In reply to:

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Again very true if you offered a guarentee that all the connections to all game servers would be 20ms or better that would be untrue.

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Is that not what is being suggested?.

In reply to:

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"So for a 2Mbps connection you still get 2Mbps on HTTP, 20ms pings on gaming and your VoIP call is perfect but your P2P is reduced to say 192kbps."

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Whereas the BBPro blurb quite rightly says, "Low latency and pings".

In reply to:

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If the tips in my previous post don't help and then you need to change ISP or raise a fault call with your current ISP to get low gaming pings.

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If I was currently using PN I probably would raise a fault call on the strength of the above quote. However we both know what the outcome would be don't we

Kent Mirror site is what used to be mirror.ac.uk (The others are the same content hosted on the Irish and German mirrors). I will speak to Dave on Monday and see if we can find a way to describe that better. We will see what we can do to improve the description about Akamai too, although listing specific sites doesn't work because those servers are used to distribute download content rather than serve websites.

I don't disagree that as we've set out our stall to be the clearest ISP around, we should make sure we do that. If we end up stating that something affects a lot more than it actually does in practice then so be it, but I don't see how that helps anyone. The most important thing is that sites and services work for customers and that we meet customer expectations at all times. If there was ever an example of that not being the case it would be something we would go out of our way to resolve.

Another thing that matters in this discussion is that the difference between traffic priority and speed is recognised. They are not the same. A site like Myspace doesn't stream music at higher rates than the rate limits, so it will be much more affected if there were dropped packets than it would be by a rate limit at a speed higher than the bandwidth being served!! That makes a rate limit totally irrelevant for many of the other examples in this thread which don't serve their content faster than the speeds we are talking about either. It's also worth noting that as per Dave's blog post those rate limits are the most we would set rather than being what is always set.

The fact is that most people are not going to be very interested in a message about us having 'top http speeds' or similar. It's much more important that we can honestly say that everything our customers want to do online will work well and where there are speed restrictions (designed to apply to non time sensitive traffic) that we explain why that is the case. This is after all precisely how we can offer better value for a quality service than other ISPs, which makes a far more compelling message for most people.

The last thing we want to do is be accused of misleading anyone when we are working so hard to do precisely the opposite.

Ian

Edited by IanWild (Sat 12-Jan-08 17:51:19)

Lets put this into perpsective.

If you check the forums of ISP's such as Orange, Virgin, Talk Talk etc they have alot of different people complaining about issues around support and quality of service. You rarely if ever see any reps from those ISP's on the forums. There are also alot of posts about people trying to leave. Their websites vaguely promise unlimited broad band and how great their support is etc.

On the Plusnet forum here they do not have alot of different people complaining about issues around support and quality of service. The ISP's reps are frequent visitors and try to help people out and clear up anything that is not clear. There are not a lot of people coming to this forum asking to leave Plusnet. Plusnets website gives more information than most on how their products work and how they view the provision of their service. The main source for complaints is ex customers from a long time ago who no longer have any recent experience of the quality of service Plusnet provide.



When were you last a customer of Plusnet ?

Maybe a slightly amended version which includes the assumptions I made.

""So for a 2Mbps connection you still get 2Mbps on HTTP (assuming you are downloading from a web server that can supply you with 2Mbps of throughput that the server isn't one that is included in the HTTP download site/server list and a rate limit is applied at the time you are downloading, no exchange contention is affecting the speed of your connection and no other traffic is being used on your connection, 20ms pings on gaming assuming that you can ping the game server at 20ms and that you (very likely) don't have interleaving on the line and your VoIP call is perfect assuming the VoIP supplier has no problems with their service and your headset works fine but your P2P is reduced to say 192kbps assuming that the source you can download from can supply you with 192kbps." "?

I'm sure someone can come up with more assumptions that I've missed out

Edit: Made the first line clearer as to what I meant.

Edited by deleted (Sat 12-Jan-08 18:17:36)

Edited by deleted (Sat 12-Jan-08 18:47:35)

Just out of interest which ISP is it that is giving you poor gaming pings ?

Edited by deleted (Sat 12-Jan-08 18:56:48)

So a more considered reply would have been appropriate after all

There you go your all happy now

You're missing the point. My post wasn't about support or QoS. It was about telling the truth.

That may well be sufficient reason for you to list everything under the sun that you can think of which isn't, in your opinion, broken but I didn't want to discuss all those things ... in much the same way that you don't want to talk about PlusNet making misleading statements about HTTP management.

So since we each seem to have a complete lack of interest in what the other wants to discuss, how about you don't reply to my posts and I won't reply to yours?

Simon

It depends on the context from the rest of the post. I believe it was meant to answer about how gaming pings are managed low at the expense of non time dependent apps, not a post about HTTP management. So I think it was honest and open, David was not delibrately trying to mislead but yes if a new customer took that single sentence as gospel and not in context then there could be confusion.

The only way to avoid any confusion and PN Rep remarks being taken out of context is for them not to post or each of their posts be checked by marketing, legal etc which could take days.

I for one think they post openly and honestly about the subject/discussion they are getting involved in but they can make mistakes, but this I believe is not a delibrate act.