Vfast questions Hawkinge (Folkestone) area.

I'm currently on a very well performing unlimited ADSL2+ service syncing around 19Mbps with 1Mbps upload.
With no hope of FTTC in the next year or so I've been thinking of trying out the Vfast 24Mbps service, mainly for the vastly higher upload figure but maybe a bit extra download as well.

I've just fired of an email to them with some questions however is there anyone in the Hawkinge (Folkestone) area that can give some feedback on the network performance?

Have 3 kids using voip and gaming so stable latency is just as important to me as the throughput.
Any feedback on how they manage contention? E.g. I'd prefer slowdown to packet loss and high pings. Also couldn't see if they traffic shape any protocols?

Other issue I have is that the 'normal' background usage in our house of 5 is around 200GB / month. By background I mean without any large downloads etc, just browsing, streaming, voip and gaming so not maxing the connection.
Probably add another 50GB or so to account for larger high speed stuff we could schedule overnight.
Have asked if this would fit into their FUP as I consider it very high usage.

Finally, is the quoted max 24Mbps the actual potential throughput or like ADSL do you just get around 84% of it?

Thanks
Gary

I can't give you any answers specific to the Folkestone area but here is my 2pence.

From my VFast connection (24mbit down / 10mbit up) served from the Dunkirk mast (half way between Canterbury and Faversham).

Pinging www.bbc.net.uk [212.58.244.68] with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 212.58.244.68: bytes=32 time=8ms TTL=55
Reply from 212.58.244.68: bytes=32 time=7ms TTL=55
Reply from 212.58.244.68: bytes=32 time=8ms TTL=55
Reply from 212.58.244.68: bytes=32 time=8ms TTL=55
Reply from 212.58.244.68: bytes=32 time=7ms TTL=55
Reply from 212.58.244.68: bytes=32 time=7ms TTL=55
Reply from 212.58.244.68: bytes=32 time=8ms TTL=55
Reply from 212.58.244.68: bytes=32 time=6ms TTL=55
Reply from 212.58.244.68: bytes=32 time=7ms TTL=55
Reply from 212.58.244.68: bytes=32 time=6ms TTL=55

Ping statistics for 212.58.244.68:
Packets: Sent = 10, Received = 10, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 6ms, Maximum = 8ms, Average = 7ms

Tracing route to www.bbc.net.uk [212.58.246.90]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms unknown [192.168.1.1]
2 3 ms 3 ms 3 ms 202.88.80.arpa.orbital.net [80.88.202.20]
3 3 ms 4 ms 4 ms 202.88.80.arpa.orbital.net [80.88.202.19]
4 6 ms 6 ms 7 ms ge0.ln1.thn.orbital.net [80.88.216.113]
5 8 ms 9 ms 9 ms bbc-linx.pr01.thdow.bbc.co.uk [195.66.224.103]
6 * * * Request timed out.
7 16 ms 10 ms 8 ms ae0.er01.cwwtf.bbc.co.uk [132.185.254.93]
8 8 ms 11 ms 14 ms 132.185.255.165
9 7 ms 8 ms 6 ms bbc-vip011.cwwtf.bbc.co.uk [212.58.246.90]

Trace complete.

There are 6 people in our household and I would say that our usage has been at 200GB or higher at times.

After my younger brother had ignored my instructions (downloaded 15GB+ games from STEAM during the early evening/peak times) I had an email from VFast that said "As a rough guideline we consider anything over 150GB per month or 10GB per day to be on the excessive side, but having said that if large downloads are done out of hours it is not as much of a problem.".

Support/Customer service are excellent. I've had a few problems over the 2 years of service but VFast have been great at resolving all issues.

Finally I've had the maximum download speed out of the connection at various times of the day (both download and upload). STEAM is pretty good at saturating the download and hitting the maximum obtainable speeds (shame it doesn't have a built-in speed limiter).

Thanks for that Yaz.
Excellent stats!

Sounds like I may be over the edge of what would be acceptable with them. I'll see what they come back with.
Just calculated our average daily rate (without the big download days) at 6.5 GB which blows through the 150GB figure you were quoted.
Think the only time it goes over 10 in a day is when we download large files etc. Having 3 Steam accounts in the household doesn't help!

I don't want to be stressing too much over usage. I came from AAISP (maximum usage anxiety!) to an unlimited provider and I am a much more relaxed person because of it

Looking at your sig you seem to get the full 24 and 10 as real throughput which answers one of my other questions.