So....throttling...

[CJP]

I'm on the 500Mbps "semi-skimmed" Fibre plan and speed-tests are fine.

I've been trying to download from a friend's Seadrive server and I can NEVER get more than 3MB/s. Some sketchy BBC and Twitter performance, too, but everything else seems to fine.

This 3MB/s limit is the same no matter what PC I use. Even my mobile phone maxes out at 3MB/s, except when I turn off Wifi and use 4G instead. When I do that the download speeds rise to around 20MB/s.

I did try my VPN on one of the PCs and couldn't see much difference. I just tried a different VPN, one that I don't often use, and it jumped to to around the same 20-30MB/s.

So what's going on here? BT Tech guy came this morning and swapped out the router. Didn't make any difference. He was stumped.

The only possible explanation is that BT is throttling some inbound traffic. Maybe port-specific, I don't know how that works.

[licquorice]

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@CJP wrote:

The only possible explanation is that BT is throttling some inbound traffic. Maybe port-specific, I don't know how that works.

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That is obviously not the only explanation as BT do not throttle anything.

[CJP]

So what else? Gladly test all hypotheses.

[Anonymous]

Perhaps that is the maximum speed your friends outbound network and/or server can manage?

[CJP]

No. There are others getting much higher from all around the world. As a matter of fact I am the only one in the UK. His server is hosted in the UK. Everyone else is in Canada, US, Australia and New Zealand.

[rbz5416]

I'd start by trying different DNS on your PC.

[Keith_Beddoe]

I assume they must be using a torrent, if they are serving multiple locations?

[CJP]

Thanks. Did look at that a few days ago, but got a little bit lost. Will have another look.

[CJP]

No, not torrents.

Access is done via browser (which isn't great) or via Client app which integrates into Windows File Explorer, so acts like a physical drive, and you can copy, paste, upload etc etc.

[CJP]

I think it was actually Keith's post in an earlier thread that confused me...

https://community.bt.com/t5/Home-setup-Wi-Fi-network/smart-hub-2-dns-settings/td-p/2301272

Will look at individual DNS settings.