Best way to escalate a utilisation fault?
 

We have been suffering with a utilisation fault on our cable (to sotn8) for over 18 months now and I would welcome ideas on how I could raise the profile of the fault in an attempt to expedite it (if possible).

The first fault (F002097435) started life on 30th July 2012 and recently has been closed (27th Mar 2014) and a new one has taken its place: F002668758. This started life on 12 Sep 2013 and is still open.

The work requires resegmentation work to be carried out but this normally, from what I can gather, takes around 6 months, sometime less, sometimes more.

The slowdown in speeds follow the usual pattern: slower in the evenings and at weekends with speeds sometimes under 20Mbps on a 152Mbps service. I have seen slower speeds for utilisation faults so I guess things could be worse but it has been dragging on for a while now.

I was wondering if there is any mileage in trying to escalate this problem within VM to get closure on this fault? Support says they are not allow to contact the Network group who handle these works and so are unable to shed any light on the real state of the work.

Options I can think of are:

1. write letter (on paper) to Complaints section
2. email CEO office (VM and/or LG)
3. contact Network group (somehow) to inquire of real world status
4. do nothing

The artificial fix dates that are given customers does raise the question if VM are deliberately misleading customers here. An estimate is normally defined as the output of calculating approximately the amount, extent, magnitude, position, or value of something. In these cases, no calculation is being done, instead an arbitrary date is assigned.

Until an estimate can be done by Network then no fix date should be assigned .. once they assess the labour, capex, permits, etc. required for the works then they can assign a provisional fix date which of course can be reviewed based on real world progress.

The cynic in me would say that if VM told the customer of the real world estimate, they risk the customers leaving but if they drip feed short term promises then more customers would decide to stay ...

Interestingly this ties in with BT's "when will my cabinet be enabled for FTTC" estimates .. same approach is taken here as well. We live in a city where FTTC has been available for getting on for 3 years but when the Availability Date for our cab nears, it magically gets assigned to 3 months time .. been like this for last couple of years.

Wouldn't it be funny if car garages operated on the same fix date principles? "When will my car be fixed"? .. Oh next week sir, on Monday .. Monday arrives .. "I have come to collect my car" .. Ah .. Really sorry Sir, your car will be now ready week Tuesday ... week Tuesday comes around .. "My car? Can I collect it?" I am really sorry Sir but we need the car for another 2 weeks ... you get the idea ..

Re: Best way to escalate a utilisation fault?
 

WOW! That isn't good - but surprising that they have upgraded you to the 152Mbps service without performing a full network re-segemtation change. Im assuming that the March closure date on that fault was related to the speed uplift?

Any escalation is better than relying on customer services to give you an update on a fault.

Re: Best way to escalate a utilisation fault?
 

I had a rapid response from the CEO's office, and a quick resolution.

Re: Best way to escalate a utilisation fault?
 

The fault closed in March was ostensibly for (my cable's) utilisation issue so maybe they closed it because it was running too long and wanted to open a new one to take its place? I guess this looks better ..

The area upgrade is certainly available to new & existing customers. It could be that only my network segment is suffering from this issue. We (customers) get no insight into the network loading at an area level and I doubt whether VM have the metrics available (to Customer Service) to determine if a particular customer's connection should be upgraded. The Southampton head-end has 9 or so CMTS' (going by the numbering) and each CMTS handles a number of network segments each provisioning groups of customers so who can tell if we are just the unlucky few (in which case sotn customers can and should be upgraded) or if we are representative of the majority (in which case tier upgrades should be blocked for sotn)

---------- Post added at 19:03 ---------- Previous post was at 19:02 ----------

Sounds good. Who did you contact and how did you do this? Thanks ..

Re: Best way to escalate a utilisation fault?
 

email
tom.mockridge@virginmedia.co.uk it will get passed to the department who will deal with your problem.

Re: Best way to escalate a utilisation fault?
 

Emailing the CEO office in the past sometimes helped but if a re-segmentation is needed they probably can't speed that up. Sometimes it's possible they can move you to another UBR with less utilisation but they don't like doing it and might not offer that.

Personally I moved to another ISP 18 or so months ago after having similar problems over a similar time period with VM. Not looked back since. Hope you get that option soon!

Re: Best way to escalate a utilisation fault?
 

Some resegs are very complex and can take time to do and some are very simple and take no time to do .:)

Re: Best way to escalate a utilisation fault?
 

Which is an excellent reason to plan and implement them in advance rather than waiting for problems and reacting. Networks should be working on node splits as soon as the node is maxed out on channels / modulations so that they can be delivered promptly.

Re: Best way to escalate a utilisation fault?
 

I agree that VM do not excel are being proactive in their capacity planning at least on a micro scale. They tend to band aid problems on a reactive basis ..

The real problem here is not that they do not fix network issues (eventually) but the lack of visibility & information into the process. The current auto fix date generation process leaves a lot to be desired

Re: Best way to escalate a utilisation fault?
 

As far as I understand it, Virgin prioritise where the most customers complain. No single customer is likely to cause them to push a reseg up but if they get hundreds and hundreds of people calling in because of it, they'll do what they can because it's costing them more money.

Emailing the CEO will help a little, but again it helps if lots of customers are complaining.

Re: Best way to escalate a utilisation fault?
 

Agreed but what percentage of customers that are affected actually a) know what is going on b) are bothered enough to complain and c) have the energy to pursue the complaint ..

