit/s. Another poster said his service was very slow at 41Mbit/s instead of 48Mbit/s. I wonder what they are expecting to be able to do at those speeds. For downloading software or documents I don't know many sites where I can download faster than 2Mbit/s. 41Mbit/s ought to be fast enough for 14 computers to watch HD video simultaneously.