Quote:
Originally Posted by Kushan
Not necessarily on your street. Think of your connection and where it goes - you have a coaxial cable coming from your house to the green box somewhere on your street, all your neighbours connect to that same green box. That green box will have it's own connection to a hub where other green boxes connect to. Depending on where you are, there might be an even bigger hub those hubs connect to and so on and so forth until you hit a backbone/link site that Virgin connects to the rest of the internet with.
If anywhere along those connections doesn't have the capacity to deal with everyone having faster speeds, it will need upgrading. So it might be that the green box on your street needs upgrading, or it might be the hub that green box connects to, or it might be somewhere further up the line.
Furthermore, the point isn't that you get full speed now, so what's the issue? The issue is if they open the floodgates and give everyone faster speeds, you won't get full speed, you'll get congestion. When enough people use enough bandwidth on your local node, they sometimes have to split it - akin to taking half the people connected to a green box and putting them on a new green box (or a new hub further up the line, etc.). Sometimes you'll even lose downstream channels as a result of this, but overall capacity is boosted all the same.
Virgin used to not care about this - they'd double everyone's speed and as a result, nobody would get that speed, everyone would just get congestion and it would get worse and worse. Never mind going from 200 to 350, your connection would drop to sub-10mbit if you were lucky. It made your connection almost unusable. Congestion is a bit like a dam busting, if you don't hit the capacity it's all gravy but as soon as you do then buffers start to bloat, packets start to drop and the whole thing falls apart.
You'd then have to wait months (or worse) for them to upgrade the area because it was all reactive and not proactive - and with everyone jumping the gun and getting mad speed boosts at once, it just crippled the network in huge areas for a long time.
As frustrating as it is waiting for the speed upgrades, it's by far the better option. It's better you get full-speed at 200Mbit now and have to wait 6 months to get boosted than to get "350Mbit" in name only but actually suffer serious congestion for 6 months.
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That makes a lot of sense but it is very annoying VM offer 300Mb as standard on the VIP package yet can't deliver it to certain places. In my eyes, it shouldn't be standard until all areas can receive it.
To add to that how the heck is a paying customer supposed to know when they can upgrade to something they are paying for and how long this 'issue' will continue. It's not a very fair system in my view.