good old Broadband from yorkshire.. or not!

These 'upto' 20mb speeds they advertise are exactly that. Generally to acheive them you have to live in the phone exchange and have kryptonite cables, and hope nobody else in the world is using the net.

GhallTN6 wrote:

Any nerds have any bright Ideas on this one..

Any ideas folks!

You could say I'm a bit of geek on this, having set up worldwide networks and helped with the launch one of the major Broadband suppliers.

Most ISPs will throttle connects at peak time and they will throttle sites that they consider high usage such as iplayer. Whatever the techies on the phone say, they do throttle.
When you got to it directly via the ISP, they can see that you are making a request to the servers which run websites regardless of what DNS you use.
They do this by intercepting and caching/proxying all the HTTP traffic or by looking at the IP address(es) your machine is connecting to after resolving the DNS name, they can then throttle accordingly.
However when using a VPN the traffic is encrypted in an IP packet that is always designed for the VPN device owned by you company, so basically they don't know what sites your going to.

The other thing to remember is that most internet connections have more 'download' capacity that 'upload'. Why? because most web browsing or streaming involves you sending a small request (the url) and getting a lot of data back (the webpage).
So when you tested the speed at work did you get 10MB both download and upload because when you are connecting from home via a VPN your download speed will be equivalent to the upload speed of the work link. Also remember that the IT guy's at work may have a limit on the speed of the VPN connections to avoid a remote worker saturating the internet connection. So the five meg limit might be imposed by them.

Many things can affect the speed of broadband, including distance from exchange amount of users in you area using the same service (contention ratio) etc. So the upto speed is a bit of a waste of time. Have you tried any of the speed prediction tools from any of the providers to see what their esitimate of the max speed should be.

The BT one is here

http://www.productsandservices.bt.com/c ... icId=25795

This BT one predicted a speed of 3MB max whatever broadband package.

All the major suppliers offered me 20MB broadband on a line that could only take 3MB. In the end I opted to Virgin and it's been a godsend, 20MB speed allday everyday.

And lastly don't forget that plusnet is BT, just in another guise.

GhallTN6 wrote:

Cheers, I was pretty sure about the rest buth this is the bit that interests me.. not sure what I'm going to do with it though

You could try something like TOR https://www.torproject.org/ but that mainly for anonymity, so performance isn't garaunteed. Basically it's another type of VPN.

also consider once you get into your companys internal network you are highly likely to be then behind a proxy caching server for all you web requests so the speed reported to you for download will include the proxy caching the file as well.

In this instance its probably best to try an ftp from a public site both on and off your vpn (thats if you have ftp access from your work vpn to the internet) as this wont be "cached" and will max out your tcp throttle
Im also on Plusnet and having sinilar issues, i complained and they have reset my line to "learning mode" like it is when you move in/connect up and funnily enough my daily connection speed has upped from 1 - 1.5mb to 2.5 to 3mb depending on the weather!
In the first instance talk to Plusnet and be firm but not angry they are a good bunch and still small enough to care!