Browsing through treacle again

[#1]

Bob,
My ticket has just been returned to me and I'm now being told that PN can't differentiate between MS downloads coming from Akamai and "dynamic" content like BBC news / Facebook etc :

Quote

We are currently seeing large amounts of traffic from the content provider Akamia due to new windows updates and patches released this week. Due to this large volume of traffic this week we have had to manage Akamia traffic so that the impact on other protocols and services are not greatly affected.

I cannot believe this really can be the case. We've heard so much about how wonderful these bits of kit are - when apparently all they can do is restrict traffic based purely on where it is coming from.
Also that really doesn't explain why its been bad for a long as it has

[#2]

It kinda reads like "due to a number of windows updates, we've throttled the traffic from akamai even further. So the sites you visit most often which get data from akamai will now take an eon to load up (if at all).

[#3]

Does windows updates come from Akamai?  Do business customers get a much better service?  The tuesday Windows updates downloaded almost instantly at work and are still downloading after several DAYS at home.  Both accounts are through PN.

[#4]

I am on the value pack with XP SP3, I had 13 files to download on win update, the download and install at lunchtime on Tuesday took about an hour

[#5]

It's only just finished downloading here (Friday).  It took all evening.  What's a "value pack" btw?

[#6]

I am on value (cheapest of the new products) and downloaded 3 lots of patches yesterday - Vista 64 bit, Windows 7 64 bit and XP - none of them took longer than about half an hour

[#7]

do what  where have you been look here http://www.plus.net/?home=hometop

[#8]

I'm on BBYW2 so should not be any worse than Value.

[#9]

Latest update to my ticket:

Quote

Thank you for your reply.  As the updates such as the one recently released by Microsoft are only sent out every 1-2 years this is a rare occasion.  In addition, due to the number of people using Windows machines it is inevitable and therefore unavoidable that it will impact the network bandwidth due to pure demand. Please accept our apologies for any inconvenience this has caused.

Is that it?
We've been told that all this kit is supposed to STOP things like MS updates overwhelming the network, then we're basically told that the kit can't tell the difference between MS patches coming from Akamai and things like BBC news coming from Akamai, and finally we're told that actually pure demand just kills the network anyway.
If that is the case why have all these clever bits of kit.
Maybe PN should approach Microsoft and ask for compensation of some sort

[#10]

I can't even get the Plusnet Portal to open to raise a ticket!

[#11]

Anyone else finding youtube a bit slow tonight?

[#12]

Yep - just tried to watch a video and it kept stuttering - I'm on the Unlimited package syncing at the full 8128kbps.

[#13]

Trying to list some stuff on ebay - website timing out most of the time, or takes a good 20 seconds to load each page..... welcome to the 21st century!
The other half is trying to download Norton Antivirus and its taken about 15 mins to download 4 megabytes!

[#14]

Since the status update on Friday http://usertools.plus.net/status/archive/1255723754.htm , i have seen no improvement at all, website taking 20 - 30 seconds to load , not loading at all , can hardly watch any streaming  . i just hope things improve over the next day or so .
Regards
Mike

[#15]

PayPal is pretty useless too.