Okay, understood.
In my response to "no major issues", it depends on the area due to the availability of other services and with regards to comments about Virgin's network, some area's are covered by multiple headends, where some are covered by one...
This isn't actually a problem. Areas are covered by multiple hubsites, customers don't necessarily connect directly to headends, these are a slightly different beast from the hubsites where most of the CMTS are.
The amount of customers on a particular hubsite / headend isn't an issue as long as there's enough equipment in that hubsite / headend. It's about the number of CMTS and CMTS ports available more than anything else.
There's also the the networks that have been upgraded with 10Gig links and some still hanging around the 1Gig link mark...
The VM network isn't like an Openreach exchange. Each CMTS has multiple 1Gb connections back to a pair of core network routers at the very least, and these backhauls are upgraded to 10Gb as required. It's very uncommon for there to be issues with backhaul between CMTS and core, and nearly as uncommon for there to be issues between core and backbone though not unknown.
There are no hubsites relying on 1Gb links. The links where the 1Gb and 10Gb connections from CMTS to core routers aggregate are 10, 40 or 100Gb.
So for instance, the network I was covered by in Birmingham had 11/12 headends and that covered between a 25-35% of South Birmingham, where I'm living now the network has been plagued with capacity and various other issues for a good 5+ years.
I don't think Birmingham would need 11-12 headends or, for that matter, hubsites. Birmingham has 7 hubsites and a single headend as that's just how the network ended up being built.
The entire city of Leeds, about 3/4 the size of Birmingham lives off a single headend and a couple of hubsites, Leeds Seacroft and Leeds South, Middleton Grove. Seacroft is home to 24 CMTS, Leeds South 12.
Aztec West has 32 CMTS and covers Bristol and surrounds on its own. Reading, with 24, covers a good part of Berkshire and Hampshire on its own including Reading, Basingstoke, Newbury, Thatcham, Wokingham and Bracknell.
Neither 10Gb or 1Gb would be much use trying to backhaul a couple of hundred thousand customers. Many Virgin Media hubsites are not equivalent to a single Openreach exchange and the headend / core sites would be equivalent to the 21CN core nodes.
However the network here has 7 headends covering the whole city (maybe equivalent to whole of South Birmingham)... so utilisation issues affect area's differently depending on the availability of services from other providers and the headend availability.
Headend availability is irrelevant to utilisation issues. What's in the hubsites and headends, alongside how deep fibre is, is what it's all about.
One thing that is odd though, the issues with the network local to me are despite there being near 100% FTTx availability and my previous network that copes very well has 50/50 availability with one of its main area's having no coverage by FTTx at all (and ADSL averages of around 3-5Mb/s)
Your issues are purely a symptom of problems at the Crawley hubsite. They aren't related to anything at Croydon, your headend, or the backbone sites deeper into the VM network.
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) I knew about the networks issues with layout from the area manager... I wish they could of said something about the issues with physical capacity in the first place, it would of probably kept me a wee bit calmer about the situation.