BT Infinity Network Capacity exceeded 24 hours a day?

[travelhigh]

Well been a few months with Infinity now and surprised to say not terribly impressed by BT's obvious network limiters in place despite supposed unlimited account.

I have monitored general download speeds to major sites e.g. Microsoft/ Oracle / Google etc but consistently not been able to achieve a download speed greater than 35Mbps.   Run a speed test to the BT test servers and never exceeds 40Mbps agrees with that BUT ... run a speed test to the nearest NON-BT test servers and over 70Mbps reached typically 12-14 hours a day dropping down to 20-30Mbps during busy times.  As the 35Mbps upper limit is reasonably consistent seems to not be due to bandwidth but more packet handling, window sizes etc

Summary seems to be that although the local connection from building to street to exchange appears capable of 70Mbps some bandwidth issues in the BT network are constraining real life usage.

Anyone else had similar issues,  are there plans in place to adjust the BT backbone. 

[adrianc]

I'm really suspcious about those results.  Given that BT's speed test doesn't leave their network but external speed test sites do, you would expect the results to be the other way round if there was a genuine issue.  As for measured download speeds, there's any number of other factors that may be in play... do you 100% know that the server isn't at/near capacity? 

Or could there be other networking issues: I know of one person on Inifinity who could download two or three files at 8-ish Mb/s simultaneously but could never get more than that for one download.  In that case, it turned out to be the MSS/RWIN settings on his PC - changed them and download speeds went through the roof.

Adrian

[travelhigh]

Completely agree something to do with Network windowing.  Since Windows 7/ 8 / 8.1 and Linux are now all automatic window sizing it is up the network to recognize the autosizing and not a matter like xp days of locking to pc's to the rate of your broadband.

This brings the good old days of early 100Mb when with bad timing parameters and cheap hubs you would get typical 30Mbps throughput and 70Mpbs throughput on more advanced networks.  Then came 3rd generation 100Mb hubs/network adapters and PC Drivers and almost full 100Mbps become achievable.  Seems like going to be a similar story with Infinity..... thought this lesson had been learnt already.

Does BT have any recommended settings for the Windows network stack to correct the current handling?