Yes, that echo's my view stated earlier in this thread - but has been completely ignored by PN

I'm also getting ~25KBps. BT Speedtest says I can get about 5000kbps throughput and I'm synced at 6000 (although my router has been syncing at 8096kbps since day 1). It worked fine a few days ago, but these last few days it's seemed to die off.

My speed test with BT.

Test1 comprises of Best Effort Test:  -provides background information.
    IP profile for your line is - 7150 kbps
    DSL connection rate: 448 kbps(UP-STREAM)  8128 kbps(DOWN-STREAM)
    Actual IP throughput achieved during the test was - 5346 kbps

I have rebooted with no luck.
How do i know what gateway i would be on?
how do i change?
Have PN said when this problem will be resolved?
Thanks for your help so far.
Neil

You can check which gateway here
http://usertools.plus.net/@gateway/
To change gateway try disconnecting the power to your router for 3-4 mins and then power back up
As for PN fixing something - well,  thats anybodies guess
as they don't seem to be interested in their customers it could be a long wait

I just connected to steam and it downloaded an update at 512kbs - so it looks like they stuffed up their capping on Usenet again.
They will fix it and pretend nothing happened!!!!!!!!

Hi there,
I am a EX Plus Net Business Premier customer and left mainly for this reason. I paid £45 and was capped(WtheF???I know).
Download Wireshark/Ethereal and start sniffing your connection on port 119(think that is USENET).Then look for the DiffServ Field Code(it will look like 0x80 or 0x20 ect....). If you post the code i am sure a PN member will tell you what code relates to what catergorry(Bronze,Silver...).
Make sure you save them for evidential purposes  .
PN are like lab rats(lol) because there always seeing how many sessions they can get. I think they managed to get near the 30,000 mark but failed to notice a rising number of angry customers. They are just a trial for the router companies and BTw.
I just find it funny that smaller ISP's have such better bang for buck. The ISP i am with can offer me my full line speed Usenet access the only problem is that i am havig to switch providers(USENET) because there link to me is not fast enough but here is the speed i would get(same as all protocols):

How can a small ISP offer this bang for buck and still make a descent profit and yet you can't?
Oh and they are on the same BTw pricing plan as you i have checked(forgotten what it is called CBC or something).
I will probably get the PN guns pointed at me but what are the results when going through SSL and port 443(Obviously not to avoid been shaped just for the 256bit AES security and packet mangling)? Just thinking because PN would not want to cap online banking now would they?
Do not do this or you will probably get thrown off but i remember the days where you could download at a remote location with a fast upload through VPN and then SSH or copy the files over  ! This got round Server IP banning.
Got to go and check to see if new GRAW2 maps are out so good luck your USENET nightmare.
One last thing and sorry to do this to you but my upload to Usenet is faster than your download at the mo:
Upload Speed: 1405 kbps (175.6 KB/sec )

James Barlow

Quote from: paulgul

That looks about right at the moment- Things went downhill mid week after all the mods PN done. They really should learn to leave things alone when its running ok

Hi Paul,
This was compounded by a BT outage which Bob described in his earlier post.  It is quite possible that we would have had near balance without this outage being experienced.

Quote from: paulgul

That looks about right at the moment- Things went downhill mid week after all the mods PN done. They really should learn to leave things alone when its running ok

Leaving things alone simply wasn't an option and the main reason the network is in such a state of inbalance is due faults across BT's network and not ours.
Just so we're all clear what's happened here...
On Wednesday of last week we moved two of our core routers to a new suite at Telehouse North down in Docklands. The reason we did this was due to poor power efficiency and temperature issues in the existing suite. It wasn't just the gateways that were moved. We also moved a number of other things including our Ellacoya accounting servers and RADIUS platform. Leaving things as they were was *not* an option and the old suite will be decommissioned.
Two central pipes had to be moved as part of this work so anyone connected to these gateways will have been disconnected as part of the work. When this happens you have an inconsistency of sessions across the gateways with some being much busier than others. You also end up in a situation where there are concentrated numbers of transient users on particular gateways whilst others are full of customers with long-term sessions. Experience tells us that transient users are less likely to use heavy amounts of P2P/Binary Usenet meaning your left with large performance inconsistencies across the gateways when dealing with the lower priority traffic types. To combat this we 'load-balance' which involves kicking users across all the gateways. In addition to this we sometimes ask BT to put double RADIUS entries on some of the gateways too which forces more users to them. After the move on Wednesday we did exactly this and the platform was nicely in balance. Until...
As mentioned we moved the Ellacoya accounting servers too. When we did this we had a problem with ptn-ag1 where the gateway stopped accepting new sessions. We had to perform some maintenance to fix this that disconnected several thousand customers and left us inbalanced again. Following this we performed some more manual balancing to get things back to normal. Just before doing this, a BT problem across two of the gateways caused even more users to be inadvertently disconnected.
Heading into the weekend we were relatively balanced however on Friday night antoehr BT problem caused two of our gateways to drop - It's this that's the main reason for the issues over the weekend and is why I was able to get line speed on one gateway but only 5kB/s as per my post earlier in this thread.

