WebUser reports on broadband speeds

[#1]

Yesterday I came across an article on WebUser about a broadband.co.uk report concerning peak time traffic speeds in the UK. I was surprised with the PlusNet results; Epitiro's most recent speed tests placed us at 2nd so we're generally highly rated for speeds. This seems like a good time to point towards how PlusNet prioritises real-time traffic (like web and email) during the evenings and how this may have affected the speedtest results. Web, streaming and email is always treated as high priority on our Broadband Your Way products and we have plenty of capacity to deliver all of these technologies at full speed around the clock. Have a look at this blog regarding our recent network expansion. It's possible the speed tester uses our 'download' profile which is prioritised differently in the evening. Our traffic prioritisation policies are explained in detail on our help and support pages. We'll speak with the team at broadband.co.uk to find out how many PlusNet speed tests were performed and how they were assessed. Have a look at this page to view the expected speeds of our broadband products or test your speeds now at www.mybroadbandspeed.co.uk

[#2]

just done back to back mybroadband speed Today 19:13 6065 kbps (758kB/s) 379 kbps (47.4kB/s) Broadband speed Download 5080Kbps Upload 358Kbps

[#3]

I've certainly experienced speeds dropping at peak - speedtests on my line (which syncs at 7000kbps) can drop to 3000kbps around 7pm-8pm. I'm on BBYW Pro btw. I guess the issue with traffic management is that my speeds might drop, but my traffic is still being prioritised correctly. I think people need to stop worrying about speed and worry about the quality of their service. Personally, if I had a choice between 3Mbps and no difficulty loading websites, good pings and latency etc vs 7Mbps but a poor experience, I'd choose the former. Generally, with PlusNet, I get 7Mbps and a great experience!

[#4]

Yep, the way that the traffic managament is designed is to try and give the best experience it can (within certain parameters) and differentiate certain products from each other. So that for example, gaming and VoIP get the best experience (the latency stays low even when the network is busiest), and browsing and VPN and stuff like that continue to work fine and any effect on them is minimal (such as it might take an extra 50ms to load a webpage not something you're going to notice) but will lower P2P and usenet speeds. Whilst the BBYW Pro experience means that the P2P and usenet speeds should stay high even when the network is busy because they get gold priority same with unidentified traffic. Now we can't legislate for exchange side contention which can cause some slow downs in speed, we can as I say control the exprience across our network and whilst that may cause some slow downs when it gets busy, the effect is more controlled so that P2P/Usenet gets slowed first, then only when it gets really busy would you notice any effect on gold traffic and you still shouldn't see any effect on titanium.

[#5]

yeah people are so obssed with the amount of bandwidth avable to them. im a gamer and was telling some one they where lagging during a game and they said i shouldnt be im on cable (hahaha) cannot rember what bandwidth he had but was big and he didnt understand about ping times and peak times alot of isps networks slow right down. so keep the good work up pn with makeing shaw the traffic mangment system runs smothly only had one problem with the system since joining and that was a few weeks ago. when u needed to give it kick to get mangment levels to work on few customers accounts.