Hi,
There's other factors with BitTorrent that just the network capacity and traffic management. The speed you can download at is determined by how fast other people are uploading, how many are uploading and how many others are downloading at the time. Also local settings like your upload speed, and port forwarding setup can have an effect. And if anything else is being used on your connection at the time. The priority of the traffic is not only determined on the network but on your individual connection as well. Download over P2P and browse the web or play a game at the same time and that traffic will automatically get a higher priority than the P2P.
I'd make sure your upload speed is set to at most 50% of your maximum upload speed, make sure the port you are using for BitTorrent is forwarded on your router and firewall and it's probably also worth trying different torrents from different sources and see what speeds they give. On the Unlimited product there's no reason you shouldn't get full speeds overnight on a P2P download (might not be on the dot of midnight just because everyone starts their downloads at the same time), we have plenty of users that do get 6Mbps+ speeds on P2P overnight and some on the 21CN trial getting over double that.
I am currently re-reviewing our capacity management plans, the next segment is just waiting on BT doing the necessary and the one after should be delivered in the middle of next month so long as there are no hitches with moving customers back from the Tiscali LLU platform. We have dates pencilled in for the rest of the financial year and beyond based on what we expect the customer base to be, what the mix of products is and what the usage will be like and trigger points and KPIs that say whether or not those dates need shifting around such as the level of performance customers see, what our reporting shows, whether the mix of customers change or we get a change in signup numbers or signups to different products, etc.
One of the factors that I think doesn't help is trying to keep the network balanced. A lot of people have noticed that just changing gateway can lead to very dramatic changes in performances particularly for P2P and Usenet. Which fits in with a lot of things, in managing the bandwidth we have to have the right amount in total of course but having the right amount in the right place, or rather keeping the customer mix right on each central pipe is getting harder and harder.
You may have noticed that we've done more load balancing on the DSL platform recently than before, simply because this is the most effective tool in getting the mix of customers right. We can add more new sessions to a single gateway if it's under utilised, e.g. after a drop, but you don't get the right mix of customers, you get a big percentage of active customers all using gold and titanium traffic and a small percentage of idle customers or customers just using P2P and usenet mainly because it's people connecting because they want to do something then and there.
So a question I'll throw open, to try and help keep the network better balanced would you think it would be a good idea for us to do a weekly or twicely weekly regular session of load balancing? We can schedule it to happen out of hours and ensure we don't disconnect certain groups of customers (for example business users are excluded normally) but this could help in a big way in keeping the network in balance.
Dave Tomlinson
Enterprise Architect - Network & OSS
Plusnet Technology
