Gateway Load Balancing

The Zen Internet Service Alerts have reported that "the DSL gateways will be load balanced as part of some general network maintenance" about twice a week so far this month. This seems a lot to me.

I do appreciate Zen's having the courtesy to notify its customers before starting the work, but is there an underlying problem, or is this normal?

JPL

I think it depends on how you define a problem. To me it indicates the centrals are getting quite full (which could be veiwed as a problem), but at the same time it seems to be standard inudstry practice, so it's normal too.

It all points at their pipes getiing full. Thats why they are putting caps on legacy and upped the price per gigabyte. They probably have seen the problem coming and those were the steps they decided to take to aleviate the problem, the question is are they also going to invest in more bandwidth? we'll never know

I also believe this is the case that the pipes are getting full. Zens network used to be super stable etc.

Now im seeing this almost on a weekly basis depending on the pipe im connected too etc.

http://www.zen22204.zen.co.uk/graph.png

My exchange is green and download speed remains ok but then im only on legacy 1meg so i doubt id notice speed problems with there central pipes unless it got really bad.

blackmesa8

same here, intermittend PPP connection drops (not DSL), disconnections from BF2142 and high pings/low downloads (I'm on full 8Meg (sync), speed is varying between 1.5MBit and 7 since two weeks)

so yes, we can make the assumption that ZEN is now (as Entanet and others) maxing out their pipes.... say "hello" to MaxDSL *fg*

maybe Zen should invest some money in a 1000 miles long fibre-optical cable(s) and connect it to a "residential" home in Germany / Cologne

NetCologne (small LLU provider) announced today that they have started connecting HOME users to their fibre-optic network backbone

(http://www.netcologne.de/presse/nc_presse_meldung_16808.php)

down : 10 MBit/s - 40

I hate to do a "don't mention the war", but the reason why much of Germany finds the installation of fibre so easy is because much of it was totally rebuilt after WW2, with American and British money. Cologne was almost totally destroyed, so the infrastructure of post-war Cologne is rather more modern than most places in the UK. In central London there are whole streets where it's impossible to lay any more fibre, because they are already full with a mixture of water, gas, sewage pipes, and electricity and data cables.

Why don't they do what they did in that old guiness advert.
1 street at a time you do everything gas, water, electric, telephone (not just bt). The main cost seems to come from digging up the road, but if more than one company is doing this the cost would come down. Of course you would have to close down a street at a time. You could call it "rebuild britain" as our infrastructure is pretty crappy compared to japan and others.

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1 street at a time you do everything gas, water, electric, telephone (not just bt).

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A nice idea in theory; in practice much more difficult to achieve. For one thing, you need to co-ordinate the plans for several different utility companies (and even for telecoms just think how many providers might want to place their own cables/ducts in the ground!), not to mention that each of these utilities will have differing priorities and different investment programmes.

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The main cost seems to come from digging up the road, but if more than one company is doing this the cost would come down.

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It's true that the main cost of laying a duct tends to be the civils, but as to whether the cost reduction would be that significant is another matter. The road might have to be closed for longer for example, since each utility won't be able to work in the road at the same time (I wouldn't much fancy trying to lay gas, water and electricity all at the same time).

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our infrastructure is pretty crappy compared to japan and others.

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As has been mentioned elsewhere (perhaps another thread?) one of the reasons for this is that many countries have had to significantly rebuild their infrastructures post-war. There are also significant differences in the population densities which contribute to how easy or difficult it is to provide high-speed technologies. Japan (taking your example) has a much higher population density that the UK, which means that a larger percentage of the population can be served easily with copper or fibre (much more effective to run fibre into a building that may have 100+ individuals living in it that fibre to homes in the UK where the average occupancy would be much less, say 4 or 5 individuals*). It also means that distances to exchanges and the like are much shorter and more likely to be within the performance limits of technologies such as ADSL.

* - not sure what the average occupancy is in the UK but the point remains that it will be a low figure in comparison to countries such as Japan.

fibre in post-1945-Germany ? didn't know that

well, "Deutsche Telekom" put fibre into East-Germany in the 1990's ... a "too modern" network and hence nobody is able to get DSL there

who had his own phone in Britain in the 50's or 60's ? Have you ever seen a telephone-pole in Germany (after 70's) ?

I guess the main difference is that THEY upgraded their network once-per-decade and BT thinks "why change it when it's working"... "why put this cable underground if the birds need something to sit on"...

BT 21CN network ? well, let's see how this "innovative" network will look like in 2015 (compared to other countries)

Germany dispensing with poles was what started the whole war in the first place, was it not?

Perhaps if they hadn

Have to disagree on this.

When my parents first ordered a phone from the Post Office (pre BT days) in about 1965 it took 6 months to get a line. This was in an urban area. The good old state controlled GPO didn't invest enough to even put in the basic infrastructure. This was quite normal at the time. The situation was little different in 1976 when I got my first flat in outer London. The phone was connected just before my first 6 month lease expired.

Anyone who thinks state controlled telephones is a good idea can't have been around before BT was created in the run up to privatisation.

I hate to say this, but that was very funny, Mike!

I thank you!

I'll add fuel to the flames with the middle ground. I think Dave's point is a valid one; the privatisation of the GPO/BT in the way it was done was not ultimately the best way to do it. I believe that in order to truely break the monopoly, BT should have been split there and then into two distinct parts; one charged with responsibility for the national infrastructure, and one charged with the task of delivering phone services and the like to consumers - in much the same way as the old gas board was split into BG and Transco; one for carrying across the UK, the other for "selling" to consumers.

In that way, the customer-facing part of BT would have been forced to compete equally with all the other telcos as a provider, with no direct ownership of the national infrastructure.