With all the fuss about the new products, contract length, throttling, etc. I've been taking a look at the conditions for VPN use. I access my university's VPN, typically for very short periods of time, just to transfer a few files (usually 200KB or less) to a network drive, but occasionally to use a remote desktop session to control my office PC for a short while (e.g. to access a student records database).
I'm on BBYW option 1, with a couple of extra GB usage allowance. I haven't noticed any significant slowness of response, even at peak times, and I'm unclear about whether my VPN traffic is being throttled or not. I did try the Thinkbroadband speed test while using the VPN (though not the remote desktop) and the download speed was about the same as I get when not using the VPN (about 2300kb/s in my case - I'm not very close to my local exchange).
Information on throttling of VPN traffic under BBYW1 is confused. There's no mention of it here:
http://www.plus.net/support/broadband/products/broadband_your_way/experience/speed.shtml#Option1spee...And there's a statement in the FAQ that any type of traffic not mentioned in that table is not throttled. But VPN traffic appears to be throttled to 128kb/s on the Kitz comparison table:
http://www.kitz.co.uk/isp/plusnet_shaping.htmand I recall that Mand confirmed this in one of her posts to the monster thread, saying that moving to 'Value' would increase VPN speed from 128 to 512kb/s. I think I might even have seen the 128kb/s limit in a table at another location on the PlusNet site, though I can't find that now.
So, is VPN traffic throttled on BBYW1, and if so, is the throttling restricted to certain kinds of activity when the VPN is being used? My VPN uses IPSec over UDP, if that's relevant.
