Gallery

Smash your broadband limits

Posted on 19 Jun 2009 at 11:19

Barry Collins reveals the roadblocks Britain's biggest ISPs put in the way of your internet travels - and how to smash them.

Broadband providers love to bandy around terms such as "unlimited" and "unrestricted" in their adverts, but the truth is that most British broadband connections are weighed down by a barrage of limitations.

Daytime download caps, excessive data charges, traffic management, and discrimination against certain types of internet traffic are common practice among Britain's leading ISPs - although few bother to mention them when trying to sell you their services.

In this feature, we expose the hidden chokes and charges. We examine the fair-use policies and traffic-management policies of this country's big six broadband providers (which account for 95% of all broadband lines in this country), plus a selection of other ISPs, so that you're fully aware of what's going on behind the scenes on your connection.

We also lift the lid on the dark art of traffic management, a process used by the majority of ISPs to limit the capacity consumed by bandwidth-intensive applications such as peer-to-peer software. Some ISPs are commendably open about their traffic management; others are highly secretive. We interrogate ISPs about their traffic-management policies and ask experts exactly what the ISPs can detect with their deep-packet inspection technology. We investigate whether tricks such as disguising the ports or encrypting peer-to-peer traffic will throw your ISP off the scent.

We also reveal how to get around some of the restrictions and avoid extra charges, by scheduling large downloads during off-peak hours, when ISPs routinely don't care how much data you download.

A final note of caution: broadband terms and conditions chop and change with monotonous regularity, and each ISP's deals are subject to change. Before you jump broadband ship, check what you're signing up to.

The BT group
Virgin Media
Sky
The Tiscali group
TalkTalk & AOL
Orange
Can you throw the snoops off the scent?
Other leading ISPs
How to beat the download curfews

Author: Barry Collins