Quote from: jabns2

Download Wireshark/Ethereal and start sniffing your connection on port 119(think that is USENET).Then look for the DiffServ Field Code(it will look like 0x80 or 0x20 ect....). If you post the code i am sure a PN member will tell you what code relates to what catergorry(Bronze,Silver...).

It will be 0x20 and it relates to the bronze queue. More detail for those interested here.

Quote

Make sure you save them for evidential purposes

Evidential purposes? Am I missing something here? We're quite open about how our platform is managed and we've nothing to hide.

Quote

PN are like lab rats(lol) because there always seeing how many sessions they can get. I think they managed to get near the 30,000 mark but failed to notice a rising number of angry customers. They are just a trial for the router companies and BTw.

Absolute nonsense. There's only a finite number of sessions a gateway can accept. Besides, we've plenty of free sessions as can be seen by the graphing here.

We've 7 central pipes and each central pipe can facilitate 32,000 connections.

Quote

I just find it funny that smaller ISP's have such better bang for buck. The ISP i am with can offer me my full line speed Usenet access the only problem is that i am havig to switch providers(USENET) because there link to me is not fast enough but here is the speed i would get(same as all protocols): How can a small ISP offer this bang for buck and still make a descent profit and yet you can't?

The smaller ISPs are less likely to have anywhere near the volume of heavy users we have. As soon as they do then they will start to see problems as you cannot justify throwing money at central bandwidth to feed heavy P2P/Usenet use. As time goes by we've all seen more and more ISPs coming to this realisation.

Quote

Oh and they are on the same BTw pricing plan as you i have checked(forgotten what it is called CBC or something).

Yes, CBC (Capacity Based Charging).

Quote

I will probably get the PN guns pointed at me but what are the results when going through SSL and port 443(Obviously not to avoid been shaped just for the 256bit AES security and packet mangling)? Just thinking because PN would not want to cap online banking now would they?

Assuming your news provider doesn't change their IP address at the same time then there wouldn't be any results

Quote

Do not do this or you will probably get thrown off but i remember the days where you could download at a remote location with a fast upload through VPN and then SSH or copy the files over  ! This got round Server IP banning.

I'd strongly suggest against attempting to circumvent our traffic management mechanics. They're there for a reason, and you'd only be helping contribute to making things worse for others. In some instances we've started tackling this by using rate limits but that's no where near as effective and doesn't allow us to be overly restrictive as we need to avoid negatively impacting the more conventional uses for these protocols.
We'll be addressing the current network imbalance today which is likely to invove the need to disconnect some customers from the busier gateways.

The yellow is P2P and it's taking up about half of the network - to be honest i think plusnet manage this very well.
I don't use P2P or Usenet - i don't see any degrade in service
so well done i say

Quote

Evidential purposes? Am I missing something here? We're quite open about how our platform is managed and we've nothing to hide.

Oops I think we had a misunderstanding. I meant that say a game is not classed correctly the log files could be passed over to the teks for analsis and correction.
Oh and you did not stick to the policy with my business accounts(2002-2006). I had 2 of them and they all got rate limited on about 3 protocols. The only time i ever use Bit Torrent is to grab new linux distros(and that is actually 100% the truth) and i would say thats business related.
BitTorrent is one of the best networks ever technically speaking and also lowers cost of developing and distrobuting software ---- EG. opensource
And also why did you rate limit a £45 account that has "highest priority(cough cough...)".
Sorry i don't mean to be a pain its just that the USENET issue touched a raw nerve and i wanted to let these people know that if you want to realisticly use BINARY Usenet servers you really have the wrong product(and possibly ISP - although it is very hard to find an all round 10/10 ISP). Anyone with there head screwed on would realise this and i am not just trying to be spiteful.
The only product i can see USENET been reliable on is BBMW PRO. Please do correct me if i am wrong as i am not entirly up to date with PN.
James

James,
Premier, BBYW Option 2 and beyond and PRO are all suitable. I use a Premier account and download a lot more binary Usenet than most. We have customers on these products downloading 100's of GB's off-peak and we've some downloading amounts that they'd never get elsewhere for the price.
If you want line speed on Usenet during the day then yes you'd probably have to be on BBYW PRO and you'd probably have to pay for it but for those that don't mind scheduling these things and keeping to off-peak hours then speeds are usually fine.
It's the imbalance that's causing these complaints, not our traffic management policies as you're implying.
To quote the OP:

Quote

Hi at this very moment i am dowloading off usenet at 26.5kbs. It was 800kbs this time laast week.

Its the first time I have used my USENET account in at least  4 weeks. I am by no means a heavy user and used to get between 3 and 6 MB when downloading during off peak hours (I am PlusNet Broadband Premier Option 2). I am trying to get a file today and the speed is appling. I have rebooted many times and am currently on  the "City Lifeline, Juniper 8" gateway. This gateway is sometimes known as pcl-ag01. When did that appear? its crap. I can only achieve 30-60 KB a second regardless of what Gateway I seem to connect to?
My account should have "Line speed" or close to it out of peak hours. ( 12:00 am till 16:00 pm). I have used littel of my allowance. What is going on?

Because UseNet was invented so long ago it has little protocol overhead.
Binary groups can be used to transfer GBytes of data.
They ought to be fast - I only use them for short text articles, so the speed issue does not cause any problems.