Re: VMNG300 92Mbit limit
 

A lot of people think of Liverpool and remember the 1980's but it is quite different here now with many call centres based within an 20 mile radius and quite a few in the city centre, plus many other opportunities locally.

Re: VMNG300 92Mbit limit
 

I must say I've spoken to a few sexy sounding ladies in my banks' call centres, I wonder if they were Liverpudlian

Re: VMNG300 92Mbit limit
 

The are a few HSBC, Barclays and Santander possibly some others.

Re: VMNG300 92Mbit limit
 

so yeah I think that concludes that the VMNG is capable of more than 92mb :D

Re: VMNG300 92Mbit limit
 

https://www.cableforum.co.uk/images/...2013/01/56.png

http://www.speedtest.net/result/2420770062.png

Re: VMNG300 92Mbit limit
 

nice on dude, you should email that to everyone at VM, especially the customer service plebs who tell you you need a shub in order to receive a speed upgrade.

Re: VMNG300 92Mbit limit
 

Its capable but 30meg on each downstream channel is a big ask 24/7

Re: VMNG300 92Mbit limit
 

alot bigger than 25 per channel?

100mbit was sold on 4 channels for quite a while.

Re: VMNG300 92Mbit limit
 

The network was not as busy then, now with all tiers moving to docsis3 I imagine the superhub would hit 120 more often than the vmng300 will during peak times

Re: VMNG300 92Mbit limit
 

No need to call them plebs, most people in customer services are told this information by the higher ups, plus with VM rolling out more than 4 channels which the VMNG300 can only handle, I understand you think its a great modem but its about time you stop with this we all understand you prefer the VMNG300 to the snub.

Re: VMNG300 92Mbit limit
 

Thank you, I came in to say exactly this. CS agents are only repeating what they've been told, it's not their fault. I remember having similar arguments with people who didn't want to give up their old Motorola Modems because they KNEW it could handle 20Mbit (Talking about an SB3100 here).

Re: VMNG300 92Mbit limit
 

it has got nothing to go with me liking the vmng300 and not liking the shub. It is to do with how comfortable VM seem to be getting in lieing to customers, especially when it involves them palming off rubbish cpe to customers which only causes more problems which can be entirely avoided if they they did what they were supposed to and upgraded the customer or provided a decent explanation why not.


I agree and rather than VM blaming the vmng300 for speed and saying it cant do it, I would rather them come out with something like "whilst many customers may enjoy full speed on their vmng300 due to the technology we employ on our network we recommend customers upgrade to the superhub as they will be more likely to achieve full speed". It is VMs fault they havent got the bandwidth their for the vmng300 to use, not the modem's.

Re: VMNG300 92Mbit limit
 

I actually agree with your sentiment, but you're wrong about VM not having the bandwidth for the Ambit 300. It's not just bandwidth, but load balancing. The more channels you're connected to, the less congestion is an issue - if one channel gets heavily congested, you've got more to make up the load. This is part of the benefit of switching to DOCSIS3 over older DOCSIS - surely you've seen people complaining about being on "a bad channel" and reboot hopping to get a better one? The more bonded channels, the better - for everyone.
Plus, Virgin has plenty of other reasons for ditching the Ambit 300 - it's out of support for one and they're currently paying through the nose for firmware updates, plus it's easier on the CS agents if they have to support less modems. Ultimately, they want everyone on a Superhub if possible.

Re: VMNG300 92Mbit limit
 

I understand the reasons behind the shub and why they would want everyone to have one, it makes good business sense. But, if they want to put all their eggs in one baskey so to speak then they should have made sure what they were giving out to customers was up to standard. I am not going to say anymore because I'll start the usual banter we go through everytime :)

Re: VMNG300 92Mbit limit
 

One of my professional roles in the networking field is Performance & Reliability Engineer (for safety of life systems). At risk of blowing my credibilty, I'd agree with you on the load balancing provided that its is actually so. It is indeed right to replace all the VMNG300s with SHs so that in any area no channel imbalance is introduced.

The last thing you want is channel imbalance because that can introduce latency when reassembling the packets distributed and interleaved on the bonded channels.

Finally, VM have the unenvious task of ensuring that SNR is maintained high overall the bonded channels so that there is no tendency on one channel for irrecoverable FEC errors to occur. There's much that can go wrong with 8 bonded channels, IMO and thus infrastructure standard has to be high.

Re: VMNG300 92Mbit limit
 

I don't think anyone's going to argue about the Superhub being an inferior router or whatever - we've heard all that before. However, at least as a Modem, it's no less capable than the Ambit 300.



