Affect on speeds of the Plusnet profile

[#1]

£4-£5 million pound a month to pay BT Wholesale? No way! Plusnet haven't got these amount of money! I think u sum up the maths wrong AndyH.

[#2]

I suspect they have "special" rates with BT Wholesale - the same goes for BT Retail.
For the year end 31 March 2013, Plusnet's revenue was £140m with costs of sales of £63.4m.

[#3]

The cost savings are in the HARDWARE at the telephone exchange !
The issue is that the DSL link between the telephone exchange and the customer is NOT buffered, and does NOT have traffic flow control.
The cost of adding hardware buffering and flow control to prevent data loss would be prohibitive, and could add to link latency.
By shifting the flow control upstream to the ISPs means that BT can provide the service at lowest cost, and the responsibility for sending data at an optimum rate is handed to the ISP for who it is in their best interest to provide an optimal solution.
In my opinion, Plusnet's system provides one of the best traffic management solutions of any ISP - on the proviso that your Plusnet 'Current Line Speed' correctly tracks the BT speed profile.
Once you understand how all this works, what Plusnet has done is quite clever and would be difficult to improve on.

[#4]

BT Wholesale £40 per month per 1Mb/s of bandwidth (that's far too much) greed of BT

[#5]

You can probably get all the figures from this - https://www.btwholesale.com/pages/static/Library/Pricing_and_Contractual_Information/Part_7_BT_Whole...
I just can't be bothered to read it ! 

[#6]

Congratulations to almost everyone for completely avoiding or ignoring the whole point of this thread - that the plusnet current line speed - even when set to match the BT profile - seems to reduce your speed by more than what is necessary. 

[#7]

Well i have always wondered why we on plusnet FTTC 80/20  don't seem to get the same throughput speeds as customers of several other ISP's  The are 2 noticeable differences , a second IP profile, and traffic prioritising /shaping  that other ISP's don't do,  so maybe one out of those two  or the combination of both  is the underlying reason for it ,

[#8]

I'm still confused how I can get faster speeds than my Plusnet Line Speed. I did the same test as Oldjim:

Pinging bbc.co.uk [212.58.244.20] with 32 bytes of
Reply from 212.58.244.20: bytes=32 time=4ms TTL=54
Reply from 212.58.244.20: bytes=32 time=4ms TTL=54
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[#9]

Another one:

Pinging bbc.co.uk [212.58.246.104] with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 212.58.246.104: bytes=32 time=5ms TTL=55
Reply from 212.58.246.104: bytes=32 time=5ms TTL=55
Reply from 212.58.246.104: bytes=32 time=5ms TTL=55
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Reply from 212.58.246.104: bytes=32 time=5ms TTL=55
Reply from 212.58.246.104: bytes=32 time=5ms TTL=55
Speed Test Starts
Reply from 212.58.246.104: bytes=32 time=43ms TTL=55
Reply from 212.58.246.104: bytes=32 time=4ms TTL=55
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[#10]

I  don't know but I have seen it occasionally and after a bit of digging reapplying the profile fixed it

[#11]

Quote from: goldenfibre

BT Wholesale £40 per month per 1Mb/s of bandwidth (that's far too much) greed of BT

We pay £48.55 per Mbps on WBC as we're on WBMC Shared and IPSC is more than that. There's about 7.5Gbps of WBC bandwidth going in this week another 7Gbps going in a later in April.
But on to the speedtests. Are you only measuring the speeds using speedtests? This unfortunately is slightly flawed. We've spent a lot of time ensuring we get the profiling correct and there are a lot of reasons for that.
First, the reason we have the profile is two-fold, first the spec of the product we buy from BTW means that we are supposed to apply a profile on our side to ensure that the we don't send a customer more data than they can receive. In the event of a DDoS attack for example someone could be sent several hundred Mbps or even several Gbps of traffic, without a profile our side that would head down the BTW network and hit the BRAS which in the most severe event could have a knock on effect to 10s of thousands of people on that BRAS.
BTW send us regular updates when speed profiles change so we can keep our side up to date, so knowing we have to do something we want to be clever and smart about it. We take the BTW profile and round down to the nearest 100kbps or 200kbps depending on whether you're on ADSL or fibre.
The second reason and one of the big differences Plusnet has over most other ISPs is the way we do our traffic management. The Plusnet profile is a scheduler or a shaper. That means that when the amount of traffic being downloaded is greater than or equal to the profile rate we will buffer the traffic. Without the profile or if the profile was set above the BTW profile the traffic would hit the BTW profile limit which is a policer. The difference is that this would cause packet loss or retransmissions.
The trouble with speedtests is that they will see the few ms that the download is in the buffer as a slow down in the download rate which it doesn't take into account.
Try out a download or look at the utilisation in the interface. Whenever we've tested this out we've always seen that the actual throughput coming down the wire is faster than the speedtest reports and in testing in the labs this was the behaviour we saw.
The third reason for the Plusnet profile is that we can use it to prioritise one type of traffic over another when you max out the line. If you're watching a video and making a VoIP call and download via P2P all at the same time you shouldn't see problems with the video or the VoIP but instead see the P2P max out at whatever bandwidth is going spare rather than try and swamp the other 2 protocols.

