O2 Home Broadband Access - Traffic Management

[hammy]

Announcement from O2 Forum

Hello - in October we’re making some changes that will help your O2 Home Broadband flow better.

The busiest times for our O2 Home Broadband Access are between 8pm and 11pm, when most people are online, and we’ve noticed the service can slow down for everyone between these times. To stop that happening, we’re introducing a traffic management policy.

From now on, we’ll give first priority to the things most of us want to do in the evening – things like emailing, looking at websites, watching video on sites such as BBC iPlayer or YouTube or using programs like Skype or Messenger.

We’ll give lower priority to peer to peer programs and newsgroup services which means these will run slower when our network is busiest. You can find more specific details on these here. We’ve done this as a lot of people use these services to download large files – everyone doing this at the same time will slow our network down.

So here are the key points of our traffic management policy:

- We’ll only manage traffic when we’re busiest – from 8pm to 11pm or whenever our network’s congested

- You can still use whatever programs you like, however peer to peer and newsgroup programs will run slower during traffic managed times

- Streaming audio and video using sites like Spotify or BBC iPlayer will work normally and may even be faster

- We won’t limit your actual connection speed – just peer to peer programs and newsgroups

[Undecided adrian]

The only p2p application I can see that will upset people if it is crippled is Xbox Live.

Oh well hopefully there isn't too many access customers that use XXboxes.

[hammy]

8pm-11pm is not the bad, virgin media use traffic management on both the 10mb and 20mb packages. if you pass the limit your speed is severely reduced for 5 hours.

[bedrock]

Never mind, I just read it's only for O2 Access...

[muzzatron]

Im a new O2 broadband customer and have not been able to successfully watch any streaming media ie mobile Sky Tv, BBC iplayer, ESPN sports or in fact any streaming media at anytime during the day using my home wireless connection, which I may add is o2 wireless box ii.

Claims that your BBC iplayer or streaming media may be faster due to the traffic management certainly in my area are complete nonsense. I can never watch streaming media on my iphone within my home without after 30 seconds.....sometimes less, its starts its loading crap, my picture freezes and then 1 minute later I carry on from when it stopped.....only for it to do .............. the same again 30 seconds later.

This isnt very good considering when your trying to watch a live football match on your iphone via a subscription offer currently being advertised by O2, for mobile Sky on your iphone. Whats the point of this subscription offer if you cant use it because of O2 Broadbands inefficient service ie traffic management rubbish.

Rang O2 Broadband four times this month about it and thay say its being dealt with by their engineers and hope to rectify the problem by the first week in December.

What is going on? or should I just take the hit with my contract and leave o2 home broadband........so far Ive been lucky Ive not paid a penny due to the free 3 months. Considering getting my MAC cancelling the direct debit and telling them to shove it!

[dazzler]

Originally Posted by muzzatron

Im a new O2 broadband customer and have not been able to successfully watch any streaming media ie mobile Sky Tv, BBC iplayer, ESPN sports or in fact any streaming media at anytime during the day using my home wireless connection, which I may add is o2 wireless box ii.

Claims that your BBC iplayer or streaming media may be faster due to the traffic management certainly in my area are complete nonsense. I can never watch streaming media on my iphone within my home without after 30 seconds.....sometimes less, its starts its loading crap, my picture freezes and then 1 minute later I carry on from when it stopped.....only for it to do .............. the same again 30 seconds later.

This isnt very good considering when your trying to watch a live football match on your iphone via a subscription offer currently being advertised by O2, for mobile Sky on your iphone. Whats the point of this subscription offer if you cant use it because of O2 Broadbands inefficient service ie traffic management rubbish.

Rang O2 Broadband four times this month about it and thay say its being dealt with by their engineers and hope to rectify the problem by the first week in December.

What is going on? or should I just take the hit with my contract and leave o2 home broadband........so far Ive been lucky Ive not paid a penny due to the free 3 months. Considering getting my MAC cancelling the direct debit and telling them to shove it!

Yup i feel your pain, mines the same, streamings dont work anymore, even on iphone, the date of rectifying it by December has gone up, i was told aswell as others that it would be mid November.

I tried getting out of my contract due to them changing the conditions of sale ie i signed up for unlimited/untouched broadband which i am not getting, they said i had a good chance of having the termination fees waived due to the length of my problems but at the end of the day it was a gamble.

Im currently waiting for improvement, better the devil you know and all that.

[Saturday]

Originally Posted by muzzatron

Im a new O2 broadband customer and have not been able to successfully watch any streaming media ie mobile Sky Tv, BBC iplayer, ESPN sports or in fact any streaming media at anytime during the day using my home wireless connection

I'm (luckily) not on Access so haven't experienced its problems but one thing that does come into my mind reading your post - wireless can be a very poor medium for streaming.

To make sure it is Access giving you this problem and not a poor wireless connection, try a comparison connected to your router with the supplied ethernet cable. You can then at least see if there's an additional problem being caused by the wireless connection.