Quote:
Originally Posted by Kushan
That's not quite how they measure utilisation. I can almost guarantee that no area is 96% utilised because % utilised by itself is almost meaningless.
96% of the total capacity being used would either be completely unusable as that remaining 4% would be whatever's left over out of hours and at peak times congestion would be abysmal OR 96% peak capacity would be absolutely fine because everyone's getting full speed and there's still 4% of capacity left for growth.
Rather, "96%" needs to be qualified with another stat - the time it's at 96% for. Hitting 96% for 5hours+ might be cause for concern, but hitting 96% peak for a few mins is fine. There's always going to be times when all bandwidth is being used - think peak times when a major event is happening, like the world cup. It's generally accepted that you cannot expect Virgin to provision enough capacity for 100% of customers to get 100% of their speed at all times - that's just far too expensive to do. Instead, virgin (And other ISP's) allocate enough capacity so that the majority of the time, people get the speeds they pay for. It's hitting that balance between cost (to you and Virgin) and availability that's tricky.
Years ago, in the bad old days, it was something like 98% capacity used for greater than 90% of the time before Virgin would upgrade the area. When I worked there, it was something like >95% usage for >10% of the time in a 7 day period was when it got logged. Over time, they got more and more proactive with the stats but I don't know what they are today.
It's also worth pointing out that just because an area hit those thresholds doesn't mean it would get scheduled in, just that the ticket would get raised. Areas were prioritised based on budgets and need, i.e. the worst areas got fixed first or the most customers got fixed for the best bang/buck.
|
Thank you for the info. Just passing on the little information I was given by UK Business support.
Generally nobody expects 350 24/7 but when it drops to less than half what you pay for or even lower then questions needs to asked and when you're given some blase response that its to be accepted as that from 'Tech Support' it sums up how they work.
Luckily my area recently went to 24 Downstreams which fixed the issue until obviously they pack more customers onto the cmts or offer a free upgrade. only time will tell.
Having the 2 lines makes it viable for everything really and its under £120 a month total so it's working out atm.
One line for Streaming to twitch/Games/latency required applications.
One line for downloading large files and general YT/Prime/Streaming