Yeah, I understand. Hopefully by the end of the month the bonded upstream will be activated as per their timeline and waiting the last couple of months won't be as bad.

In answer to your question re FTTC contention, each of the cabinets (serving a maximum of either 144 or 288 lines - either inactive or active) has a symmetrical 10gig ethernet connection for backhaul.

Even in the absolutely unlikely situation that a 288 port cab had 288 active subscribers, everyone would still be getting about 35meg up and down allocated to them.

Yes I knew that with FTTC the initial backhaul offered a very high % of connection speed. I doubt that that sort of contention ratio exists all the way though. The usual problem with VM is their tiny local pipes and the high contention ratios they run at but as at least one of the speedtests showed full headline speeds it seems that in this case the problem is further back in the network and VM have form for running their peering links at levels that threaten to melt the fibre.

My area is problematic at times but cable + Vonage is a fair bit cheaper than FTTC. I might consider plain ADSL were it not that I've got used to 60Mbps most of the time (I tend to avoid peak times) and the fact that 5 Openreach visits failed to fix the line fault that lead to me switching to cable.

one note kwikbreaks.

in my days on VM it wasnt unusual for me to do repeated tests on one speedtest server and get random results, so eg. even just using the reccomended namesco server I might get 5 results in a row line this (on 30mbit service).

30
9
24
14
2

so to assess it as peering issues I would first make sure the fast result is repeatable, as it may not be.

True - massive speed variations are often encountered with high congestion - I got a bit carried away with the one showing decent speeds being hosted by VM. It was pretty much on the nail for download on 30 but the upstream was probably a bit low.

Even at 9.30am it seems to be all over the place.

http://grab.by/nukQ

Anyone seen this on torrents before?

If you mean you are using torrents to measure the speed you need to remember that VM use traffic shaping that will penalise torrents.

No, I'm not only but it's weird behaviour. It's absolutely [censored] again tonight, 200-500ms pings and stuff.

Total rubbish. No idea how they are going to compete going forward.

In reply to a post by mr_mojo:

No idea how they are going to compete going forward.

Not very well. My area now has bonded upstreams and it hasn't made one jot of difference to the high jitter. My only reason for staying with them is that I now spend a lot of the time away from home and FTTC + a phone line would cost me quite a bit more.

That's not great to hear. Thursday night tonight:

http://www.speedtest.net/result/2786656324.png

For what it's worth, bonded upstreams came online a few days ago and the service has been rock solid. Might buy us another few months of decent peak time service