In reply to a post by kwikbreaks:

There may be some downstream congestion on mine too but as I've downgraded to 10Mbps it has to be pretty dire before I'd spot it. Since the split the TBB chart certainly looks better than before but they admitted there is still some high utilisation - just not high enough and long enough for them to raise a fault.

It will be interesting to see what the new traffic management does to the utilisation - if it works I suspect that there will be much wailing and gnashing of teeth about the impact on volume downloads. I really can't blame the wailers either - just what is the point of having 100Mbps if you can't download anything sizeable at that rate?

Indeed, the only real party to blame here is the isp.

I am currently getting sub 10mbit, it is pretty dire here.

The only reason I havent downgraded is that I been given a discount which effectively has me paying only for the bottom tier anyway.

http://www.speedtest.net/result/1650898947.png

Edited by Chrysalis (Thu 15-Dec-11 20:43:48)

I think that's local congestion, sucks that VM don't upgrade some of their nodes quickly enough. Broadband and cable has always been shared service, obviously if you want the full line speed all the time then you need to pay for a dedicated line or a 1:1 connection.

For the price, the speeds you can achieve and the large amount you can transfer VM is very good. It's about twice the price of the entanet connection I used to have, over 10x the speed and i went from being limited to something like 120Gb a month to essentially unlimited.

My advice would be to simply check the local speed in your area before joining up, either take a trial or ask some local people to do speed tests, or visit the forums a lot of people post area codes which are currently slow.

Even if I was only getting 10mbit I'd still be a good 3x faster than adsl in my area.

In reply to a post by anon123456:

My advice would be to simply check the local speed in your area before joining up...

That advice would be fine if it wasn't for the speed a "good" area can go to complete garbge. Mine was fine for ages then over a matter of days (possibly just a single day) it went to absolutely dire.

The problem is 100% caused by VM selling 100Mbps unlimited on shared local pipes that can only do 200down 18up. All it takes is a single torrent freak on 100Mbps to put a serious strain on a node serving maybe a couple of hundred customers. Add in a second and it's totally borked.

VM will be introducing new traffic management next year. If it's going to square the circle then it will be need to be pretty draconian for high usage customers which pretty much makes taking a 100Mbps connection pointless.

xDSL has lower headline speeds but is uncontended back to the fibre feed so can be given virtually unlimited bandwidth. By it's nature cable can deliver high headline speeds but is quite highly contended back to the fibre feed so delivering more bandwidth is expensive.

Its entirely possible to sell a contended product and have no visible contention.

In addition if there is visible contention there is acceptable levels and unacceptable levels,

My own defenition of unacceptable is when it falls lower than the tier below what I am paying for and probably anything lower than 75% of marketed speed. Also I consider it unacceptable when I get any kind of slowdown outside of peak hours.

Why people accept shoddy service as acceptable is beyond me and why people think a service either has to be a leased line or completely oversubscribed is also beyond me. Especially when I know VM are capable of providing a good service as is evident in other areas.

By the way my area was only just activated when I ordered, yet somehow in a brand new area it was congested from day 1. How did VM manage that?

Edited by Chrysalis (Mon 19-Dec-11 16:34:27)

In reply to a post by kwikbreaks:

In reply to a post by anon123456:

My advice would be to simply check the local speed in your area before joining up...

That advice would be fine if it wasn't for the speed a "good" area can go to complete garbge. Mine was fine for ages then over a matter of days (possibly just a single day) it went to absolutely dire.

The problem is 100% caused by VM selling 100Mbps unlimited on shared local pipes that can only do 200down 18up. All it takes is a single torrent freak on 100Mbps to put a serious strain on a node serving maybe a couple of hundred customers. Add in a second and it's totally borked.

VM will be introducing new traffic management next year. If it's going to square the circle then it will be need to be pretty draconian for high usage customers which pretty much makes taking a 100Mbps connection pointless.

xDSL has lower headline speeds but is uncontended back to the fibre feed so can be given virtually unlimited bandwidth. By it's nature cable can deliver high headline speeds but is quite highly contended back to the fibre feed so delivering more bandwidth is expensive.

Given Vms past behaviour of excempting top tier customers from traffic management my prediction is the new traffic management will be extremely draconian on lower tier customers in heavily subbed areas, so the top tier customers can post on public forums nice speeds and marketing wins, it wouldnt surprise me if they still excempted the top tier as VM have been stupid many times in the past.

How someone figured out STM was required to have a smooth network but then that same network could handle unthrottled 100mbit is baffling.

In reply to a post by Chrysalis:

How someone figured out STM was required to have a smooth network but then that same network could handle unthrottled 100mbit is baffling.

Simple.

It wasn't the same "someone"

The networks "someone" noted that to provide sufficient capacity for demand he'd either need to (vastly) exceed his budget or introduce some restrictions on just how much could be downloaded or uploaded in a given time. Realistically those limits are far too high for what the network can deliver if the salesforce gets lucky which is why there have always been congested areas long before the madcap launch of 100Mbps unlimited.

The marketing "someone" wanted to advertise unlimited 100Mbps. As the company appears to be run by a bunch of cowboys he was allowed to do so despite the all too obvious consequences.

A note to the vast number of people who will say I get 10/20/30/50/100 all day every day...
pray you don't get a torrent freak take 100Mbps nearby - if you do kiss goodby to that sweet connection. If you get two kiss goodbye to any usable connection.

Edited by kwikbreaks (Tue 20-Dec-11 10:56:00)

That seems fair to me, if you want better speeds then pay more money, the network isn't run for free they need to pay off their running and investment costs, the people on the top tier like me are paying a lot of money for their connections, my 50mbit connection is about £40 a month which in a world of broadband which is often free with certain phone packages, is quite a lot of money.

Again I think most of the VM problems are local to some areas, i don't know what sort of percentage of their customers are in these problem areas I suspect it's probably small however, I do see some whining on tech forums but it tends to be from a bunch of people in one area, it eventually gets upgraded and it all dies down.

I don't see usage that is something that really heavily changes based on package speed, people who torrent a load of stuff are going to torrent that stuff irrelevant of their speed, the speed just decides over what period of time the network becomes congested, torrenting a 350mb TV episode on 100mbit for example is a burst download of about 30 seconds assuming full speed, it lowers the odds of that 30s clashing with someone elses download when you knock it through at much faster speeds.

This idea of usage increasing in direct proportion to available speed is a bit of a false idea, I think there will be some increase and we can't say exactly what that is but I suspect it's significantly less than the actual speed increase.

For example if you're on a 50mbit and you're downloading say 50Gb a month, then going to 100mbit isn't likely to cause you to now be download 100Gb per month. and the flipside which is I don't think people who download a lot, say 300gb per month are going to download any less if they're downgraded or capped they're still going to cause that throughput just over a longer period of time, instead of ragging out a 350 TV episode in 30s they'll simply do it over an hour or whatever it takes.

You seem to have forgotten seeding which some do constantly. The problems in my area were upstream rather than downstream. A single 100Mbbs user with 10Mbps up soaks up 60% of the available upstream on their node (several hundred victims) when running flat out.

I've no idea how many areas are impacted but the complaints seem to be growing since the upstream upgrades and 100Mbps launch - unless it's just that I notice them more because my own area sucks.

Seeding and upstream is the big issue, and hence why many providers target P2P rather than other download activities, i.e. they don't have the same effect as P2P