PN's Exchange Information

Does anyone know where PN get their exchange information from? I notice Liam Martin is telling PN customers that nearly 50% of BT exchanges are red for capacity. Looking at SamKnows I can see 133 exchanges are red out of a total of 5074. Apart from the obvious, what could account for this huge discrepancy?

http://www.samknows.com/broadband/capacity-summary.php

TT

It is another excuse used by PN because if it isn't then how is it that a customer can download at high speed from http but restricted on everything else even on a red exchange? PN go round in circles blaming everyone and everything for the speeds except to admit not having the capacity to service its customers.

http://usergroup.plus.net/report_pncapacity.php

I am told that the information is wrong and over a year old.

Its just another way of PN passing the blame to someone else.


Surely if this was the case - then people on all ISP's would be complaining about slow speeds. .... oh no wait .. its just PN users...

strange that!

On samknows my own exchange is shown as Green, whilst on the PN and Zen checkers it comes up Red, so there would appear to be discrepancies.

Given that I can't find any "Next DSLAM" dates on samknows less than a year old, I suspect that to be the 'faulty' one. Also, the VP/DSLAM info isn't shown on the individual exchange pages, so that suggests to me that it isn't considered worth showing at the moment.


StealhyP

Here is the update:
http://www.plus.net/supportpages.html?a=2&support_action=messages&ispservice_id=other

See how carefully worded that is?

In reply to:

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Ellacoya who manufacture the switches used to identify different types of traffic across our network. It is this traffic identification that allows us to offer guaranteed quality of service for those applications that require it, whilst still allowing the use of lower priority, less latency-sensitive applications like P2P and Binary Usenet.

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Who decides what applications need priority? If they are guaranteed but not working to normal speeds should PN not be issuing refunds? Where on Premier does it state that P2P/Usenet packets will be dropped? The only reference is that other applications will get a higher priority but that doesn't imply that the available bandwidth will be limited for these other protocols. No mention of VPN or Remote Desktop problems even on standard ports. Round and round they go.

Having read a thread on the portal, if I was still on PN trying to use P2P I would encrypt my data and use port 3389 or one of the others ones PN allow for other encrypted services. It is clear that their traffic management identifies all encrypted data - not just P2P- and since they have to open ports for other encrypted data that would be the second best solution to get it to work.

"Its just another way of PN passing the blame to someone else."

That was the obvious!

TT

"On samknows my own exchange is shown as Green, whilst on the PN and Zen checkers it comes up Red, so there would appear to be discrepancies."

Seeing the same. Had a look at the Zen one and from the dozen or so exchanges I did check, the data appears to be identical to Usertools. It appears both PN and Zen are using the same source of data from BT.

TT

"I am told that the information is wrong and over a year old."

Did they figure this out today or have they known for some time?

TT

"It is clear that their traffic management identifies all encrypted data - not just P2P- and since they have to open ports for other encrypted data that would be the second best solution to get it to work."

The Ellacoya switches don't work as you would think. Whilst the switches can look solely at protocols and port numbers, they mostly look for application signatures to classify the flows. If the world ran p2p servers on tcp/80 they'd still recognise the traffic and classify appropriately.

The 6.4 software is still not classifying certain applications correctly. PN need to manually identify which applications are affected and implement a workaround on the switches to classify appropriately. If the signatures are particularly voluminous then it might be easier to use protocol and port numbers to identify the traffic. If you know of any apps/games that have been manually added, it might be worth running your p2p software on those ports to see if it improves speeds.

TT