Unlimited Speed and Usage Broadband

mathewshanley

Yeah I'm quite aware, it's more for the upload speed. The fibre cabinet is right outside my house so my speeds are towards the upper limit of upload and download speeds.

I have a fileserver at home which I store all my photo and video files (hobby photographer) and just about everything else, I often RDP and sync files when I'm away from home. As well as video conference calls so upload speed is important. I'd be happy for download speed to be less. It's annoying that you can't get a more balanced speed for both up and down stream.

I also have no issues streaming 4K content from YouTube We're a heavy internet household anyway it's not unusual for three internet video streams going at once and VOIP. How someone can watch a film/TV show and be on the phone is beyond me.

boliston

Just had a look at providers that avoid the typical "mass market" type suppliers like sky, bt etc who will almost certainly throttle/sensor/manage the life out of your connection. Noticed a provider called idnet who do a 200gb package for £28.20 although they do charge £16 for a phone line. I would not really want to pay more than £10 for a line but might if there was no other option. The thing that would would worry me about an "unlimited" service would be massive downloaders slowing my connection at peak times.

onomatopoeia99

mathewshanley wrote: »

As for web censorship, it started off with just TPB, but then this spiraled into a bunch of other sites (as I expected) and I'm just not comfortable with that. It should never have been allowed. IMO the internet is a global resource that should not be filtered, or tampered with. No network traffic should be prioritised or slowed down over others. It should all be treated equally.

The larger ISPs are subject to court orders that require them to block access to certain sites. These are granted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act (1988) so the blocked sites are generally things like torrent indexes and the orders have been sought by the big film studios and so on. Smaller ISPs have not been so pursued through the courts, so are much less likely to block these sites.

All of that ignores Cleanfeed which all the big ISPs use for other censorship.

I have no particular issue with an ISP putting in a large capacity direct link to (say) the BBC iPlayer server to ensure their customers always get good throughput, even if links to other sites are busy. That is prioritisation of a particular form of traffic and if a provider wishes to sell a service based on providing a good connection to a site then that's fine with me.

MataNui

onomatopoeia99 wrote: »

The larger ISPs are subject to court orders that require them to block access to certain sites. These are granted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act (1988) so the blocked sites are generally things like torrent indexes and the orders have been sought by the big film studios and so on. Smaller ISPs have not been so pursued through the courts, so are much less likely to block these sites.

All of that ignores Cleanfeed which all the big ISPs use for other censorship.

I have no particular issue with an ISP putting in a large capacity direct link to (say) the BBC iPlayer server to ensure their customers always get good throughput, even if links to other sites are busy. That is prioritisation of a particular form of traffic and if a provider wishes to sell a service based on providing a good connection to a site then that's fine with me.

Its not about blocking sites. Its about the type of network traffic. your ISP (and you if you download some free software) can tell exactly what every network packet does. They know if its a web request, if its an audio/video streaming file, if its an ftp download or a http based download and if its a gaming or P2P packet. The problem is that some ISPs will throttle specific types of packet at certain times of day. 2 commonly used examples are video streaming being throttled in the evening and P2P being either throttled permanently or simply prohibited completely.

ISPs are rarely (never) honest about how much of this they do. All the main retail providers do this. Its only specialist companies like Zen who either dont filter traffic or are very specific about what they do filter and when because its the business and specialist customer they are looking to attract.

onomatopoeia99

TPB was specifically mentioned as a blocked (censored) site in the post I responded to. I understand that completely blocking a particular site is not the same as rate limiting a specific protocol.

I used an ISP that is more specialist than Zen and they do not block or rate limit anything. Further they have full IPv6 support (I have something like a /48 assigned to my connection), which Zen did not when I enquired six months ago.

Spookieuk

boliston wrote: »

Just had a look at providers that avoid the typical "mass market" type suppliers like sky, bt etc who will almost certainly throttle/sensor/manage the life out of your connection.

I've used newsgroups with BT and never had any issues maxing my 78mb fibre connection at peak times. As far as I'm aware they don't throttle torrents either.

TalkTalk

Hi Matthew,

I can understand the confusion, but that "no" applies to all the items to the left. It makes more sense to list them all with 1 "no", rather than listing "no" 20 or so times.

Cheers

Mark