Kitz Forum
Broadband Related => ISPs => Topic started by: harry on February 11, 2008, 08:06:20 PM
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Hi from Dementia Land,
Today I started watching an old safety video on Spike.com. My ISP is AOL, using their silver grade. The video lasts for 23 minutes and a few seconds, so you can imagine my annoyance when after 12 minutes and and 15 seconds the video stopped, and despite every effort on my part, could not be persuaded to continue.
Cooling down outside, I mentioned this stoppage to my neighbour, who is also on AOL. He said this was not unusual for AOL, and I was lucky , as his normally stopped after 9 minutes.
I returned to my cold seat , and decided to try watching the same video again, but this time using Mozilla Firefox as my browser. Success, the video played without a hitch through to the end.
My query - is this normal practice from AOL? My speeds do not vary greatly, so I was wondering if this was yet another way to cap my use of a service for which I pay???
Regards,
Harry.
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Hi and welcome
AOL have been rumoured to traffic shape for quite a while.. although there wasnt really that much evidence of it until they brought out the FUP in Feb last year. Things started to get much worse around last Oct when many users have reported some very slow speeds when trying to download.
AOL say little about what they are doing and there has been some evidence of blatant denial by CS where later users have indeed found themselves to be throttled.
It seems to vary from location to location and could depend upon which type of connection AOL are using at your own particular exchange. Its all very woolly what they are actually doing Im afraid. :(
Theres a bit more info on my caps page
http://www.kitz.co.uk/adsl/caps.htm
I put up a new ISP rating page a week or so ago and you can read on there what aol users have said so far.
http://www.kitz.co.uk/adsl/ISP_rating.php