Re: Virgin Media Q1 2011 Results...
 

Comparing AAISP to Virgin Media is like comparing Fortnum and Masons with Asda. One has extreme price competition the other does not as it appeals to a niche.

VM can't appeal to a niche, they need to sell, sell, sell, cable networks are expensive.

It's not about my standards it's about reality.

Incidentally I didn't make any mention of fixed contention ratios, however I entirely agree with the policy of limiting upgrades to heavily utilised areas. My main issue with VM is the occasional lack of timely upgrades to oversubscribed areas.

Re: Virgin Media Q1 2011 Results...
 

The reality is severe oversubscribed areas break trading standards legislation, regardless of what you think about that. The reality is VM can solve it via various methods quite easily, they are not stukck in a diffilcult position, the reality is they have made a concsious decision to leave people with horrible performance. VM are getting away with this due to lax regulation, with a decent regulator the unlimited farce would be gone long ago and noone would be uploading 24/7 as a result. AAISP do sell to a niche, but that niche is mainly for things like their uk localised technical enhanced support, line monitoring, large ip ranges, managed services, SLA's, prirority fault resolution. The fact they happen to also treat congestion seriously is more a bonus for their business customers although they probably wouldnt tolerate severe congestion that disrupts whatever they doing I suspect as long as their emails work etc. they mostly wont be aware of any congestion that may creep up occasionaly on aaisp's services.

lets forget about the financials of it for now we both disagree on this. Even tho you have made no comment in regards to VM selling something they cant supply and if they should stop unlimited.

My question is what do you think is happening in these so called not oversubscribed but over utilised areas? given that nntp and p2p are throttled down now plus a bunch of other unidentified protocols at any given time. Is someone who isnt using p2p or nntp and staying within STM limits doing something unusual?

Re: Virgin Media Q1 2011 Results...
 

I agree.

They may sugar coat the p2p and usenet throttling down to other things, but in reality I think most agree it comes down to the fact they can't supply the bandwith in certain areas when people are home :P

Whats worse is they made it national instead of targetting areas that have the problem, trying to make it look like it happens everywhere.. but it doesn't. And as said by Chrysalis its a legal loophole they have been navigating and without stringent overseers VM and other ISP's will continue to benefit from it.

Re: Virgin Media Q1 2011 Results...
 

Show me where VM have been successfully nailed by Trading Standards for oversubscription please.

This applies to any ISP anywhere, it's always a question of money.

The UK's regulation isn't lax by any stretch. Excessive interventionism has a lot to answer for within the UK's market. If you want lax regulation see Canada.

You need to tell AAISP this as they make a selling point of their congestion management.

http://aaisp.net.uk/broadband-speed.html
http://clueless.aaisp.net.uk/congestion.cgi

No let's not, it's completely about the financials. You can't just say 'Let's forget about x as you haven't discussed y' and expect me to immediately drop x and defend my position on y.

I have made many comments in the past about unlimited services which I'm not going to go back over. It should be quite well known that while I would prefer a service that's more expensive and of a higher quality I entirely appreciate why VM feel the need to advertise and offer the pricing they do. Their services necessarily appeal to the lowest common denominator.

As far as the costs go blame the regulator you describe as lax for regulating ISPs into a race to the bottom in terms of prices and quality.

Given that the congestion is nearly always upstream and I'm not overly convinced of the upstream throttling's effectiveness I suspect you're quite aware of what's happening.

There is, simply, virtually no legitimate reason for a home user to upload extremely large amounts of data for any length of time. Perhaps a single use cloud backup but extremely large amounts of data remain the province of P2P for now. There's the very odd Slingbox user but these are a tiny minority of the whole. VM need to make the upstream shaping more granular ideally but, as already noted, this is just the early attempt at protocol management and more will no doubt follow.

Re: Virgin Media Q1 2011 Results...
 

why?

I can guess and my guess is the congestion is actually also caused by normal traffic like ack packets and video streaming etc. things that are taking off and are reasonably popular, for things like live blogs. The shaping seems brutal enough as we seeing complaints of unuseable services going at sub dialup speeds.

Wrong type of regulation, its regulating competition but not consumer experience.

They havent, trading standards if get involved in individual cases normally lead to VM (or any company for that matter) offering some kind of bribe to the consumer or personal attention given to their situation which stops anything from escalating.

When have I said otherwise? You know money is an issue but yet dont see raising more of it from customers as the solution.

Lets say I was supplying you with goods. I then realise after we signed contracts that to supply you with what you paying for doesnt make me as much money as I liked so I think start diluting the goods watering them down so to speak so I make more money, you find this acceptable practice? Or you buy a can of lager from the supermarket but its only half full because the lager company says they forced to by competition to sell at low price but can only make money by half filling it? thats ok? profit comes before providing what you market and sell?

