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Re: [LUG] UKFSN problems

 

Gordon Henderson wrote:
> On Wed, 11 Feb 2009, Rob Beard wrote:
>
>   
>> The only problems I've had recently with Enta is slow speeds in off-peak
>> times. From what I understand they have a facility now where if a lot of
>> bandwidth is being used on one of the nodes it will throttle everyone's
>> speed down in chunks to give everyone a reasonable connection. There has
>> been speculation on the ThinkBroadband forums though that the throttling
>> is over agressive and slowing users connections down to about 100KB/sec
>> or worse
>>     
>
> I've not noticed it myself, but myself and all my customers are on the 
> busines quality service, or "elevated best efforts" thingy in 2+ terms...
>
>   
I'm also on a business connection.  It's fine during the day just find 
sometime it slows down off-peak although it's not been as bad as it 
was.  I can live with 400KB/sec downloads as most of the stuff I 
download off-peak isn't so critical anyway.
> The throtting thing is called ALT - Anti Loss Tool. The idea is to 
> throttle traffic to prevent packet loss...
>
>   
Yep, I didn't put ALT because I didn't think anyone who wasn't on Enta 
would understand what it was and I couldn't remember what it stood for :-/
> They do reduce everyones maximum speed in chunks of 500Kbps at a time - 
> every 2 minutes until the node is 'stable', then they increase everyone in 
> 200Kb units when capacity is avalable.
>
> On top of that, they "mark" high bandwidth users and these users will be 
> throttled in 700Kb chunks rather than 500Kb. It's the top N% of users on 
> each node that they look out for - the percentage varys by node. If you're 
> a consistently high bandwidth user - 5 times inside a 14-day period, then 
> the alternative set of ruless will apply when ALT is in-force (the 
> 700Kb drop)
>
> I don't know how well it's working. I don't doubt they're have teething 
> issues with it, but I'd hope it had settled by now.
>
> I'm in 2 minds about it myself, but I'm still happy with the performance 
> of their network during the day - which is when I need it most - for VoIP 
> to business customers, and I don't know any other ADSL wholesaler with a 
> suitably good network.
>   
I've read about a few people complaining about the 5% of heavy users and 
they're saying that Enta should tell us what is considered heavy use.  
One of the arguments is that if the 5% leave then they'll target the 
next 5% until they're left with light users only.

I was going to go to O2 but it seems that a whole horde of heavy Enta 
users have gone over to them, plus I can't get LLU at the moment with 
O2.  I'm thinking about just sticking it out at the moment.  I wouldn't 
touch Virgin, they were great when it was owned by Telewest (and even 
when I was in Derby NTL wasn't too bad, at least not as bad as 
Freeserver) but with all this throttling going on plus contracts between 
12 and 18 months I'd rather stick with Enta.

Rob



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