Virgin oversubscribe regularly - check out their forums. Bristol 9 months - Southampton 5 months and so on.

Be had a spate of it about 2-3 years ago.

In reply to a post by drummerjohn:

Be had a spate of it about 2-3 years ago.

You don't actually have to look that far back: http://forums.thinkbroadband.com/beunlimited/f/41984...

I'm connected to one of the affected exchanges (Selby). Sky CS informed me, that BT are upgrading our exchange with a 10GigE link, on or around the 15 Feb. Fingers crossed!

Edited by HiPing (Wed 23-Jan-13 00:21:36)

In reply to a post by MrSaffron:

Cheaper but if the expectation is that 2 x 1GigE will run out soon too the the big leap may make more sense.

True but most of the time the standard is 1Gb -> 2Gb -> 10Gb.

Suspect a combination of tons of advertising, the nature of the advertising, Netflix and Sky On Demand has stuffed them a bit.

I was talking about backhaul too, there is no 10Gb CableLink product available yet.

Sky rent backhaul links from BT for the most part, a few other providers plugging gaps. Not aware of their using dark fibre for any of their links from exchanges.

Going from 1Gb to 2Gb is a doubling of capacity, customers using FTTC going from say 16Mb to 80Mb does not entail a five-fold increase in usage. The actual usage increase downstream averages only about 10% - people for the most part do the same things faster.

I'm not aware of Sky having plans to offer FTTP or FTTPoD - FTTP will be available to a very small base and FTTPoD will have a massive install cost and that target audience will be mostly the home worker / SME base along with some uber-nerds rather than your average residential Sky customer.

Edited by deleted (Wed 23-Jan-13 00:21:29)

In reply to a post by Ignitionnet:

Going from 1Gb to 2Gb is a doubling of capacity, customers using FTTC going from say 16Mb to 80Mb does not entail a five-fold increase in usage. The actual usage increase downstream averages only about 10% - people for the most part do the same things faster.

I'm not aware of Sky having plans to offer FTTP or FTTPoD - FTTP will be available to a very small base and FTTPoD will have a massive install cost and that target audience will be mostly the home worker / SME base along with some uber-nerds rather than your average residential Sky customer.

Clearly it depends on the profile of each aggregation node. If Sky are winning a lot of customers from Virgin or other ISPs, or if FTTC becomes available in areas that previously had very low ADSL speeds, Sky's backhaul requirements may be growing rapidly. If the majority of new FTTC customers have upgraded from fairly fast ADSL, I'd expect more modest growth in their requirements, though if faster connections loosen restraints on 'on demand' video, the growth may still be sharp.


I can understand Sky not offering FTTP in the short to medium term. It looks like BT Openreach's modest proposals for commercial deployment of FTTP are mostly being replaced by FTTC deployment. I'm sure you're correct about the vast majority of FTTPoD customers being home workers, SMEs and uber-geeks. However, there will be those wanting FTTPoD because it's the only way to get a moderately fast and stable connection, or those having FTTP left over after a previous FTTPoD installation (I don't think Openreach will want to offer FTTC to locations with working FTTP).

The obvious answer will be for Sky to offer low speed FTTP products, but not support FTTP products faster than 80/20.

indeed.

maybe ignition, maybe not.

I cant imagine me using netflix on my old 6mbit adsl connection, and I think it would have been chaotic on my VM connection (before it got fixed). Now I have been using it heavily for the past week or so and during the evenings.

I routinely now click on 720p on youtube to get the video buffered to the end very quickly (as that isnt rate limited), on older isp's I would just leave at the default which is usually 360p which is not only smaller sized but also rate limits the streaming throughput meaning if I dont watch the entire video it isnt all streamed.

In terms of the content I download things havent changed a great deal but my streaming activity has skyrocketed.

I think there is certian net activities people dont even try until they get a faster connection.

Also the fact isp's get caught out time and time again whenever they increase speeds suggests the theory that usage doesnt go up is wrong.

Edited by Chrysalis (Wed 23-Jan-13 18:41:22)

yes i agree also, we cant just say from 16 to 80, because the typical speed on adsl2+ is way below 16, likewise not all of vdsl2 is 80 either but the average speed on vdsl2 is several multiples of the average on adsl2+.

In my particular area the speed multiple from adsl to vdsl based on estimated speeds is 17x. A calculation of actual speed multiple is 12x still much higher than 5x.

Those are the stats from ISPs who've monitored customers before and after upgrades, the average usage increase is around the 10% mark.

There will, obviously, be those such as yourself who use considerably more after an upgrade, there will likewise be those whose usage doesn't change at all with the upgrade.