.Griff. said:
I think you've read one too many posts and not quite understood what you were reading..
Fristly traffic shapers are not physical entities, it's simply a nice marketing word for port throttling. . You talk about them as if Plus.Net went to the traffic shaping superstore to buy them.
Nope, that's exactly where they went
http://www.ellacoya.com/products/
.Griff. said:
Secondly you say Plus.Net should have "simply" purchased more central (pipes - I think this is what you mean to say) in order to increase bandwidth... Yes 5 years ago that would have been a good idea.. But not these days.
Plusnet were already commited to enabling 2 segments (as per their contract with bt wholesale) by feb of this year, rather than light those segments early they went to the traffic shaping superstore and bought ellacoyas to deep inspect packets and prioritise the traffic according to protocol - much more sophisticated than mere port shaping.
The situation only got better on the network when the additional segments were enabled and they removed traffic shaping from the first 20/gb of traffic, mainly because lots of people were complaining because speeds on everything had dropped substantially.
.Griff. said:
BT Wholesale who supply ALL the UK ISP's with IPStream services used to charge based on connection speed (hence years ago a 1mb line was £35.99) but 2 years ago they changed the pricing structure to usage rather than speed. Hence a 1mb line today costs next to nothing provided you don't download everything in site. Plus.Net adding more bandwidth would do absolutely nothing for heavy downloaders unless you are prepared to pay £60+ a month (see why LLU suppliers are so popular?)
Yes, I know! If only they had enough bandwidth at peak time to cope with their existing customers, but it's been shown that they simply don't. Obviosuly if every user on any ISP downloaded at full rate then they'd grind to a halt because ISP's don't offer 1:1 contention, but even one of plusnets buggest fans (on adslguide) has shown that from figures gleaned from plusnet that their contention is over 100:1, far greater than the 30:1 that they claim.
It's also worse with the new changes, it's says 15gb before rate change, but they start shaping after 10/gb.