[UKFSN Status] New ADSL Traffic Management Policy

[Jason Clifford]

In the last 6 weeks the launch of the MAX ADSL services, providing up to 
8Mb download speeds, has led to a massive increase in demand on bandwidth 
at our wholesale partner Entanet.

In response to the continuing and rising demand they have now implemented 
traffic management on their BT Central pipe. The details of their policy 
are quoted below. Note that Enta have a second 622Mb/s BT Central pipe 
coming online either this month or next (should be this month but it's BT 
we're talking about) which is completely remove all congestion on their BT 
Central capacity.

"In order to continue to meet End User expectations now and in the future 
it will be necessary to implement Quality of Service policies on our 
current and future BT Centrals. We do not, at this stage, envisage 
imlpementing a "Fair Usage Policy" on individual End User connections, 
which is a method of management that is becoming more commonplace amongst 
other large Internet Service Providers, although we still reserve the 
right as per our Acceptable Use Policy to take action against individuals 
whom we believe are deliberately engaging in network abuse.

It is out intention to create a hierarchy of traffic types and rank them 
in order of highest priority to lowest priority during business hours to 
ensure that traffic which is necessary for the efficient conduct of day to 
day business is given priority over traffic that is not considered typical 
for normal business use.

At the moment this means that Peer-to-Peer (p2p) file sharing traffic 
(e.g. Bit Torrent, eDonkey, etc.) and NNTP (a.k.a. Usenet Newsgroups) have 
a lower priority than Web, email, FTP, VoIP, VPN, and other traffic types. 
The dynamic traffic management means that bandwidth available for p2p and 
nntp traffic is controlled by demand for other traffic types. During 
off-peak (non business) hours the policy is removed and all traffic has 
equal priority *within the limits of the BT Central*".

The final phrase, enclosed in *, is in italics in the documents.

In effect this means that if you use p2p or usenet you will see these 
services are somewhat slower at the moment and will continue to be so 
(particularly from 8am to 10pm Monday to Friday) until the new BT central 
comes online.

As the BT Central capacity is currently congested there will be periods 
during which your connection may slow to a degree. You can determine if 
this is being caused by congestion on the Entanet BT Central by running 
the BT speed test as detailed on the ADSL support section of our website.


Jason Clifford
-- 
UKFSN.ORG			Finance Free Software while you surf the 'net
http://www.ukfsn.org/		  up to 8Mb ADSL Broadband from just £14.98
http://www.linuxadsl.co.uk/		ADSL routers from just £21.98