Bigger, better, faster, more – those words seem to encompass the internet these days. Content is getting richer, and more and more services from television to financial transactions through employment and shopping are basing themselves online. But is connectivity keeping up with this? Are speeds good enough? In order to make sure that they are, we’re arranging bulk upgrades for our customers on to the up to 20Mb service on BT Wholesale’s 21st century network. The best bit? It’ll not cost you a bean! We’re starting in March with around 12,000 customers and continuing onwards with another 8,000 customers per month. Our aim is to have over 60% of our customers connected on up to 20Mb speeds by the end of 2011, against the 15% already on these speeds. If you’d like to know more about this we have an FAQ published here. In our experience though, while connection speed is important it isn’t everything. A fast line is all well and good, but what do you do if you want to call your family in Australia using Skype or frag some guys in Call of Duty when your housemates or kids are busy downloading their new games? You may have heard that Plusnet use traffic shaping. We do, and we’re proud of it. It’s our expertise in this field that’s helped us keep the latency – that is, the time taken for your broadband traffic to pass through our network – as low as it is. All VoIP and all Gaming (except on Value accounts) traffic is classified as Titanium, the highest priority traffic on our network. Next down from that is Gold, which includes Value gaming, web browsing and email, video streaming, VPN traffic and several other types (read more on our website here). Over the past six months the average latency for Titanium and Gold traffic across the 20CN network, that is the up to 8mb speeds, was 1.20ms and 1.91ms respectively. The average across the 21CN network was even better – just 0.17ms for Titanium traffic and 0.96ms for Gold. We’re not stopping there. Since the middle of last year we’ve invested a lot of money in our broadband network, replacing the older 155Mb and 622Mb pipes that used to form the backbone of the UK’s broadband network with 10Gb hostlinks – you can read more about our new network in Dave’s blog. If those last few paragraphs went past in a blur, here’s a summary. We’ve spent a lot of money our new network in order to make sure that your gaming, web surfing, emails, video calls, iPlayer and VPN traffic will continue to work as they should no matter how heavily your connection is being used… and now we’re investing further to upgrade your connection speeds. This means you’ll have the fastest and most reliable broadband service possible. If you've got any questions, or would like to know more, then why not ask it on our Community Forums.
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