[pseudonym]

Unfortunately, "just find another ISP" is no longer an option for plenty of people. I can appreciate the sentiment, but the risk of being kicked off of your local internet mono/duopoly is a lot higher for a lot of people than it was in 2008.

[ZenPro]

Can you explain?

In the UK we have 6 prominent providers with over 100+ niche providers who must (by law) be given rental agreements on the existing infrastructure.

[jdsnape]

That's because the Ofcom regulation of BT has lead to one of the world's most competitive broadband/telecoms industry

In other countries, e.g. the US, there tends to be one Telco per region which both owns the infrastructure and provides service.

[ZenPro]

I had no idea the infrastructure in the US was so prohibitive. Thanks for the insight.

I have upvoted because the comment deserved it not because the US is getting telecommunicationsly-screwed.

[maxerickson]

In areas where cable companies had much build out, there is usually at least 2 choices (the incumbent cable player + the incumbent telco). In lots of areas, there will be more than 2 big players (you can pretty much predict this based on how wealthy the area is).

More remote areas are probably gaining high speed wireless faster than they are gaining other infrastructure. It's expensive, slower and has more limitations, but it compares pretty favorably to dial up, which may be the existing option.

[Nanzikambe]

Given the various changes in policies in the UK of late, how many of these actually provide complete Internet access? (as opposed to "Some" Internet access)

I travel frequently to the UK, I use a torrent based sync solution to sync between laptop <> desktop (outside UK) <> VPS ("oh shit backup") - and I've found it absolutely astonishing how many ISPs throttle bittorrent and in some cases any traffic to a host known to run a tracker. I've tried to resolve this by putting my torrent sync within SSH (poor speed) and inside a full VPN (OpenVPN) and found several throttle VPNs too! I've subsequently moved my VPN to port 443 which seems to work, for now. Then there's ridiculously strick fair use policies despite terms like "Unlimited" and "High Speed" etc being bandied about. Seems bizarre to me, I expect that when I pay for 100mbit cable Internet, I get what I pay for, all the time, every day.

[Nanzikambe]

Don't get the down votes really. Just reacting to the parent with my experiences with UK ISPs, and pointing out that despite the competition, there seems to be a trend towards degraded service.

Anyhoo nbd

[ZenPro]

The downvotes were because the throttling en masse that you speak of is largely non-existent.

There are problems in the UK with achieving advertised speeds (you are correct it's misleading) but it is not because of ISP throttling traffic.

Normally it is that the UK infrastructure outside of London and the South West is plagued by huge distances to the exchange (> 6 kilometres) making the advertised speeds nothing but a dream.

Most ISPs in the UK are extremely tolerant of torrenting as a fact of life. It was only when a court order forced them to do so that they blocked access to kickasstorrents et al.

When the mirrors sprung up the ISPs refused to block access since the court order was very specific what they had to do to comply. You said kat.ph specifically Judge nothing to do with katph.eu...

The Talk Talk CEO actually blogged about the ridiculousness of the legislation and stated they absolutely would not send letters to users of the service accused of illegal piracy.

The throttling you think you are seeing is normally caused by legitimate issues. Although you are correct some ISPs have a fair use limit but that is becoming rare to non-existent (even across our mobile spectrum - most plans are all you can eat data).

[Nanzikambe]

> The downvotes were because the throttling en masse that you speak of is largely non-existent.

Really? Well, let me elaborate on what I've explicitly described as the situation I've encountered personally, as opposed to anecdotally. Though it should be obvious by the fact that I give ample indication that I'm absolutely certain what I encountered through the means I used to circumvent it. It has nothing to do with the blocking of websites (kickasstorrents or otherwise). My problem is the use of L7 packet filtering/deep packet inspection to identify and connections using torrents and penalize them for it. As I stated, I'm peeved about this because it inhibits my sync solution, so no .torrent files or public trackers are involved at all. In some cases the ISP doesn't just throttle the "offending" traffic, the throttle the entire connection.

You don't need to believe me, on this - here're a whole bunch citations, including from the horses mouth:

EE Section 2: Traffic management to optimise network utilisation (what happens during busy times and places in addition to traffic management as described in section 1)

  Slowed Down:
    Peer to Peer (P2P) [x]

Source: http://ee.co.uk/content/dam/ee-help/e-gain.s3.amazonaws.com/...

Virgin Media Virgin Media also manages P2P traffic and in its Fair Use Policy explicitly points the finger at proscribed sites like Limewire, Gnutella and BitTorrent. Access to newsgroup services like Usenet are also restricted, with those accessing similar sites subjected to slower connection speeds. On services where you get speeds of above 30Mbps, your connection speed will be halved for a 5 hour period if you exceed the following limits: Source: http://www.broadbandbuyer.co.uk/News/Article.asp?TextID=1554

Also have a look at the UK section of: https://torrentfreak.com/new-data-exposes-bittorrent-throttl...

Or the broadbandbuyer link at the top or: http://www.v3.co.uk/v3-uk/news/2292840/ofcom-publishes-inter...

Got bored of searching at this point, but DDGing or googling for virtually every ISP I could think of in conjunction with "site:co.uk" and combinations of "AUP" "Fair Use" "Throttle", "Peer to peer" "p2p" and "bit torrent" returns matches that at least from the summary text seem to indicate they do implement it in some form.

How about you, or some other helpful poster, instead of down voting me, point me in the direction of some ISPs that don't throttle, as I obviously haven't been able to find any? :)

[ZenPro]

I never downvoted you. I just gave an educated guess at why it was occurring. Trial by Google search results is never helpful because you only cherry pick the data that supports your hypothesis. For instance I searched for throttling ISP UK and found a comparative study by ISP Traffic Management that stated thus -

  >>BT Broadband Services

P2P traffic on BT broadband connections are slowed between 4pm and 12pm on weekdays and 9am and 12pm on weekends.

While P2P traffic is slowed, no other services - like gaming, newsgroups or VoIP - are subject to any throttling or traffic management and nor are they prioritised.

Apart from P2P throttling on its entry-level packages, BT does not shape or alter traffic in any way.

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  >>Sky Broadband Services 

Sky Broadband was for some time unique among the UK’s major ISPs in that it doesn’t apply any kind of traffic management at all, now others are following suit.

Nothing is prioritised or de-prioritised at any time of the day or any day of the week, including P2P services like BitTorrent.

So when we said at the start of this piece that every ISP has a traffic management policy we weren’t wrong. Sky does have a policy, one which basically says ‘do what thou will’.

That still hasn’t stopped it complying with the UK Court Order and blocking The Pirate Bay.

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  >>TalkTalk Broadband Services

TalkTalk has removed all traffic management from its Essentials and Plus broadband products at all times, including P2P services (although like all the large ISPs some P2P sites are blocked).

No type of traffic receives priority over any other, although TalkTalk Plus TV susbcribers will find around 4Mbps of their connection is set reserved for TV when their YouView box is streaming TV, in order to ensure a smooth, high quality picture

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REF [http://recombu.com/digital/news/isp-traffic-management-bt-sk...]

Helpful enough? :-)