BT Throttling Game downloads

[ScottieBoi]

Feel like I need to come on here for some advice/assistance regarding my new BT FTTP 900.

I had fibre installed in my house, excited to be able to download games at a better speed other than 8MBps. They installed the fibre, I connected my PC via a Cat7 Ethernet cable and amazingly hitting 115MBps download on Steam/Epic/Battlenet etc which is great.

My problem is that only lasts for 30 seconds then plummets down to about 20MBps and then doesn’t go back up. If I stop the download and start it again it does the exact same thing. Firstly I thought it was my SSD so I pointed it at another drive - this was a HDD so only hitting like 60MBps but then plummeting again. I refuse to believe it’s my PC that’s the problem as I’m running a very high end CPU and GPU, I’ve got 32GB ram so it’s definitely not hardware.

I tried 2 other devices, one laptop and one MacBook and both are doing the exact same. 

So my question is, do BT throttle downloads on games after a certain time or is there a problem with my connection? I’ve seen a few posts that BT do throttle and can set a parameter on your Hub.

My problem with this is that my previous package was 54mbps-75mbps, and so I was only getting 8MBps download and now I’m only getting like double that when actually downloading which is disgusting considering im paying a hell of a lot more 😞

Can anyone suggest what to do?

[licquorice]

BT do not throttle downloads. What leads you to think that the problem lies with BT and not the game server?

[ScottieBoi]

Because I’ve tried multiple different game launchers and different games. I’ve also tried large downloads on chrome and displaying the exact same symptoms.

[-Richie-]

---

@ScottieBoiwrote:

So my question is, do BT throttle downloads on games after a certain time or is there a problem with my connection? I’ve seen a few posts that BT do throttle and can set a parameter on your Hub.

---

No, BT do not throttle any downloads or have any restrictions with the exception of sites ordered blocked by the high court.

[ScottieBoi]

Okay that’s all well and good, any ideas what it could be then? I’m a network engineer myself so I’m not unfamiliar with troubleshooting steps but this is making me scratch my head… I’ve done the obvious rebooting devices etc but still no idea

[licquorice]

See message 2

[-Richie-]

It could be a number of things, the CDN source for the downloads is at capacity, it could be compression as the downloads are unpacked (certainly impacts FTP downloads), bad sectors on your HDD.

Steam downloads for me will also rise and fall, I had a few downloads scheduled, I set them away and the results vary

My download settings if it helps, location chosen is London even though I'm North-East

[iniltous]

Hopefully you are aware the difference between MB/s and Mb/s….20MB is 160Mb.
If you want a guaranteed 900Mb download service 24/7 then a domestic FTTP service from anyone isn’t going to provide it, you need a much more expensive leased line, but even that won’t get around   bottlenecks elsewhere .

You are on a system that has 2.4Gb of download bandwidth, and you are one of up-to 29 others ‘sharing’ this bandwidth….if you were allowed to ‘hog’ 25% of the bandwidth , that would affect others if there is lots of demand at the time , it wouldn’t be fair on the others , and what if there happened to be another another ‘gamer’ like you on the same PON , let you and them have 1.8Gb and upto 28 others share what’s left ?, it’s a dynamic allocation, if you are downloading at peak times you won’t get 900Mb ( or 112.5MB if you prefer ) constantly, you may ‘burst’ at this speed but not have it constantly 

As already stated , the bottleneck , if you call it that may not even be on what Openreach or BT are responsible for , there will be finite resources at the server and it will also determine its own download rate depending on demand .

[ScottieBoi]

I absolutely know the difference between Mb/s and MB/s - I am a network engineer so if I didn’t know then I’d be very concerned 🙂 I agree that there will be a shared line, but should it really be dropping to a 5th of what I’m supposed to be getting? I’m paying around £25 more to just get double the download speed? I would’ve been better off just sticking with my copper 

[iniltous]

If you haven’t already , try downloading something at what would be typically a quieter time , say after 11pm , if you get the same burst of Gb type speed, then settles to around 160Mb/s it’s most likely to be a limit imposed by the game server, try a third party speed tester at the same time , compare the results, or download something then simultaneously watch a VOD stream 

As already stated , there isn’t throttling, or any traffic shaping by BT , although it’s likely there are measures taken to ‘share’ equitably the Openreach PON bandwidth ( the 2.4Gb ) at times of high demand

https://www.bt.com/help/broadband/bt-s-approach-to-broadband-traffic-management

As far as price , a 1Gb leased line would be something like 7-10 times more expensive than domestic ‘900Mb’ FTTP , and as said would only really eliminate one potential bottleneck , chances are you could do various things simultaneously on your FTTP, download a game , watch a couple of Netflix streams , browsing, email etc and have a better experience than doing this on your FTTC connection, even if your FTTC connection was pretty decent,