Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
The way it works in the UK is that the telephone network is owned by British Telecom (BT). They are an ISP themselves, but also act as a wholesaler, selling bandwidth on their network to other ISPs. My ISP buys a certain amount of bandwidth from BT.
In my case, the slowdown I see during business hours is because I live in a small village, which has quite a few "high-tech" businesses in the immediate local area. Our local telephone exchange, being rather old, has a limited capacity IP "pipe" connecting it to the rest of the BT IP network. That pipe gets overloaded during peak hours, resulting in a slowdown in performance for everybody. BT are gradually upgrading their network and adding capacity, but that upgrade hasn't reached down as far as local village telephone exchanges yet, and my local exchange has not yet been scheduled for an upgrade.
This is a very common situation in the UK. People who live in large towns and cities generally get much faster speeds than those like me who live in small villages. It's simply a matter of network capacity and has nothing to do with throttling or traffic management.
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So it would seem that BT holds a monopoly position in the UK. Your "ISP" (using a subset of BT's available bandwidth) has evidently oversold/under provisioned its customer base, hence your degraded performance during business hours.
Based on what you've described, I'm not even sure why data caps are necessary since your bandwidth is effectively throttled by the usage from the "high-tech" businesses in your town.
Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
For example, when my ISP here in the UK introduced a usage cap they reported that 0.1% of their users were using over 50% of their network bandwidth. It's only fair that high volume downloaders should pay more - it is a limited resource.
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So did the usage cap have any effect? It doesn't sound like it, and I would imagine that those users that go over the cap just end up paying more for the same class of service, with no change in your ISP's marginal cost (but a substantial increase in profits.) I guess AT&T isn't so bad after all. Only 98% of their customers are overpaying. Your ISP seems to really be working it - 99.9% are overpaying. Ka-ching!
At your level, it is a "limited resource" by provisioning choice - your ISP's. They have signed up too many customers for the size of pipe they are leasing from BT.
What really bothers me with your situation, is that in spite of the data caps, it would seem you have paid for a certain class of service and you don't even get that except during certain parts of the day. The data caps AND poor service are indicative of the anti-competitive environment you find yourself in.