Indeed, this is probably why Virgin tends to insist on Engineer visits for a lot of installs that could be simple modem swaps, particularly when a customer is going from DOCSIS1/2 to DOCSIS3. While it sounds daft, being that swapping a Modem is easy, as you've stated there's a lot more that can go wrong with it. You seem to see this a lot with virgin, they make questionable decisions with a hint that there's a valid reason behind it that gets lost in the ether.

Re: VMNG300 92Mbit limit
 

That won't help when you still have hundreds of legacy DOCSIS 1/2 modems that can only use the primary channel in any set and cannot be load balanced. They're a far bigger problem than any VMNG300 will ever be...

Re: VMNG300 92Mbit limit
 

Not sure that's entirely true. Some D1 services live on the D3 frequency plan and they, as you say, buggerate the load balancing. But a huge chunk are still on legacy frequencies not yet gathered into the D3 range. But it matters not a jot as to whether it's VMNG300 or Ambit 256 - we are agreed that they buggerate load balancing.

Re: VMNG300 92Mbit limit
 

They do, but VMNG300 being DOCSIS 3 compliant can be load balanced across all channels, just not all at the same time. Say you got 10 VMNG300's across an 8 channel set, 5 could use channels 1-4 and the other 5 would be on channels 5-8. The VMNG300 has a 16-channel wide tuner and can use just about any 4 channels out of 16. Not all need to be on the same subset of channels. DOCSIS 2 modems would all have to be on channel 1.

Well it's not quite that simple but you get the idea. Still nowhere near as bad as a bunch of legacy modems.

Re: VMNG300 92Mbit limit
 

It's a shame as some of these visits are a complete waste of time. I had 2 in a row after my install. After the original swap, the engineer didn't bother checking my power levels and left me with 58 upstream power. The second engineer who was booked to fix the power level told it was perfectly within limit until I told him about my line dropping out and second line telling me high upstream was the cause.

Back on topic my area has recently been upgraded to double speeds. Before the area upgrade my speeds would hit 12000KB/s but now I barely sustain 9000KB/s. Come on VM stop starving our VMNG300 modems :p:

Re: VMNG300 92Mbit limit
 

Indeed it's not as simple because legacy single channel CM's would only be limited to primary channels as and when VM decided to disable MAP on the secondary channels in order to reduce DOCSIS overheads (to increase data payload), otherwise legacy CM's could potentially load balance across any d/s channel configured within their load balance group. ;)

Re: VMNG300 92Mbit limit
 

I was able to change channels on my docsis 1 modem. Its just the usual channel hopping process, turn modem off for long enough then turn it back on again and hope it uses a new channel, so my experience was not that it always used a primary channel.

There is no doubt tho that the docsis3 experience on a docsis1 modem is severely hindered, qas probably remembers when I signed up to 30mbit on the docsis1 modem on the 20mbit service on docsis3 network my speeds were at the time chaotic, I upgraded and got the superhub and then on a docsis3 device they stabilised and that was with a 50% higher speed package also.

Re: VMNG300 92Mbit limit
 

Again there is indeed every doubt you can validly state(or infer) that experience is typical unless you present some degree of objective comparison with some analysis of the linecard types, number of cm's deployed per LC/port and types involved along with load balance groups, channel/frequency plans used.

For example I was quite happily provisioned on an Ambit256 via a D3 compliant CMTS for 18months without a degraded service until migrating to a SHub(with same IP) a couple of months ago. Similarly my son was on Ambit250 legacy (with 20XL tier, and still is!) before migrating to SuperHub over a year ago. However only when both d/s & u/s channels increased could a significant improvement be observed!

That said however using DOCSIS "mixed mode" is going to be finitely less efficient anyway without a doubt but until VM eventually migrate the remainder of their 4million+ BB subscribers it's going to be around for a long time yet. If VM did reduce the number of channels with MAP data and/or had not allocated correct load balance group configurations then your scenario may well have occurred to the detriment of the DOCSIS legacy CM, and perhaps even more so than the D3 unit.

Like most things here it's another pointless argument without supportive evidential data to compare objectively and thus only represents a couple of observations based on a limited statistical sample base.

Re: VMNG300 92Mbit limit
 

horseman my area has had high DS utilisation for years, so when that is combined with a modem that relies on just 1 DS channel its clear it will have issues. My guess if your area had lower DS utilisation than mine.

eg. there is currently a high DS utilisation fault open on my area now (again).

the scenario I had may have been.

DS channels - utilisations
1 - 80%
2 - 90%
3 - 70%
4 - 75%

with all 4 bonded 30mbit throughput available so no visible congestion downloading, but on a d1 modem no single channel had 20mbit throughput available hence congestion.