High Utilization Fix Dates

Anyone know why they keep delaying the fix dates all the time for high utilization faults... It seems to move on each time to at least a month later?

Do they have like ONE engineer working on this?

Are the dates moving, or they are upgrading and users are growing their data use to consume available bandwidth even after upgrades.

This has happened with BT Wholesale upgrades in the past, when incremental increases in capacity are not enough.

In reply to a post by Coogz:

Do they have like ONE engineer working on this?

Judging by the number of complaints I'd say it's more like NONE.

My own area whent to the dogs and I was given a date 3 months away so I downgraded from 50 to 10 as that is all it was delivering a lot of the time. Some sort of work was done and my IP changed but the TBB monitor still looked abysmal. As I'm now only on 10Mbps I can usually get that but I imagine gamers would be unhappy with the high jitter.

IMO VM are running scared of Infinity and releasing products which their infrastructure simply can't support - 100Mbps on 200Mbps pipes supporting a couple of hundred modems. There will be some upgrades for the speed doubling but imo that capacity is needed on what they are selling now.

VM marketing are clearly hoping to BS people into staying with them or joining on the back of headline speeds without the bandwidth being there to back up those speeds when they are used in anger.

The jitter is visible in the Ofcom testing too, particularly on the upstream

You'll always get jitter on cable because of the way the upstream works using requested timeslices. How bad it is depends on how many torrent freaks they've sold to in the local area who are smart enough to evade the shaping.

Here's my TBB chat from yesterday - http://www.thinkbroadband.com/ping/share/8b155e7a6ff...

Plenty of people have posted far worse (but only those on cable SFAIK)

Edited by kwikbreaks (Wed 08-Feb-12 10:10:29)

In reply to a post by MrSaffron:

Are the dates moving, or they are upgrading and users are growing their data use to consume available bandwidth even after upgrades.

This has happened with BT Wholesale upgrades in the past, when incremental increases in capacity are not enough.

Probably both.

VM wait until utilisation tops 90% before even starting to plan an upgrade. By then performance is severely impacted already and then the time from planning to relief been provided can be several months. During that time they are of course still signing up new customers and the upgrade may well only be a small incremental amount. It does seem from where I sit VM want and try to keep utilisation at around 90-100% and only act when thngs get extremely bad,

On my current high utilisation fault I am now on my 4th ticket, they just keep getting closed with no real reason.

To give you an idea how bad it is to wait until 90. 10% of a upstream pipe is only 1.8mbit/sec. 100mbit users can consume 60% all by themselves, 50mbit 30% and 30mbit about 17%. Jitter is likely noticeable on anything above about 40% utilisation.

Comcast a US cable provider consider 70% as high utilisation and thats on larger shared pipes as well.

Edited by Chrysalis (Wed 08-Feb-12 12:41:59)

In reply to a post by Chrysalis:

Jitter is likely noticeable on anything above about 40% utilisation.

Mid-60s.

In reply to a post by Ignitionnet:

In reply to a post by Chrysalis:

Jitter is likely noticeable on anything above about 40% utilisation.

Mid-60s.

it was noticeable here when I was told I had mid 40s utilisation. Also if utilisation is at say 40% and a 100mbit user does a upload speedtest or something, that would cause a burst of jitter would it not as it would burst it to 100% utillisation or close to it.

Edited by Chrysalis (Wed 08-Feb-12 21:46:21)

In reply to a post by Ignitionnet:

In reply to a post by Chrysalis:

Jitter is likely noticeable on anything above about 40% utilisation.

Mid-60s.

So in most areas just about any time you want to use it unless you're an insomniac.

well I am curious how he obtained this mid 60s figure. Has there been specific live testing eg. and how recent was it.

If it was from when he used to work for VM years back, back then conditions were different, mainly that upload speeds were much lower.

Even if we accept mid 60s as a jitter trigger point thats 30% or so below what VM consider high utilisation and probably below the average utilisation across their network.

I get jitter 24/7 on VM even at dusk, so that would suggest my utilisation at 4am is at least 65%, isps that show uncongested traffic levels usually show that traffic at the time of day is many multiples below peak demand which means peak demand on my port is probably restricted by congestion (and certianly by shaping).

We also now know that VM have used their traffic management to hold back upgrades.

They use a trigger point on utilisation for upgrades, traffic management reduces utilisation (to a degree) which makes it harder for this trigger point to be reached, so in turn traffic management has stopped upgrades been carried out. Unlike most other ISP's VM still have 2 seperate forms of traffic management running and cannot prevent congestion. They used to have 3 until they scrapped their FUP letters. In my opinion STM violates the ASA ruling which comes into affect april this year, so its possible that will be canned this year leaving just the protocol shaping in place. Although the STM is likely not having too much impact anyway as its very generous on uploading and doesnt even affect the top tier at all.

It would be nice for tbb to run a story of some sort on this as this site usually is quite open.