BT to end traffic throttling - claims capacity is FAT
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BT has claimed that it will kill off traffic management on its broadband service and stop capping usage limits on all but its entry-level products.
From now until early June, its "Totally Unlimited Broadband" offering will be applied to BT's 16Mbps copper service for £16 a month, while Infinity customers can get their mitts on it for between £23 and £26 a month depending on the downstream speeds offered on their broadband subscriptions.
But existing customers have to rip up old contracts and sign new ones that run for 18 months.
The national telco claimed that its offering would not be hampered by bandwidth issues like the ones that recently crippled BSkyB.
BT's consumer managing director John Petter put the boot into all the company's rivals with this lovely statement delivered straight from the heart:
We believe we have boosted our broadband offering by moving our best broadband deals to totally unlimited. Customers told us that they wanted to be able to enjoy catch-up TV, streamed films and other bandwidth-eating applications without having to worry about going over their limit or being slowed down by their ISP.
But we wanted to make that really affordable too, without the sort of traffic management Virgin Media, TalkTalk or EE customers may find themselves subject to. Unlike Sky, we’re extremely confident that our network can stand up to the extra bandwidth demands from totally unlimited products everywhere across the UK.
BT's entry level broadband packages that won't be part of the "Totally Unlimited" offering are the basic one that costs £13 a month and Infinity 1, which has a £18 monthly price tag.
BT also said it would begin offering its customers an online storage service with free allowance for broadband subscribers, but that's not unlimited.
Infinity customers supposedly enjoying download speeds of up to 76Mbit/s will be granted a 50GB limit on the service. BT didn't say what allowance punters on more lowly packages can expect to receive, however.
The company reckoned it was the ahead of its competitors in the broadband biz by offering such a cloudy service. ®
COMMENTS
Liars
So by increasing the prices and locking into another 18 month contract, they offer unlimited. (implicitly acknowledging their previous claims were a pack of lies) and let the exisiting customers suffer.
Isnt this discriminatory?
Wankers.
Re: Unlimited until...
In throughput as seen at your premises, no. HD streaming as offered by Sky and BBC is only a few megabits a second so barely raises a sweat for a 76Mb/s connection. Even broadcast quality HD streams are only a dozen Mb/s so again would not bother your connection.
However this article is basically about congestion and the impact on it of HD streaming. That isn't down to your specific circumstances. It's down to the local and/or national usage patterns. You have to realise that if BT know that 1,000 people have 76Mb/s connections on your exchange they won't have allocated 76Gb/s of backhaul (76Mb/s * 1,000). That would be 1:1 contention and you're not going to get that on a residential service.
No BT will have provisioned somewhat less than that. The trick for them is to decide how much less. It's very much a black art. Just working out the current requirements is tricky. Then you have to account for growth patterns and spikes in usage. This is where ISPs control their profit margin. You never want to have spare capacity but equally you have to accept that for large parts of the day the network will be underutilised. It's a nightmare shared by road planners.
You wait untill everyone in your street starts streaming HD on a few devices. Contention is the bane of all networks...
Since the poster appears to have FTTC other people on the street are not the problem (setting aside minor crosstalk impact). It's other people on their exchange (ie; anyone else in the town) that matters. And of course everything from there on back to the ISP. And the ISP interconnects.
A nice lady rang me up the other day...
offering the infinity service.
"Have you checked the line?" I asked.
"But we've got fibre now," she said.
"Iit's copper from the cabinet to me. Have you checked my line?"
taptaptaptap
"Yes sir, we think you'll be able to get 3.6Mb/s..."
"Call me back when you have fibre to the doorstep."
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