In reply to a post by kwikbreaks:

In reply to a post by Chrysalis:

you may have a low expectation of your connection but dont expect everyone else to.

Perhaps it comes from years of experience of cable?

Vendor tests and personal observation.

Do bear in mind that this of course doesn't come close to Chrysalis' observations of his Think Broadband Quality meter along with out of date reports of historic load from technical support on the occasions he gets figures. Clearly far more reliable.

In reply to a post by Chrysalis:

most web pages today taking 3+ seconds to respond. Although not as bad as 12 months ago the way its declining my area will be like that within a month or so.

So what? What does that have to do with the subject in question? As per any excuse to whinge about your own connection. No-one's forcing you to use Virgin, given they evidently aren't fixing it in a hurry either change or stop hijacking every thread you post on in whatever forum that's remotely related to whine about your own connection.

In reply to a post by Ignitionnet:

Vendor tests and personal observation.

It seems that your personal observation coincides with my own observation of my VM connection - I really don't expect much from it at all these days and will certainly be moving on as soon as I can risk a phone line based connection again.

In reply to a post by kwikbreaks:

In reply to a post by Ignitionnet:

Vendor tests and personal observation.

It seems that your personal observation coincides with my own observation of my VM connection - I really don't expect much from it at all these days and will certainly be moving on as soon as I can risk a phone line based connection again.

Or wait for a fibre connection instead.

Many people are getting fed up with VM but they, VM, still trounce most BT telephone line broadband products.

BT are serious about FTTH. I was speaking to a cheerful Openreach network engineer the other day who expects to lose his job within 5 years along with many Openreach employees if FTTH takes off. Most of their work is based on dealing with faults to copper lines which will be a thing of the past in a FTTH world.

My area is planned for FTTC and I will switch to it when it arrives. My phone line had a fault which OpenReach failed to fix after 5 attempts which is why I switched to cable. Going back to ADSL would virtually certainly see me on the same line with he same old fault. With FTTC I only have the last line segment which with any luck will be fault free or diagnosed and fixed on install.

With FTTC there is still the same length of plain old twisted copper pair but it only gets used for voice. FTTH will involve high install costs so I reckon your friend from OpenReach will still be in work for quite a while.

Edited by kwikbreaks (Tue 14-Feb-12 22:21:01)

In reply to a post by Ignitionnet:

In reply to a post by kwikbreaks:

In reply to a post by Chrysalis:

you may have a low expectation of your connection but dont expect everyone else to.

Perhaps it comes from years of experience of cable?

Vendor tests and personal observation.

Do bear in mind that this of course doesn't come close to Chrysalis' observations of his Think Broadband Quality meter along with out of date reports of historic load from technical support on the occasions he gets figures. Clearly far more reliable.

thanks for clarifying

Ignition, you need to stop the personal comments.

You used to work for ntl but you dont anymore. So in terms of what is the average experience at current how are you backing that up?

For a start its pretty evident VM themselves cannot accurently determine user experience, as they think anything below 90% provides a good user experience. Its logical to assume you still have colleagues within VM who you worked with you feeding you information hence you able to leak stuff, however its also logical to assume that they will have an optimisitic point of view on what is a good and bad utilisation.

You have also contradicted yourself, in the past you have moaned about VM using 80% as a fault threshold, yet its now 90% and you suddenly now have no point of view or rather you dont want it aired in public. Even more so you have resorted to personally attacking me claiming I am some unusual event and its only a minor amount of VM customers with performance problems. Ofcom seem to disagree with you and they have samknows data, they are due to release some more this year and you may found it shocking or you may not, but those figures will show a large chunk of VM customers with congestion.

Your reply to me states the following.

1 - you think oversubscribing is acceptable sales practice.
2 - you take offense at me reporting problems with VM as you have not reacted like this to other people who have reported as much as me.
3 - you have completely ignored the farcical support I have posted, again whats your agenda.

So here is a few facts for you.

1 - its not just about jitter. the tbb graphs are a way of monitoring latency and jitter, when these increase it indicates congestion which can cause other problems. You know this but you are playing dumb. Would you be happy if you cant stream content, you download at abysmal speeds, web pages take several seconds to load, latency senstive applications break or at least perform poorly, games are unplayable. The list goes on.
2 - there is congestion and there is excessive congestion. Your reply indicates you think there is no such thing as excessive and people should just up with it.
3 - This is widespread on VMs network, its not just me alone and 99% of VM customers dont have or dont care about this. This is point I have to make because your posting pattern on forums lately you are starting to look like a PR person for the company, pretty much all the info you happen to leak is things like speed upgrades and capacity upgrades, never the bad stuff eh? dont think its not obvious because it is. You now trying to play down what I have posted as some minor jitter that I am obsessing over, come on you know its not just a bit of minor jitter. Maybe next month you will leak some information that VM are upgrading another package and doing some 'massive' capacity upgrades that will keep things running smooth. Then you will continue to ignore negative posts or shoot them down.

I dont make any money out of problems on VM or any broadband isp's so this has got to the point you trying to completely slander and discredit me so people ignore what I say.

