SuperPro Priority Traffic

[Dougc]

Firstly; apologies if this has been covered elsewhere.  I've tried a few searches but have come up short with an answer so far.

Being fed up with Virgin Media's poor customer service and traffic shaping, I'm coming back to IDNet.  I only moved away because my new house had cable and we had to continue the contract with Virgin for DSL when we moved!

Anyway; I'm looking at the packages IDNet provide now, and I can't decide between Home Plus and Home SuperPro.  The bandwidth of Home Plus is ample for me, but I'm attracted to the SuperPro by the "Priority given at the exchange over standard ADSL traffic" feature.

What I'd like to know, is how much in reality is this "priority traffic" feature actually going to affect things?  I realise that this is a bit of a "how long is a piece of string" question, but having been hampered by Virgin's throttling etc, I'm looking for my next ISP to have as little shaping/throttling as possible.  While I realise IDNet state "Unthrottled & unrestricted (i.e. no traffic shaping or port blocking)", obviously there is some element of this by positively discriminating against traffic coming from SuperPro customers?

I'd be interested on people's opinions, especially if you've moved from a lower package to SuperPro and noticed a difference.  Thanks in advance

[Glenn]

  Dougc. The main thing I found when upgrading to a Pro package was the reduction in ping times. On a long line (approx 4.5Km) I was getting around 22 - 25ms ping with Pro, I think the pings were 5 - 10 ms higher on the standard package, but it was some time ago.

[Steve]

 

Start with the normal priority and see how you fare, if you find evidence of exchange congestion you can easily upgrade. It does seem to make a difference on busy exchanges.

[Lance]

I found it dropped about 4ms average off my ping, probably not noticable in normal day to day use. Its important to note the treatment of the packets being given higher priority is within BT's network, all traffic is treated the same once within IDNet's network.

[Dougc]

Thanks for the quick reply guys.

As I stupidly thought the bandwidth allowance figures were daily () I may actually have to go for SuperPro after all!

It's an interesting point though about the package giving priority within the BT network.  I'm currently on the Swindon (SSSWN) exchange, which appears (in comparison to others I've seen) to be very busy, serving almost 50,000 residences and companies.  Obviously it's able to do this as I presume they wouldn't put that many people on it if it wasn't able to cope!  But I'm wondering if that's maybe why I've had issues before at peak times   In which case, the priority you get with the SuperPro package sounds like it might be a sensible idea