Hey everyone - can people on Big Time let me know if they can stream from TVNZ OnDemand during peak hours and what YouTube performance is like during peak time as well?

Since switching to Big Time a couple of weeks ago I have found that almost all of my HTTP traffic seems to be shaped -- TVNZ OnDemand plays for about 20 seconds, then buffers for 20 seconds and repeats the cycle. Naturally it makes content unwatchable. Same with YouTube - last night it took over six minutes to buffer a 30second clip. I downloaded a video from YouTube to get a speed reading and it was clocked at 15KB/s versus around 600 - 700KB/s on my old plan.

I know that traffic is managed on Big Time during peak times, but I wasn't expecting it to be managed to the point where I can no longer even use services like YouTube and TVNZ. Even downloading Windows Live Movie Maker from Microsoft.com took the best part of an hour despite only being around 120MB, and photos on Flickr trickle through line-by-line like the dial-up days.

Is what I'm experiencing normal compared to what others are seeing? I would love to stay on this plan for the unlimited bandwidth, but not if it means you can't enjoy the services that broadband was made for.

Steve.

I seem to find local traffic runs great, nearly full speed but if the traffic is offshore, it's shaped, all the time.

Youtube has a caching system, if it's an obscure video that has not been cached locally, it buffers extensivley. FIX: play the first few seconds of the video and then refresh the page [Ctrl] + [f5]. The video then always plays full speed for me. I often don't bother as I can tell what quality it is from those buffered first few seconds and then just initiate the downloads of the 2xflv and 2xmp4 streams which pours in at full speed as it detects a "new" connection.

TVNZ ondemand appears to comes from akamai, and all the akamai traffic seems to be very shaped so I just download these also and watch them at a later stage if my $99 pvr missed the news.

I'm running a hosts file and an adaptive advertising blocker which stops most of the connections to those international sites and browsing performance has significantly improved as it's just looking at the local content.
I miss the days of Adwords and 2 or 3 small ads placed properly on pages that loaded fast without piles of flash and javascript. I often clicked on them too as they were relevant, upfront and simple!

Downloads seem to be constricted to 15Kbps each though I can load up a number of these 15Kbps files without them each slowing down any further.

Torrents, Could not tell you, I might try and get a "squished" version of a DVD I just bought to compare the quality of my own Divx mobile transcode with something a third party has done.

I'd almost say, treat it like a "free national traffic plan" and you'll be right, Trademe works fine as do many other sites and email including Yahoo and Gmail. Seems Telecom may have an arrangement for some Google content.

If you want a full speed plan, go for one of Telecom's business plans, they scream along even with international traffic if the line conditions are good.