What you basically saying is that heavy users arent profiteable, I agree with this statement. This is of course true for decades and applies to any isp. Your opinion is loss making users should not be subsidised and its ok for consumers sharing resources with them to have a 'not fit for purpose' service (look up not fit for purpose on trading standards), unfortenatly this type of service and anything bandwidth related works on subsidy with the exception of PAYG type services. It works on averages, Its highly likely VM actually underprovide capacity in areas with lower usage than average.

Funny tho when I showed you my service situation in february you considered it unacceptable and that was the same thing, 'high utilisation' as described by VM.

Re: Virgin Media Q1 2011 Results...
 

Because they have to. VM aren't some reseller of BT services who can add a 100Mbit/s pipe here and there when needed, they have an access network covering 48% of the UK population which needs constant maintenance along with an optical network that passes an even larger proportion of the population.

The fixed costs to VM just of existing are considerable, they need a large amount of customers to spread these fixed costs across.

Every 500 or less homes on the VM network has kilometres of coaxial trunks and drops, splitters, taps and bridges and a few active RF amplifiers feeding homes. This is connected to an laser which may need intermediate amplification on its way to hub site or headend via an EDFA. Each hub site needs power, security, maintenance, optical power balancing.

Each head end takes signals both from the VM national optical network and satellite feeds, so the various multiplexing and demultiplexing hardware is required, along with the downstream lasers, upstream optical receivers, patch panels, QAMs to transport the digital TV multiplexes, VoD servers and distribution, CMTSes, other access and transport routers.

The telco network requires its own resilient optical transport in order to maintain the Ofcom mandated reliability standards.

Most of these costs are fixed or increment minimally depending on the number of customers, the cable network needs as many customers as possible to divide these costs between, cable is extremely CapEx intensive.

Re: Virgin Media Q1 2011 Results...
 

What has VM not been a reseller have to do with them having to pander to the "I want everything for nothing" brigade? Even BT themselves have a usage cap on their cheaper products.

I would love to see you try that argument to a judge.

Judge - So why did you not give a service fit for purpose?
Defendant - Because I was making no money, surely the need to make a profit comes before the law?
Judge - Not quite.

Nice to see you completely ignored my scenario points ignition, do you think this high utilisation issue is 1-2% or a much higher number like double digits? if its very low then to subsidise those areas to a acceptable service should be very possible. If its over 10% then I think its defenitly wrong to call it unexpected high usage and is a simple matter of selling something cant provide.

I am not sure why you keep going on about costs, trading standards as an example dont care one bit for such things. In basic transactions the seller offers something for a price, the buyer agrees to pay for it or doesnt. It is 100% up to the seller to ensure that price is enough to provide what they selling as fit for purpose and it makes them money.

You have gave no valid reason. VM do not have to sell unlimited 10mbit connections for the price they do. It is 100% their choice. They do not have to dish out retention deals to 10s if not 100s of thousands of people, again their choice. You have even said yourself that you think people bluff and would likely not leave anyway if retention deals were withdrawn, these things suck money out of the company. Someone who knows what they doing would budget for extra bandwidth in student areas from day 1, it would be taken into account for the price on the whole customer base.

Re: Virgin Media Q1 2011 Results...
 

Sorry, are you saying that Acks are a cause of congestion?

Do you know how large these are? 40 bytes. Per 1500 bytes downstream. It is impossible for them to cause congestion. Are you also aware of TurboDox and PHS, both functions which minimise TCP overheads on cable networks?

Video streaming isn't close to mainstream, very few people feel the need to display their lives online and the number of live webcams operating are minimal. P2P is still over 75% of all upstream traffic according to Arbor Networks.

Nothing stopping customers from going elsewhere if unhappy with the service.

In other words you have no evidence of your comment as it has not been tested.

You don't seem to appreciate how price sensitive most consumers are. We still see posts complaining about pricing both here and elsewhere.

Last I checked you are buying a can of lager with a fixed amount in it, 440ml, 500ml, 568ml.

VM describe everything as 'high utilisation' - they are hardly likely to say 'Yes we've put too many modems on the port.' High utilisation is a perfectly accurate description, it is after all the amount of utilisation on the port that causes issues, not the number of devices on it.

---------- Post added at 12:26 ---------- Previous post was at 12:12 ----------

I am working, which sadly leaves me little time to debate this.

I have given complete explanations, I am offering no excuses merely stating things as VM and every other cable company see them.

Your points of view on financial matters are rather unusual (asking companies to donate dividends from shares you own to charity for example), I'm being pragmatic. VM do what they do for a reason, I may not agree with it but they don't price their products low for their health and don't market them as they do for fun. I disagree with their advertising of unlimited but understand why they do it.

