BT accused of throttling broadband connections

Have you experienced going online and suddenly noticing that it’s moving slower than usual when you try to do certain things? For example, your connection might work fine when you’re just browsing some sites or checking your email, but you might find the speeds excruciatingly slow when you’re streaming media like movies or music or downloading files. It’s common practise for some Internet service providers to throttle the connections of their subscribers in order to preserve bandwidth and make sure that they don’t run out of capacity.

Virgin Media is one such firm that’s known for doing that. It was reported in March of this year that Virgin Media has began throttling its P2P and Newsgroup traffic during peak hours or when most of its subscribers are online. The move,however, was pre-announced, with the provider saying that they found it necessary to throttle P2P traffic so that its other users from other areas won’t experience interrupted services.

Another firm that has been called out for throttling their users broadband connections is BT Broadband. Although BT doesn’t make the fact that it throttles connections a secret, a report by the New York Times reveals that the throttling that the broadband giant implements is quite widespread.

The report asserts that BT is throttling over three quarters of its UK broadband connections, stating: “In Europe, throttling appeared to be most common in Britain. Slowing was detected on 74% of tests done on BT’s British regional network. Positive tests for throttling also exceeded 50% for six other British operators: NTL, Opal Telecom, Telewest Broadband, Carphone Warehouse Broadband Service, Tiscali UK and Pipex.”

The results from the report were generated using a tool created by the Max Planck Institute in Germany. The report cited UK as one of the “serial offenders” in connection throttling and specifically cited BT as well.

In response to the allegations, BT claimed that the results were outdated, stating: “This seems to be an extremely old survey as many of the companies highlighted have not been in existence for a number of years.” However, it was confirmed later on that the results were indeed current and that the reason why old ISP names were included was because for reasons of legacy.

Krishna Grummadi, head of the programme at the Max Planck Institute, stated: “We identify the ISP corresponding to the IP address by performing a reverse DNS lookup. Reverse DNS lookups identify the ISP that registered a specific IP address. Sometimes these ISPs are acquired by other ISPs or they decide to change their names and rebrand themselves, without necessarily changing the domain name registration of the IP address. However, that does not have any implication on the date of the results, which were all gathered in 2011.”

Source – PC Pro