Very variable Telewest ...

[unrealrocks]

I'm in the Birmingham area with Telewest. We've had it for a few months now and not been hugely happy with it.

We were using a pretty rubbish Belkin router that was kicking about which kept crashing etc. Although a few days ago we moved to a SmoothWall - the reliability has improved although the speed still really varys.

In the morning it'll be running happily downloading 900K/s - 1.1MB/s (10MBps Cable) but come the evening it'll slow down as far as 120k/s. I know the load will probably be bigger in the evening but surely that isn't acceptable

Anyone else had this problem? Or is there something I'm missing?

[mrbanana]

I'm in the north west. In my area contention kicks in around 3.30pm when schoolkids get home.

Up until a couple of months ago it would be that bad most evenings and useless on Sundays. But when they upgraded the ubrs around here things improved a lot.

On a side note, I have noticed, and a few others have noticed too, that Telewest seem to be trialing speed limits on newsgroup access and p2p in the evenings, limiting us to 600kbps. Ie, go via port 119 and watch your speeds die, change ports and therefore routing, get full speed back for a few seconds, go via vpn, get full speed back permanantly.

[Jay]

yer, I have noticed that Telewest has been a bit up and down. I'm in the N/W and get packet loss (about 1 every 20 pings) but they said that is ok. Its not when I'm getting loss etc while in CS



Nothing I can really do.

[Weetabix]

I had this when I first got upgraded to 10meg. Turned out to be UBR load. I pestered the living crap out of them for a month and they eventually sorted it. You pay over the odds, in terms of speed, for better quality of service so in my eyes you've got every right to phone them on the hour, every hour to ask if they've done anything about it.

edit> NE area btw

[unrealrocks]

Cheers, I will pester them as it's a bit of a joke!

[SpawnofSonic]

Im in liverpool and my speed goes up and down all the time was getting under 1Mb on my 2Mb line earler, hope they sort it soon, i may ring them to find out whats going on.

[pixelnet]

Someone I know on Blueyonder in Blackpool said this aswell. He could time 2 hours at full speed and then it would drop to 240KB/s (solid, not jumping around) for 2 hours, then return to full speed. He could literally time it to the minute.

He called Blueyonder and asked if they were traffic shaping / capping etc.. and they point blank denied it.

[Avalon]

TW don't traffic shape as such, however on over subscribed UBR's (read students jumping on the network from september onwards) then you will see throttling at peak times untill an upgrade is done. The other option is they let everyone grab as much bandwidth as they want and everyone gets bugger all

[xlfa5119]

I thought it maybe is network speed's problem!

[Agent]

Someone I know on Blueyonder in Blackpool said this aswell. He could time 2 hours at full speed and then it would drop to 240KB/s (solid, not jumping around) for 2 hours, then return to full speed. He could literally time it to the minute.

He called Blueyonder and asked if they were traffic shaping / capping etc.. and they point blank denied it.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/11...ets_throttled/

[Oakey]

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/11...ets_throttled/

I think that was a result of my thread over here:

http://www.digitalspy.co.uk/forums/s...d.php?t=483477

I did a number of tests to show how BY were capping speeds, much to the denial of Telewest fanboys, until last night when Telewest emailed (copy of email is on page 8 of that thread) me and confirmed they were shaping traffic.

This is all that's necessary to demonstrate the proof was in the pudding:

http://img76.imageshack.us/img76/6392/dumetersx6.jpg

[Jay]

well I don't mind that they are doing this but giving me 0.9mb from a 4mb line is taking it a bit far

also pings of over 50 to the bbc website.

To be honest with the high ping, packet loss and slow download speeds its pretty much useless to me but i'm stuck in a contract where I have to uphold my payments for a 4mb line but they don't have to uphold there side and provide me with one.

stupid really.