New STM limits etc just posted

effectively if you download at 100% of your specified speed for 10 minutes you are then capped for 5 hours during the day or 12 hours during the weekend

Welcome to Virgin unlimited downloads

YOU should not be limited in anyway in today's world, while others are going totally unlimited VM are still doing it, don't they want the business?

If they upgraded their network like all the other ISP's then maybe they would be competitive, as they still stand, they are just a low end provider with a low end service.

Thats what happens when you let the yanks rule the nest !!

FTTD for the win?

Edited by deleted (Wed 26-Jun-13 11:28:18)

Post deleted by saturn_uranus

No worry for me. The very worst 72Mb capped speed is still a good 10Mb above anything I've seen reliably in 6 months on my 120Mb connection.

Should be noted though that FiOS costs over 60 quid a month for a 75Mb/35Mb service with domestic phone calls.

It's also not available to most of the United States, and huge swathes of the USA have the option of the local cable company or the local phone company and that's about it.

40 quid a month for 24Mb with a 250GB/month limit anyone?

Or the cable company, 80 quid a month for 105Mb down, 20Mb up, 600GB/month cap.

For that price someone in the UK could purchase 2 x FTTC services, including line rental, or an FTTC and a 120Mb VM cable service, load balance them and have a service at 150Mb down, 39Mb up or 200Mb down, 30Mb up.

The USA is definitely not a model for value and superior services.

To get some more idea of what Liberty Global may do longer term check their UPC cable brand.

Edited by deleted (Thu 27-Jun-13 23:14:06)

if the cable option was uncongested I would take it to be fair

so

Or the cable company, 80 quid a month for 105Mb down, 20Mb up, 600GB/month cap. uncongested no STM no protocol shaping.

Or VM 30mb down 2mb up no official usage cap but extremely low peak time limits which throttle speeds and all time peak protocol shaping, plus varying levels of congestion that last for years at a time.

Value for money isnt always base price.

Of course if the .us service has VM levels of congestion then its no better.

Edited by Chrysalis (Fri 28-Jun-13 07:30:47)

There are several UPC offerings in different countries. Netherlands, Poland, Switzerland, Ireland, Slovakia, etc.

Bonding connections together if you really want them fully bonded is done by using a Firebrick or similar to tunnel both connections to a data centre then access the Internet from there, or if load balancing is satisfactory something like this is fine.

Obviously the tunneling option means a single IP address is seen at the remote end while the load balancing option means 2 IP addresses are seen which can be an 'issue' with NNTP hosts. You can, of course, also mitigate this through use of a VPN.

Bonding 2 VM connections is probably a bad idea though.

In reply to a post by Chrysalis:

if the cable option was uncongested I would take it to be fair

Fair enough; but if you've no issues paying that kind of money how come you use residential BT Infinity, with no fixed line back up, for your business?

As I'm sure you're aware Comcast have congestion management in place to try and avoid pipes maxing out.

Edited by deleted (Fri 28-Jun-13 12:00:20)

I don't recall ever being STMed, (Is that a verb?), or not that I noticed. I do avoid torrenting in peak times, so our evening usage is pretty typical, streaming with XBMC from Livedrive; Lovefilm, a variety of on line games via PS3 or Wii and automated Livedrive backups. I get 104Mb/9.80Mb pretty well 24/7 every week of the year.

Yet I hear some folk claiming they get hit at a drop of a hat. Maybe it's because I'm not particularly looking to see if I have been limited. That would apply to most users. After all, even if I have occasionally been dropped to 5Mb or 3.6Mb for an hour or two, it hasn't prevented me doing what I want my connection to. Most folk wouldn't even notice. I would still be getting a better up stream than most ADSL down streams.

I'm getting my free upgrade to 120Mb/12Mb next month, so I'm even less likely to notice any service degradation.

BT infinity is good enough overall, the main issue for me is a static ip, and I have been waiting for zen to release prices on their new products. Before deciding.

However if I was in a position of a congested VM service for VM's cost or that £80 product (assuming uncongested) I would choose the latter, thats more what I meant.

Bear in mind I dont host anything from home and my work doesnt require high bandwidth, for my work stability and latency/packet loss is most important, higher upload does help also as I can mount iso's remotely from home over KVM but its not a neccessity. But because I dont just use my connection for work, I also want higher bandwidth for my other activities as well.

For this reason 3G is a good enough backup, working is harder over it, but it is good enough to keep me going during outages or when I am not at home. this is assuming outages are infrequent tho.

Edited by deleted (Fri 28-Jun-13 14:42:23)

Edited by deleted (Fri 28-Jun-13 15:20:38)

In reply to a post by Chrysalis:

BT infinity is good enough overall, the main issue for me is a static ip

In reply to a post by Chrysalis:

Bear in mind I dont host anything from home

I'm puzzled. Why would you need static ip then?

ACL's, firewalls, monitoring my connection are a few things.

Remote desktop, is I guess a server of sorts.

But for server purposes if thats all it was I wouldnt be that bothered as dynamic hostnames compensate for that.

Since I have had the same ip for coming on 2 months now tho the urgency has gone down a bit.

That STM page is full of lies I am on a 120mbit connection and 2 weekends in a row i have been limited to 50mbit this week and 20mbit last week. Last week i downloaded a lot Friday morning and was limited till Sunday. This week i downloaded a lot between 10 Friday night and 11 Saturday morning now I'm limited to 50mbit haven't downloaded any thing for a few hours now and I'm still limited. i know it is an intentional limit and not a problem because of how stable it is hitting the ~50mbit limit.

Edited by deleted (Sat 20-Jul-13 17:26:02)