[#12]

My throughput is 9.0 9.1MB/s  = 72 - 72.8mbps  actual , downloading  test files from several locations gives the same results, my BT ip profile is 77.44  plusnet is 77.4
Results from speedtest sites  whilst not always accurate are most of the time quite close , sometimes they even  give slightly  faster results, Also when my plusnet profile  was 78,mbps, i think my max throughput may have been slightly higher at one point , maybe 9.2-9.3 MB/s  soon after my service went live
The other oddity  with Fibre 80/20 services and speed tests is seen with the upstream speeds , even between customers of the same isp.  customer A gets a upstream result of 18-19mbps whilst customer B only gets 12-14mbps  or less , but both  have a sync of 20mbps and have used the same speed test  , Because apart from speedtest sites , there aren't as many ways  for people to know what their upstream throughput is, or test it properly

[#13]

Quote from: deathtrap

apart from speedtest sites , there aren't as many ways  for people to know what their upstream throughput is, or test it properly

Have you considered signing up for a free SamKnows whitebox ?
Mine ALWAYS records upstream speeds more accurately than the speedtest sites.
The 'whitebox' does frequent measurements of -
        Downstream throughput
        Upstream throughput
        DNS response times
        Website load times
        Latency
        Packet loss
        Failed web requests
        Failed DNS queries
        RTP packet loss
        RTP jitter
It presents the measurements as easy to read graphs and tables over any chosen time period.

[#14]

The upstream's always been a bit of a mystery, we don't do any prioritisation or have any profile on the upload, there's no point as it's already gone through the bottleneck (the DSL) by the time it gets to us. All the backhaul network is symmetric so upstream congestion is unlikely but not impossible. On fibre download usage is about 4 times that of upload, on ADSL download usage is about 12 times upload so if it's going to happen it's probably more likely on fibre because of the faster speeds. That data is pretty similar to the speed too, on 80/20 your download speed is probably 3-4 times your upload and the mean speed on ADSL2+ is probably somewhere around 6-10Mbps down 600-800kbps up.
We can now see the quality of data in the upstream direction so is there looks to be upstream congestion spots we should be able to spot them and see whether it's between the customer and our network or our network and the rest of the Internet.
2nd that from purleigh - the Samknows data is really good, we get a view on some of the data working with BTR, it's a really valuable tool as it shows the actual real world experience. We can see TBB graphs with latency increases and packet loss and we have our own data showing the same but the Samknows data ties that in to show what that equates to in real terms.

[#15]

I'll try and post again  as the last attempt  i got some error message  said that i was not allowed  to make posts  ect, and the forum thought i was logged out when in fact i was still logged in !!!! please  fix this
@ purleigh : I did some time ago consider  getting one of these , but  the info from samknows  seemed negative towards  those who use their internet connection a lot , so i didn't bother with it,
On the testing of upstream throughput , i have found using an FTP client  to upload to a remote FTP server  to be a reliable method , because speedtests are very short, don't provide a clear picture, as the upstream throughput  can be erratic ( up and down ) so speedtest's will fail to see it, Saturday my upstream was affected  for a short time, (during peak hrs) Speed reduced to 13mbps maybe less  at times  when normally it's 19mbps or more
and last night the downstream was seeing congestion type effects  again within the evening peak time window  at one point  my speed was down to  45.6mbps at one point
This congestion issue seems to have a pattern  where is re occurs every month or two months,   it could be intake of new customers  or  something that BT do   at these  times,  maybe it's something to do with  scaling of their Vlans , or the timing of them adding capacity  ? It  is in some ways like they are continually playing catch up  , because no sooner they get on top of it, they are starting to fall behind again  ,if that's how it is or not  i don't know, as it's not something that they would want to talk about  even to their customers