In which case it is a case of profits before capacity, or is lack of capacity a reflect of the low prices charged?

I suspect with some it is just a case of taking their customers for a ride although with others it is plain stupidity - how many times must the all-you-can-eat for pennies model come crashing down?

Allowing blatantly untruthful advertising of "unlimited" services is possibly the biggest cause of problems - doubly so if there really are no caps and it all gets left to contention (e.g. O2 Access until recently).

on the CF site ignition stated that VM's unlimited service is now the most restrictive out there for peak time traffic or at least will be when all this is implememented.

(a) FUP/AUP letters been sent out. No fixed limit to trigger seems to depend on how heavily subscribed/utilised local area is. So if in a heavy usage area the letter will probably come at lower usage.
(b) STM - throttling all traffic after downloaded so much during peak. also for upload but the limit is much softer.
(c) Traffic shaping - soon to come for p2p/nntp traffic during peak time, will be on all the time regardless of usage. Will be upload and download.

The new 100mbit service wont have STM but will have traffic shaping, the 50mbit service will have STM for upload only.

VM in some cases (like my area) have created their own problems, heavy usage customers causing high loads on local UBR is a result of them selling cheap all you can eat services and with packages designed to attract students, 9 month contracts.

I have always said an isp should provide capacity to provide what they selling even if its expensive and then after that base retail prices on a model that can make profit on that. Instead it seems to be the other way round, marketing sets the price and spec of product and then the capacity budget is based on that regardless if its enough or not.

I would say VM should go cap for peak and unlimited for off peak, but even off peak I now have overload on my local UBR, so seems in some areas like mine they dont even have enough off peak capacity for what they selling.

The phone line to my house had a fault which the muddy booted brigade seemed incapable of fixing after repeated attempts so my choices are limited. If VM cripple their products to the point I can't use them how I want then I will cancel though. Maybe I'll take up knitting to pass the time.

I don't bother visiting CF these days so haven't read Ignitionet's comments but right now on 20Mbps I've never hit the STM threshold and as I don't use torrents or NNTP it may be that the shaping won't bother me - it really depends on what protocols they degrade.

the shaping can go one of 2 ways really.

VM can choose to classify unknown traffic as non p2p/nntp and as such a lot less will be shaped. Or they can classify it as p2p/nttp and more will be shaped.

I hate shaping however since my area is so overloaded I am curious if things will improve when it is turned on.

The problem is for me BT services are so poor in my area even a poor performing VM is faster and more stable than BT services for me. If VM are aware of how bad BT is in LE3 this may be influencing what their urgentness in rendering congestion.

If the area is overloaded then throttling back on protocols using a lot of bandwidth should presumably improve everything else.

Unless of course instead of there being approximately sequential downloads adding up to (say) 100TB over the evening you just end up with parallel downloads adding up to 100TB over the same period and umpteen folks cursing the shaping. If the shaping doesn't reduce the total download over a given period then it will achieve diddly squat other than annoying VM customers. It depends if significant numbers rape their connection throughout the evening.

Look on the bright side though - if VM shape and throttle enough everybody with decent BT possibilities will move on and ease the congestion...

in theory yes, but shaping can go wrong, marking traffic incorrect etc.

Interesting. I left ADSL just because ISPs were having problems.

In reply to a post by Chrysalis:

in theory yes, but shaping can go wrong, marking traffic incorrect etc.

Judging from posts I've read about successful circumvention of NNTP shaping simply by altering ports and issues with WoW which they said wouldn't be impacted but is that's clear. I don't think setting up the kit properly is trivial and I suspect it will be a few weeks before things settle down. Once that happens none of the circumventions will work but the gamers will stop moaning.

I personally think that VM may have shot themselves in the foot on this though - you don't need 50Mbps and certainly not 100Mbps for surfing, gaming or iPlayer even with several users - the only need for speed is fast downloads. If neither are significantly faster than the 10 or 20Mbps products when used on commonly used downloading protocols there is more reason to downgrade or leave completely than upgrade. With all day shaping 100Mbps looks to me like a product with no purpose other than willy waving rights for VM and the folks who take it.

Part of the complication is those attempting to circumvent the systems, which mean attempts are made to identify this circumvented traffic.

End result could be that rather than protocol restrictions it becomes IP based, e.g. if overseas VPN in Russia become widely used then all IP traffic to Russia may be throttled. Substitute which ever country is the favourite one this week for anonymous VPN links.