I have no idea what % of areas suffer utilisation issues, it will be single digits, more precisely than that I've no idea.

It is interesting that you complain about a 'one size fits all' contention ratio, while you also complain about VM charging too little when that 'one size fits all' price is perfectly adequate to pay for capacity to serve the vast majority of the customer base.

You want a 'one size fits all' contention ratio that's high enough to ensure that even areas with extremely high usage per active modem run perfectly, with a price to match. This is not a viable business model for them. Dropping contention down to the 10:1 or less that extremely heavy users require along with charging a price to match isn't an option, increasing prices to everyone to ensure that heavily utilised areas run without issue isn't an option and is unfair, expecting others to subsidise the heavy usage of the few is unfair.

You comment on limits, sure the FUP where they warn customers who are heavily using their services at peak times is a form of control?

As far as fit for purpose goes that's a matter of perspective. Many aren't working from a home office managing web servers via their connections and don't notice impact from a relatively minimal amount of jitter. Oddly I don't notice particularly even though my current connection's jitter is awful.

Pinging www.linx.net [195.66.232.53] with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 195.66.232.53: bytes=32 time=40ms TTL=51
Reply from 195.66.232.53: bytes=32 time=27ms TTL=51
Reply from 195.66.232.53: bytes=32 time=23ms TTL=51
Reply from 195.66.232.53: bytes=32 time=25ms TTL=51

I'm not getting into a debate on the morality of this. You've made statements regarding goods being fit for purpose, etc, that are untested in this context. I'm not interested in how moral or otherwise it is for VM to allow certain nodes to become heavily utilised as I don't see it as an issue of morality. If people have issues with the service they can take their business elsewhere just as I did.

We cannot have the services we do at the prices we do and expect SLAs or performance guarantees. Even Comhem, who I am a huge fan of, on their speed guarantee merely lower prices to the next tier down if customers hit slow speeds and don't promise anything in terms of latency and jitter as well as only promising that the tier will outperform the next one down or 50% of maximum which in the case of their 100Mbit service means anything above 50.01Mbit they consider acceptable and anything over 100Mbit acceptable on their 200Mbit. Latency and jitter do not form a part of this performance guarantee, as they don't on any other cable service worldwide.

Re: Virgin Media Q1 2011 Results...
 

most of what we have discussed is irrelevant, trading standards only care about if a product is fit for purpose, they dont care how much it costs the supplier or how much it is sold for.

You do seem to have a short memory, because when I mentioned not fit for purpose I am talking about web sites timing out, streams not working, speeds not close to claimed typical speeds. Not sure why you consider such a situation acceptable but you do certianly hold the financial needs of a company too highly. Gamers care for jitter but I guess in your corporate mindset they are irrelevant as its all about looking after the mass market web browsers. The odd ping of 40ms is not a major issue but pings varying in the 100s spiking to 1000s certianly is.

I am merely talking about maintaining standards to the point mainstream activities are useable, which isnt the case across VM's entire footprint. Advertised benefits of the service should all be useable.

Incidently if VM sold a broadband service with a low rated speed or 'no' rated speed, made no claims of typical speed, made no claims of how fast movies download, no claims of good for gaming then I would be abit more forgiving although it would still be debatable if areas like brighton have a service fit for purpose.

I know why they advertise as they do as they scared of churn, people are more concerned about customer count than profit. Again tho this is irrelevant. What fit for purpose is the subject, costs, profit all irrelevant, the only thing relevant is if the service is sold as advertised.

You right I could go elsewhere but it leaves 2 issues.

1 - they still getting away with it to other customers, this is my gripe, I dont have a "im alright jack" attitude, in fact right now my service is quite good, yet here I am still moaning for others who have a service not fit for purpose. A service fit for purpose is not 1:1 with SLA's so dont go overboard with what I am on about.
2 - the fact that the competition is all poor, the alternative for me is adsl where BT have not invested in my area at all and the service from any isp will be poor as a result. perhaps I should just keep hopping from company to company if I dont like any right?

The attitude's I see towards large business is shocking from some in this country. Ofcom telling isp's they can do what they want as long as they explain first to people they misselling products, BT getting away with phorm even tho the EU clearly stated its illegal what they did.

the fact is VM can fix issues it is within their control and some of their customers have a product not fit for purpose and as such VM have breached trading standard laws to those customers, the fact they havent been done for it doesnt make it ok. By that point of thinking if I burgle a house its fine as long as I am not caught. VM may make a bit less money by doing the right thing but thats life.

