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[Astral]

Do you have to take it on trust from your ISP what contention ratio your service is on, or is there a test or other means of establishing the figure?

[kitz]

No real test for the ISP contention (nor bt come to that these days)

If contention kicks in then things start to slow down.  Finding out these days if its the ISP or BT is a lot more difficult since they withdrew the BTw speedtester

[Astral]

I realise that overall contention will affect your throughput whether you are on 50:1 or 20:1, but obviously it should be less marked on the 20:1 service.

My experience has been that a Plusnet 50:1 service gives a better throughput that a BT so-called Business Service which is allegedly on a 20:1 ratio. The only conclusion I can come to is that either BT don't have enough kit to service their customers properly and/or their Business service is not on 20:1 contention.

The reason for my question was that it seems like a licence to print money, when you can offer a supposedly superior service, but there is no means for the customer to check that they are getting what they pay extra for.

[havelock]

Or it could just be that "business" customers are just using more bandwidth - AFAIK the ratio is usually the amount of users sharing a 16mbit pipe, even  though at peak times demand COULD be ~380 Mbit if every customer was capable of 8Meg.....

[kitz]

>> My experience has been that a Plusnet 50:1 service gives a better throughput that a BT so-called Business Service which is allegedly on a 20:1 ratio.

hmmmm funny you should mention that - Ive been having an "epi" tonight about my connection.  Was going to post up here too what was happening - but didnt get around to it because things got that bad earlier and were slowing right down.  I was also experiencing some other weirdness with the RIN connection but I'll keep those results separate for now so as not to confuse things....

Anyhow these are some results from earlier which I passed on else where.

Bear in mind if I say RIN - then thats a "20-1" product thats going over a BT Central Plus (Retail Network) account that is supposed to have no throttling.
The PN account is Premier at normal PN ratios for home users. I'm one of those that pay the extra for a MaxPremium when they offered it last year, but it doesnt get any preference on the PN platform other than at the exchange if you know the one I mean.

These are the results of the speedtests as they happened allowing for a few mins inbetween whilst configuring my router to swap the connection logins over.

Test1 comprises of Best Effort Test:  -provides background information.
    IP profile for your line is - 7150 kbps
    DSL connection rate: 832 kbps(UP-STREAM)  8128 kbps(DOWN-STREAM)
    Actual IP throughput achieved during the test was - 6949 kbps


But I cant get anything more than 2Mb on "normal" speedtesters which ever one I use...  Im on RIN so thought there was meant to be no shaping.
Speedtests immediately after the above test

Download Speed: 1675 kbps (209.4 KB/sec )   Upload Speed: 711 kbps (88.9 KB/sec )

[snip]................. [/snip]


Ive just swapped over to the Plusnet platform, and everything works ok on there.
Ermm - I think it may be RIN thats f00bed



To double check its RIN, I went back over - then back again to plusnet.

~ RIN Speedtest

1658 kbps
 

~ Plusnet Platform

6751 kbps
6687.15 Kbps

~ Back to RIN

2290 kbps
2241.02 Kbps
2737.63 Kbps


~ Back to PlusNet

6781 kbps
6372.58 Kbps
6751 kb/s