In reply to a post by kwikbreaks:

In reply to a post by broadband66:

shove two fingers up to all other users who come home from work and want to check their personal emails, purchase a couple of items and browse the web for half an hour

... the people sticking their fingers up to users are those who think it's fine to sell unlimited high speed broadband with now virtually negligible STM penalty on a network that simply cannot support that sort of usage.

a few people including one ex VM staff member are even saying VM are trialing turning STM off now as well O_o

Even with the STM operating fully, and mine seems to be totally disabled judging by the few tests I've done , it doesn't deter at all now IMO. The old 5 hours knuckle wrap was a deterrent but now the speed reduction is pretty small and only lasts an hour or two.

Ok so the pipes are bigger now but a 120Mbps user can still consume > 25% of the local downstream and 12Mbps up is 33% of the upstream. Even with STM operating a single user can still consume a sizeable % of the local pipe. With FTTC that simply isn't the case as the backhaul is so much higher.

Who allows that? VM do.
Why? So they can advertise unlimited and beat FTTC on headline speeds.
Who pays? Customers with a torrent freak or two on their segment.

I don't know if it is deliberate or misconfiguration but I noticed I hadn't been hit any STM when I should have been a couple of weeks back and started a thread about it on cableforum. Some are saying they have STM and some like me don't get penalised (I've tested this a number of times since). Somebody copied a denial from Mark Whatsisname on the VM board that there was any trial or any STM failures. I'll believe there is no trial but I know 100% that I can exceed the published limits with impunity.

Cant wait to see the network in some areas Keel over and die lol

It's not quite that simple.

What you describe is how both cable and FTTP via passive networks work. Of itself the scenario you describe isn't necessarily a problem.

In reply to a post by Ignitionnet:

It's not quite that simple.

What you describe is how both cable and FTTP via passive networks work. Of itself the scenario you describe isn't necessarily a problem.

So you are saying that there is sufficient spare capacity in a VM pipe to serve the possibly hundreds of other customers on it when one is using a quarter of that capacity? I guess I must have several on mine then considering the SamKnows daily average is virtually always a lot less than the headline rate I pay for.

Or perhaps you'd like to expand on "It's not quite that simple"

So long as the pipe doesn't max out it doesn't matter how much of the capacity is sold to a single customer. It's about a combination of how many people are on said capacity and how heavily the capacity is used by each customer.

When the 20Mb product first went live it was on a single 38Mb downstream. When the 10Mb products went live they were on 27Mb or 38Mb downstreams.

Don't obsess over how much downstream capacity a single customer can use. UPC are selling 200Mb downstream on 400Mb downstream service groups. As a general rule people aren't sitting there using 120Mb or 200Mb or whatever 24x7x365.

Capacity downstream is still planned by how many kbps are allocated to each customer and that's exactly how it should be.

Upstream is more problematic in the case of cable as it's way easier to saturate an upstream 24x7x365 simply through a P2P application. VM are quite aware selling 10Mb upstream on an 18Mb channel wasn't wise, however the current 12Mb maximum on a 36Mb bonded group isn't abnormal in cable land at all.

I can show you a cable company whose upstream tiers are 5Mb, 25Mb and 35Mb running on 94.5Mb bonded channel groups, another 5Mb, 10Mb and 20Mb on 67.5Mb. These both compare favourably with VM's 3Mb, 6Mb, 12Mb on 36Mb groups, just about how many modems are in each group.