On my shares. one company is one I want to have a share for token value, in truth its a shocking investment and I am very unlikely to make a profit on it but like to own part of a F1 team. The other company I expect the shares to go up in value and is nice to get a say as a shareholder but considering whats going on in that company I was shocked when they allocated funds to dividends. My message was more to say put the house in order before giving out gifts, and the charity suggestion was if they really insist on sending it somewhere then send it to charity instead.

Re: Virgin Media Q1 2011 Results...
 

Don't think I ever suggested this was a consideration for TS, however given that you can't mention when TS have been involved in a case over broadband performance it could be said that they are irrelevant until such a time as things go that far.

I don't remember commenting on 'fit for purpose' beyond that it's a matter of perspective. You're looking to disagree with me for statements I didn't make. Too concerned by my 'corporate mindset' perhaps.

I largely agree, however it's all about the small print. Performance and suitability for any task cannot be guaranteed.

You would be forgiving, you'd also not have a cable ISP, they would be bankrupt. Whether we like it or not the potentially but not unequivocally massaged statistics say that the majority of VM's customer base have a service that is fit for purpose by any definition.

I never suggested anything about what makes 'fit for purpose' as such. Again you're tackling me on points I didn't make.

The comments on profit are actually perhaps not so valid given VM's recent financial results. I would have agreed with you but the numbers suggest otherwise.

I wasn't actually talking about you, my exact words were 'customers' not 'you' or 'Chrysalis'. If you wish to be some kind of broadband consumer champion that is, of course, your prerogative, however customers can most certainly leave if they choose to.

That's what we do with every other privately delivered product if we don't like our current service. If a company fails why reward this failure with continued custom?

I agree with many of the issues around ISP advertising. I entirely reject the EU's opinion on the Phorm issue, we're allegedly still a sovereign nation not some subservient state of the EU so their 'opinion' is entirely irrelevant. It was also as far as I'm aware not legally binding.

Which trading standards laws would VM be breaking with areas that are oversubscribed?

Most companies don't exist to 'do the right thing'. That's not what a profit making enterprise is in business for, it's not why most investors invest. They have a fiduciary duty to supply the highest possible return to their shareholders. They have a legal duty to obey the relevant laws in the jurisdictions in which they trade.

Dividends aren't 'gifts'. They increase share price and encourage further investment in companies. Do you think that pension funds and other long term investments are constantly trading every share in order to make payouts? No, a goodly part of their income is from the steady flow of dividend payments. In addition these dividends both incentivise further investment by offering a regular return and incentivise holding onto the shares for longer term reducing volatility.

On the one hand you complain about companies being money obsessed on the other you think they hand out 'gifts' presumably out of the goodness of their black corporate hearts. Interesting.

Re: Virgin Media Q1 2011 Results...
 

fair point on the dividends I guess although it seemed bizarre to me to pay them out at the back of a poor year. Probably to give an illusion to shareholders things werent that bad.

Re: Virgin Media Q1 2011 Results...
 

In the case of underperforming companies it's basically to bribe shareholders into not selling the stock wholesale, further pushing the price down.

Re: Virgin Media Q1 2011 Results...
 

I'm just struggling to see how VM isn't "fit for purpose" when they make no guarantees over the service they provide.

Chrysalis' entire argument seems to revolve around that, yet I'm not seeing where VM are falling down on their obligations.
They sell you an internet connection that is capable of up to a certain speed. There is no doubt that they do this. Your connection, barring faults, is capable of reaching the speed you subscribe to.

They at no point say you'll ever actually get that speed though, there is no SLA. If you can connect to the internet and your connection stays up then guess what, they're fulfilling their obligations to you.

It's up to you as a consumer to then decide if the service you get from that is actually worth paying for. Maybe in some areas it isn't, in which case, go elsewhere.

To expect VM to throw money at the network to subsidise high usage areas is frankly crazy. No company in their right mind would throw good money after bad. They are there to make a profit. VM are in enough debt as it is without them having to lose money on areas like that.

Re: Virgin Media Q1 2011 Results...
 

thedon the basic defenition of broadband suggests it is capable of certian things.

so in your view if a broadband connection cannot even load websites properly, cannot use any multimedia sites without issues and is useless for gaming it is still fit for purpose?

Also VM do make various claims on their website that their service is capable of certian things.

My argument is not around any guarantuees as such but one would expect basic internet applications to work.

Doubt me? ask trading standards yourself, its the responsibility of the seller to provide what they selling as fit for purpose.

The speed is a grey area which is why I am not saying much on it, my point is regarding things like iplayer, web browsing and gaming working.

Re: Virgin Media Q1 2011 Results...
 

According to Wikipedia the term has never been formally defined but I think the term is commonly used to refer to any speed over 256k; unless someone else knows any better?