by Rossco » Mon Mar 06, 2006 6:31 pm
Yeah, there are a couple of things you've got to watch with ISPs.
Throttling - I had an experience with talktalk broadband throttling traffic other than that on port 80 - that meant everything except surfing the web (think xbox live, file sharing, streaming media, p2p) When I called them up and gave them jip about it the lifted the limits.
Contention ratio - whilst your link to the exchange might be 2Mbps what you actually receive will depend largely upon the contention ratio your badnwidth is shared between. I use Bulldog as their ratios are much lower than most. This explains why, in the evening, a broadband slow down is experienced by some - as more people go online, a finite amount of bandwidth is shared amongst more people.
Remember, the speed that is shown in the System Tray or your adsl router is usually a maximum line speed and doesn't indicate the true achievable speed after contention effect, throttling and network overheads...
Think yourself lucky though - I've just moved into a new flat and am on dialup.........sooooooooooooooooooooo sllllllooooooooowwwwwwwwww