An IT businessman who uses the BT business broadband has claimed that BT is limiting his internet access at certain times of the day.

Sam Oliver, an IT professional from Shrewsbury, had his doubts when he found that although he had no problems accessing normal websites he found that when accessing streaming media his connection slowed to a crawl. He stated “The speeds for using the BBC iPlayer get very slow and unusable essentially,”
With the use of an independently provided piece of hardware supplied by a company called SamKnows he was able to run a variety of speed tests on his broadband line at different times of the day. The tests Sam ran were also being carried out as part of a nationwide internet speed check.

From these tests he discovered that although BT gave excellent results for general web browsing anything else caused his internet connection to drop to a speed that rendered it practically unusable. One of the main findings was that at certain times of the day use of peer-to-peer (commonly known as P2P) file transfers, which are increasingly being used by news and business sites for transferring big files or large amounts of data, caused the BT connection to drop in speed to almost nothing.

Mr Oliver said: “Anything that uses file-to-file or peer-to-peer on BT just falls over.” However, speaking to BBC News reporters BT official stated: “We restrict P2P speeds if it’s having a negative impact on the online experience of the majority of our customers. We normally place restrictions in the evenings at peak time, but we do apply them during the day if a lot of customers are using P2P at the same time. Without these limits all our customers using their broadband service would suffer, regardless of whether they are using P2P or not.”

It was claimed by BT that the restrictions are clearly laid out in the terms and condition and only apply to what they described as “heavy” users. However, BBC officials are threatening to “name and shame” ISPs who restrict P2P transfers in the way BT is doing.