Edited by Chrysalis (Wed 15-Feb-12 03:44:28)

If you would be good enough to inform me where I described VM's capacity planning methodology as being adequate or fit for purpose it would be appreciated. Taking what I said and stretching it to an extreme doesn't make it what I actually meant.

I do not agree with VM's fault threshold however this is not the level at which capacity upgrades are undertaken it's the level when a fault ticket is raised for a priority fix.

I couldn't care less about the support you've received which is why I didn't comment on it, again it's not about you and your ongoing issues over a number of years are irrelevant to me.

I regard a level of oversubscription as being absolutely acceptable sales practice. All broadband networks are oversubscribed to some extent. I do not, of course, condone excessive oversubscription.

I take no offence at your reporting problems, I am amused at your constant complaints over a period of years about cable yet you still are a subscriber. I can only assume you are masochistic in some way, and enjoy having a cause for complaint. I am puzzled how you seem to think you can speak authoritatively on cable though given your information is a BQM and occasional loading information from support.

Cable networks are in 99% of cases a TDMA medium. Time Division Multiple Access. When TDMA networks load to any kind of level they show jitter. It doesn't mean they're excessively loaded. To entirely avoid jitter needs each and every modem to have transmit opportunities immediately upon request which isn't feasible. A level of jitter doesn't indicate an oversubscribed network, it's a limitation of the technology. A jitter-free cable network is the exception rather than the rule and requires insanely low loading.

Given your apparent expertise I'd have thought you'd have noted that downstream jitter on cable is low, while upstream jitter is higher. Good reason for that, the upstream is TDMA and works on a request - grant - transmit methodology, the downstream has the benefit of scheduling and standard transmit schemes used in synchronous connections.

I made no comment on levels of acceptable congestion or contention, I said that jitter on TDMA networks will increase at peak loading periods. This is a statement of fact.

I am not aware of Ofcom disagreeing with me. You obviously regard a few ms of upstream jitter as being a problem but then you are apparently superhuman and can notice such things. You may want to actually check out gamers and speak to them, their clients are only allowed to update the server periodically, maybe 30 or 50 times per second, 1000ms / 50 = 20ms of jitter being acceptable to avoid warping - which is an effect of one upstream datagram from a client arriving after a subsequent datagram and the server having to compensate.

The same Ofcom report that you claim disagrees with me informs that VM average upstream jitter around the 6ms mark and downstream of sub-1ms. Significantly higher than DSL but not high enough to cause issues with usage. These are the figures you think prove your point - they don't. VM can't call themselves the best for gaming but it certainly cannot be claimed that Ofcom's report describes their service as being unacceptable for gaming as a whole.

I appreciate for you, again, any jitter at all indicates congestion and should immediately be pursued until such a time as VM have all ports operating below the extremely low level where no jitter is evident at all. It is extremely low too, sub-40%.

This sounds like a lot to be operating at 6am say but as I'm sure you're aware, being a broadband expert, upload loading on broadband networks changes far, far less over the course of the day than downstream as the majority of upstream traffic is unattended bulk transfer. Downstream may swing by 75% depending on ISP policy, upstream it can be as little as a 25% increase. Note I said 25% increase, not 25% of the bandwidth but 25% of the lowest load period.

While we're talking about such things I'm also sure, being a cable expert, that you know how modems that have constant flows of traffic in their buffer will request bandwidth in with the traffic while modems that are handling small amounts of non-constant traffic like, say, a Broadband Quality Meter, don't do this so have to go through a request - grant - transmit cycle for each burst of data while ongoing flows will go request - grant - transmit + request - grant - transmit + request. This is an efficiency gain but can mean that the P2P monster with his full buffer can to an extent crowd out a BQM.

There are people with problems, a fair few, however they are it should be remembered part of a customer base of 4.3 million. What the actual numbers of ports that are in a bad state neither you nor I know. It's more than it should be, without a doubt, that still doesn't make it the typical experience.

I've spent enough time on this anyway. As you may have noted my activity elsewhere on cable has dropped to zero, no reason for it not to do likewise here.

Good day sir.

ignition I dont care about this debate with you anymore.

I will just say I have never claimed to be an expert in cable networks, and one doesnt need to be an expert to know when things are oversubscribed. Also my comment on the quality of tech support I have receieved doesnt require me to be an expert either.

Where you have dissapointed me as I used to respect you a lot is the personal attacks and the disrepect to what I post. I am not complaining about a minor increase of jitter at peak, its more then that and that all I will say to you now.

This is a thread regarding high utilization fix dates started by someone else and I simply participated in the same subject.

I am still a subscriber as the alternatives are very poor, a dodgy adsl connection that will be unstable and error prone, or something like 3G which is expensive to use. when FTTC arrives its likely I will be off at that point. Jumping ship is only simple when there is credible competition.

Good day to you also.

Edited by Chrysalis (Thu 16-Feb-12 00:42:34)

From reading his post Ignitionet has moved on and won't be responding to this or any other cable issues.

I will miss his knowledgeable input but certainly not the attitude he has displayed of late. Personal attacks are bad form and never justified. If a poster annoys you the answer is to ignore them as I have done with a certain VM staff member on some boards which support the feature.