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[Weaver]

With FTTP, can we still get the BT ‘priority’ option for £12 per month extra per link? I have had this in the past for many years with my ADSL lines, to get both BT-internal and Andrews and Arnold-internal traffic prioritisation.

[tubaman]

I'm curious as to what issues you've had that warranted having to pay extra for traffic priority?

[j0hn]

With FTTP, can we still get the BT ‘priority’ option for £12 per month extra per link? I have had this in the past for many years with my ADSL lines, to get both BT-internal and Andrews and Arnold-internal traffic prioritisation.

You won't have needed this for a decade or more.
The prioritization was a big thing and more necessary back in the BT Central days when ISP bought pipes in either 155Mbps or 622Mbps.
It was night after night of high utilisation, slow downs and gateway jumping to try improve things.
Paying for prioritization largely bypassed many of the issues of the day.

In the last decade with FTTC I've been with Talktalk, Plusnet, BT, Virgin, then BT FTTP and now Talktalk 550Mb FTTP. I'm sure you would agree that list contains the most budget of providers.
On every single 1 of those ISP's I've had full throughput 24/7, literally every minute of the day.

If you need to pay £12 a month just to maintain throughput in the single digit Mb/s, from 1 of the dearest providers who's whole unique selling point is that they don't want to be the bottleneck, then something is very very wrong.

It's pretty scandalous if they have still been taking your money for such a service. It's totally unnecessary.

[Chrysalis]

On Plusnet i did have to hop gateway to maintain peak time speed performance j0hn :p.  Pretty sure that was within the past decade. VM also still have peak time performance issues and probably will until the day they ditch docsis and change their transit capacity policies.

There is many products in the service industry that yield little practical benefit for added expense, its very common place actually, So AAISP offering this isnt scandalous, forcing you to take the addon maybe then.  But I do agree that its likely wasted money for most people, and I can confirm on AAISP without that addon I get full throughput 24/7.

Note BTw do still suffer occasional bouts of congestion, and whats not been mentioned if this option offers priority over the BTw network as well.

[g3uiss]

I seem to remember Plusnet offered this, but with little noticeable improvement £5 a month I think it was. I too used to hop gateway, but that seemed less important as time went on

[Alex Atkin UK]

I seem to remember Plusnet offered this, but with little noticeable improvement £5 a month I think it was. I too used to hop gateway, but that seemed less important as time went on

Absolutely never had to do this since we left the old BT Centrals.

Would be really useful if there was a mechanism for this on Mobile though so my AAISP L2TP link doesn't fall apart periodically.  Although I believe pfSense is partly to blame as it doesn't bring back up L2TP correctly when it drops.

[Weaver]

I stopped doing this some years back. To be clear, AA didn’t ‘sell me’ this, they didn’t recommend it. They said it was doubtful that I’d see an improvement but it was up to me.

Regarding J0hn’s point about ‘not being the bottleneck’ - I originally did this 12 years ago in order to get BT prioritisation in our local exchange’s uplink, without knowing whether it was necessary or not. It was a ‘just in case’. It is after all a BT feature, which AA was reselling and they backed it up with their own prioritisation wrt other AA customers’ traffic in the mainly theoretical case where they had to drop packets. This was shown on a network performance table that they published regularly, don’t know if they still do.

There has been absolutely no misspelling because there was no ‘selling’ at all.

My original post was not about whether or not this is needed , rather just a question about whether it’s still available even.

[j0hn]

12 years ago it would possibly have had some benefit, particularly with your exchange not being 21CN until a few years ago.

So AAISP offering this isnt scandalous, forcing you to take the addon maybe then.

I didn't say offering the service was scandalous. I said it would be if they were still taking Weavers money for it.

Weaver has less than 10Mb/s combined throughput from his 3 bonded lines. It's £12 per line for prioritization.
That's £12 to prioritize around 3Mb/s downstream throughput or £36 for all 3 bonded lines.

Fair enough offer the service to customers, but if Weaver asks/enquires about it they should be very very strongly discouraging him from taking it.
If they can't guarantee the very small amount of bandwidth Weaver uses without paid for prioritization then something would be seriously wrong.

[Chrysalis]

I seem to remember Plusnet offered this, but with little noticeable improvement £5 a month I think it was. I too used to hop gateway, but that seemed less important as time went on

I remember it as well, in Plusnet's case it was just paying for higher priority on their heavily shaped network, useful if you used low priority traffic during peak, I think what Weaver is paying for includes higher priority over BT's network as well.

[burakkucat]

It appears that I need to clarify things, on Weaver's behalf.

• Many years ago he used that option.
• He no longer uses it.
• Out of curiosity he has asked if anyone knows if that option is still available, with reference to FTTP in particular.

As far as I am aware, the answer to Weaver's question is "no".

[Weaver]

@Chrysalis - this was a BT thing which AA, Demon and other ISPs were reselling. Some ISPs added value by adding their own internal prioritisation too - AA and Plusnet were examples.

[Weaver]

If someone has access to BT documents then we might see whether or not BT still sell it.