In reply to a post by nemeth782:

This is what you get paying consumer prices for services of these speeds though. You pay what, £50+line rental for 330/30? I pay £51 (no line rental) for 330/21, it's just not enough to cover the cost.

VM in some areas is awful, but for me it's actually pretty good. I very rarely see less than 200mbit from Steam or newsgroups, I'd say 95% of the time it's over 300mbit, the remaining 5% of the time it's about 210-230mbit.

SH3 has some known issues with the Intel chipset, with these resolved VM would be good. The only issue I would then have with them is that downtime due to planned/unplanned work seems to happen about once every 6 weeks or so which is... rather annoying.

Well Infinity 4 is the best for the Mbit, however you do notice more congestion like I said.
Most of the time during the evenings I normally see +200Mbps with the odd fluttering below, Christmas and new years was the worse, but like I said I was expecting that.

I got around to speak to a few of my old friends round the corner from me who couldn't wait for BT to install fibre so they went for VM, not too sure what package they got but they said it top one for broadband and TV.

They all was telling me that they are lucky to see 35 Mbps in the evenings and they only just get the speed that they are paying for from about 3am to 3pm.
But they did say everyone in their area are on VM and seem to use it a lot.

Now I have a friend in Manchester and his VM connection is fine about +95% of the time, however there isn't too many people on VM where he lives.

So maybe its down to how dense the area is that is using it.

At the end of the day its still better than our 3.5 to 5Mbps that we was getting on ADSLx along with the high pitch whining sound we got on the phone at times

Granted the price is 10x the price of what we was paying for ADSLx but its still worth it.

Paul

In reply to a post by PaulKirby:

They all was telling me that they are lucky to see 35 Mbps in the evenings and they only just get the speed that they are paying for from about 3am to 3pm.
But they did say everyone in their area are on VM and seem to use it a lot.

Now I have a friend in Manchester and his VM connection is fine about +95% of the time, however there isn't too many people on VM where he lives.

So maybe its down to how dense the area is that is using it.

Yeah, I would switch to FTTP from BT if I had the option, even though I have it quite good from VM.

My current house is on the outskirts of a large town in East Anglia, it's actually a former council estate built in the late 40s but like most of these it's almost all owner occupiers now. It's not very densely packed, all 3 and 4 bed semis, and lots of old people and people with families, as 20 somethings in our first home with no kids we're some of the youngest people we've seen. VM seem very popular here, going by SSIDs, but I imagine hardly anyone else uses the internet for more than email and general browsing.

I used to live in Bristol, on a road full of students. VM was absolutely terrible, to the point of being borderline unusable, this isn't really surprising thinking about it!

In reply to a post by nemeth782:

My current house is on the outskirts of a large town in East Anglia, it's actually a former council estate built in the late 40s but like most of these it's almost all owner occupiers now. It's not very densely packed, all 3 and 4 bed semis, and lots of old people and people with families, as 20 somethings in our first home with no kids we're some of the youngest people we've seen. VM seem very popular here, going by SSIDs, but I imagine hardly anyone else uses the internet for more than email and general browsing.

I used to live in Bristol, on a road full of students. VM was absolutely terrible, to the point of being borderline unusable, this isn't really surprising thinking about it!

Not too sure with VM, but is the TV data sent separately than the actual broadband or is it all over the same cable.

And if over the same cable, does the TV Data count as broadband bandwidth, basically when watching a live TV channel, or watching an on demand program on the fly (i.e. streamed) does the download speed lower?

Paul

In reply to a post by PaulKirby:

In reply to a post by nemeth782:

My current house is on the outskirts of a large town in East Anglia, it's actually a former council estate built in the late 40s but like most of these it's almost all owner occupiers now. It's not very densely packed, all 3 and 4 bed semis, and lots of old people and people with families, as 20 somethings in our first home with no kids we're some of the youngest people we've seen. VM seem very popular here, going by SSIDs, but I imagine hardly anyone else uses the internet for more than email and general browsing.

I used to live in Bristol, on a road full of students. VM was absolutely terrible, to the point of being borderline unusable, this isn't really surprising thinking about it!

Not too sure with VM, but is the TV data sent separately than the actual broadband or is it all over the same cable.

And if over the same cable, does the TV Data count as broadband bandwidth, basically when watching a live TV channel, or watching an on demand program on the fly (i.e. streamed) does the download speed lower?

Paul

It's all down the one cable, but the TV data is multicast, so there is 1 copy of each channel multicast at all times, it doesn't matter if one person, 1000 people, or no people are watching that channel, it takes up the same data. These frequencies are not used for Broadband.

On demand is obviously not like this, it effectively uses a modem built into the Tivo TV box, that has it's own bandwidth, that isn't part of your modem's provision, although I think the new V6 boxes need to be connected to your regular modem, which means it is part of your provision. Either way, you could cause more contention with yourself I guess.

Each cable segment has a number of channels on it, each with ~38mbit of bandwidth. To have 300mbit VM insist you must be in an area where there are 12 channels available to you, so 456mbit. Your modem is then capped at whatever the VM config file sets, in this case 330mbit. Other people using that segment will contend with you, and in theory I guess your TV on demand streaming on a Tivo box with it's own modem could contend with you.

In my case I have 16 channels locked, so there is 608mbit of bandwidth on my segment, and I have a cap of 330mbit. I don't know how many houses my cable segment serves, but it could easily be 20+, so you can see that it would not take many people on 300mbit to make contention a massive issue. However, it would take 6 people on 50mbit all maxing out their connection at once on my segment before I even noticed it. This is where the issues come from on VM, especially in areas with 8 or sometimes even fewer channels.

When I moved here in May I had 8 channels locked, they would not let me have 300meg. They then upgraded the head end to a Cisco cBR-8, and I went to 12 then 16 channels locked and switched to 300m. That Cisco CMTS is capable of 32 channels, I think via a software upgrade, so there is room for them to expand here.

I'm Broadband only myself though!

Edited by nemeth782 (Tue 24-Jan-17 20:13:42)

ok thanks for this answer.

why are they artificially capping the size of the svlan's in the first place, especially that low?

You realise they run multiple VLANs over the single circuits right?

No I didnt but whats the technical reason for splitting one physicla circuit into multiple smaller segments? As it only makes contention more likely.

At least its much better than what VM have tho, so BT have an automated system that ramps up the svlan size over night, whilst VM have to take several months to carry out upgrade work.

In reply to a post by Chrysalis:

No I didnt but whats the technical reason for splitting one physicla circuit into multiple smaller segments? As it only makes contention more likely.

At least its much better than what VM have tho, so BT have an automated system that ramps up the svlan size over night, whilst VM have to take several months to carry out upgrade work.

Technical reason is segmentation of traffic, different SVLANs go to different BRAS on their way to the CPs.

Once backhaul is full BTW have to order new from Openreach along with having the hardware to terminate it which can take several months.

do they wait for it to be full before ordering (bad management) or perhaps do something more sensible like order a new one say when the existing is 50% utilised or even have spare ready to deploy links?

BTw can seem to mitigate issues quickly still when disaster strikes as we seen isp's report back to unhappy users they get moved to a new SVLAN following complaints.