As far as I can tell, for all the blame heaped on BT Wholesale, they don’t throttle different ports differently. An ISP can choose to spend enough on infrastructure to offer decent unrestricted service, if it thinks it can make up the money in subscriptions; note that I pay £60 pcm for two telephone lines, a bonded pair of ADSL2+ lines, and a VoIP phone number, which is considerably more than I’d pay for broadband and phone from (say) The Phone Coop, as I use around 10GB/month.

Yes, a sad situation.

I’m on aDSL v1, max 8, getting 1.5Mbps in good times.

Not only do you have to cope with this, but my ISP is mainly a web service provider, not an internet service provider as most of the time all the ports outside of HTTP, HTTPS, POP3, IMAP and SMTP are rate limited to 5% of the available bandwidth. An SSH to my servers in the evening is tough.

All this because in most places the aDSL equipment and feed links are owned by BT and rented to the other ISPs.

The over-subscription on the feeds is ridiculous, so instead of investing money on bandwidth and equipment, money is put on rate-limiting infrastructure, or on snail mail warning of terrible usage and other punishment.

The thing is, in most places in the UK, you cannot even exercise your only consumer right to punish the bad ISP, contract cancellation and moving to someone else, as it won;t change a thing, your copper will not even be moved to another piece of equipment and the situation will be the same, with another logo and eventually another name for the “service-enhancing and social equalizing” bandwidth control.

Sad…