Re: Cant Quite Grasp something
 

No..No..No, there was NO takeover of NTL by Virgin Media. Firstly NTL and Telewest merged, NTL was the larger company but for legal reasons; on paper at least Telewest took over NTL and many of the senior managers of Telewest ended up in control of the merged company.

Shortly after that the new company was rebranded and called itself Virgin Media, they licensed the right from Richard Branson to use the Virgin name and that's it. The company and the network infrastructure etc. are exactly the same as it was before-and speaking entirely from my own experience, I had a good internet service from NTL and now have exactly the same from VM, certainly no better or no worse.

Which is not of course to say that other people don't have horrendous problems with VM, but who is to say that these problems wouldn't have happened anyway? It's hard to see how just calling a company by a different name can have any effect. I suppose it's possible that the merged company hasn't kept up with network upgrades etc. and increased numbers of users and traffic has brought an already creaking system to it's knees in some areas but it's just speculation.

Lastly Richard Branson does not own the company, he does not run the company, he probably has absolutely no influence in the running of it either other than the fact he is a large shareholder in the company.

Re: Cant Quite Grasp something
 

I don't have any problems with my 20mb service .. seems to work OK, phone is good too, it's the awful TV service I have issues with. Probably because I've got a old Telewest Pace box (the grey/blue one)
I would be a big headache to move to different suppliers .. the cable is bloody convenient in that regard!

Re: Cant Quite Grasp something
 

Tackle the end result and not the root cause, you should get a job in government, there's possibly some taxation scope here ;)

Re: Cant Quite Grasp something
 

Unlike the never-ending trail of folk who discover that, after being upgraded to 20Mb/s, they can only get 5-10Mb/s?
Or that ridiculous STM limits (currently in trial areas but rumoured to be extended across the country) mean I can only make use of that speed boost when I don't want to use it?

That's precisely my point.
What's the sodding point of making it theoretically faster and therefore more tempting to download more, when VM know damn well that it's more than likely to overload the network, reducing performance for everyone?
The amount I want to download isn't likely to increase by much, just the theoretical speed at which I'll be able to grab it. But if everyone else downloads more, my overall speed will be reduced through congestion and more stringent STM limits will be applied to keep the network running.

If UBR congestion will be significantly reduced once DOCSIS3 is operational (presuming that 20Mb connections are switched over), why not wait until then to make the upgrades?
The only justification I can think of is cheap, willy-waving at supposed ADSL competition which is already proving to be a PR nightmare for VM.
The sooner they recognise that it's not possible for cable BB to compete with ADSL on price but they can wipe the floor with them on reliability and consistency the better for us all. And that's exactly what VM will lose by 'chasing the speed merchants'!

Re: Cant Quite Grasp something
 

As I said in my previous post on last page.

The problem is not just Virgins, all ISP's are experiencing or are worried about this in the future, due to VOD, IPTV/BBC I_Player and other such very heavy data traffic.

It only takes about 300 people to use I-Player in a city to jam it up for all other users as it is very heavy on the amount of pipes it uses. Other Video traffic have similar effects on any network, be it an ISP's or a Private company network. Hence why any IT staff, if they are any good at their job, in private networks block all ports that these operate on.

The cost to upgrade newtorks to hadle this web 2.0 content is enormous and runs into Billions of pounds for the UK as a whole. Hence why ISP's are looking at charging suppliers for their content to be allowed on their networks as one possible solution. Another may to charge the user to access this content.

Re: Cant Quite Grasp something
 

can't the BBC have it's own newsgroup server and get people to download their programs from that?

I thought I-Player used P2P system, which will hog the network - surely it's better for people to download only, rather and uploading as well

PS Magilla - do I know you?

Re: Cant Quite Grasp something
 

A central server and the BW required costs money. Thats why a decent news provider costs money and most ISP's free news services are rubbish.

The whole idea behind torrents is that it uses users BW instead of BW from a central server. Unfortunately it is the ISP's and not the users on a fixed fee who have to pay for this extra BW. Remember for each say 1gig downloaded via torrent the responsable torrenter gives back at least 1gig, preferably more. This represents at least double the BW required for the same amount of data downloaded from a central server.

Don't forget also that the ISP has to provide the hardware necessary to handle all this extra data transfer caused by the uploading.

It's very easy to see why ISP's would be extremely pleased to be able to rid their networks of what they see as the 'curse' of torrenting.