VM *know* by looking at the CMTS usage stats if there is or is not a utilisation problem on a particular network segment. The issue here is, as you put it, that it takes "hundreds and hundreds of people calling in" to expedite a resolution

Re: Best way to escalate a utilisation fault?
 

I'm not disagreeing with you at all. I'm simply stating that Virgin will always do what's best for the business - if a fault is costing them more money in the short term, they'll escalate a fix. You're absolutely right, for slow speeds most customers won't even notice, or if they do won't bother to phone in - this is why Virgin doesn't put slow speeds very high on the priority list, especially given how expensive it is to fix.

To put it into perspective, 3 Customers with a total loss of connection will have a higher priority than 100 customers with slow speeds.

Virgin knows exactly how many customers are affected by any particular issue, but they also know that some issues will cause more phone calls than others and will focus accordingly. It's not ideal at all but that's how it works.

Re: Best way to escalate a utilisation fault?
 

Furthermore, in areas with heavy chronic congestion people get so used to the low speeds and know that everyone else around gets the same crap all the time too that they give up and just consider it "normal".

Re: Best way to escalate a utilisation fault?
 

Having just renewed my contract I have been upgraded to 152Mbps today, engineer swapped my Supper hub for a hub 2 (Modem Mode). I checked the speed at around 1.00PM today after install (152+), just checked at about 8.30 PM (31Mbps) Ping and Jitter also much higher! (16ms Ping, 0ms Jitter normal now 40ms Ping 20ms Jitter
Seems like I also have high utilisation, it’s a shame as I choose not to bother with Xbox live during this time as it runs so bad (FPS).
So if you use the internet during the peak times you get no benefit from a higher speed?
Before renewing my contract I checked for BT Infinity in my area, coming soon!
Is it worth complaining about their network being overloaded? Has anyone had this problem resolved?
I will be switching to BT Infinity this time next year, Clock is ticking Virgin!

Re: Best way to escalate a utilisation fault?
 

Why not you have nothing to loose.

Re: Best way to escalate a utilisation fault?
 

It's ALWAYS worth complaining. There's a reasonable chance that it's not utilisation but a fault instead and the only way to alert Virgin is to ring in and complain about it.

Plus, the more people that ring in, the more likely they'll be to expedite a fix.

Even if you can't get the issue resolved, you should be entitled to some money off your bill - but you will have to phone in when it's slow.

Re: Best way to escalate a utilisation fault?
 

From looking at the VM forums regularly (not recently, ill admit), the large majority of faults seem to be congestion, id say as high as 80%, as i say not been over there in a while but when i was a regular most of the complaints were lack of speed

Re: Best way to escalate a utilisation fault?
 

Yeah, there is a distinct probability that if you're getting slow speeds, it's congestion caused by over-utilisation. Chances are, that's what it is. However, sometimes it actually isn't, sometimes it's noise causing the symbol rate to drop (Along with overall bandwidth) and things like that. Even if it's a slim chance, it's still a chance.

Even if it is congestion, the more that call in, the better the chances are of an expedited fix. You'd be surprised at how many people don't bother. Even if it's so slow as to be unusable, don't presume that others will have called in.

Re: Best way to escalate a utilisation fault?
 

I thought I would update this thread with a status update: I emailed the CEO office with the fault details and after a couple of days, I received a call from a very helpful person in the Complaints Team. I went through the problem with her esp. the part about the auto-fix dates being divorced from reality. She said that my original fault (opened in Jul 2012) was in fact still open and she would phone the headend manager in Southampton to find out what is actually going on. Today, she responded with this update from the Network manager responsible for the work:
They give an estimate of June for completion of all the works relating to this fault. No idea what the "H2 2013 BAU resegmentation design" is but at least I have a realistic end date plus someone I can contact if this does not play out as indicated. They also gave me 50% broadband reduction for six months to save me having to ring in each month.

I know that our area should not be having this problem in the first place but I have to give credit to VM for the customer service response in this case.

Re: Best way to escalate a utilisation fault?
 

It's funny the difference just being open and honest with your customers can make.

Re: Best way to escalate a utilisation fault?
 

Second Half of 2013 "Business-As-Usual" planned (Cat C?) resegmentation....
perhaps?

Re: Best way to escalate a utilisation fault?
 

Its the high number of students in Southampton that is causing the issue the network can't handle it.

Re: Best way to escalate a utilisation fault?
 

Not really the students' fault though, is it?

Re: Best way to escalate a utilisation fault?
 

Would customers routing in from Winchester be affected by customers (Students) in Southampton? I guess this depends on the network topology and which network segments route into which CMTS (Southampton has 9 of them I think). Only VM has the answers to these questions I suppose

Question for the cable network gurus: where is utilisation actually measured? at the CMTS? If so, can you have one network segment overloaded but others under-utilised for the same CMTS? Not that it matters, just curious ...

Re: Best way to escalate a utilisation fault?
 

Re: Best way to escalate a utilisation fault?
 

Can you not also have a situation where a physical cable is over utilised Seph?
(i.e. cable has a fixed number of channels available but all are used).

This case requires the physical splitting of the cable segment and the addition of optical nodes. These new nodes will require fibre and power (and a home).

Eeeps

Re: Best way to escalate a utilisation fault?
 

I'll take "overutilised" to mean, say 90% of capacity. The capacity of 8 downstream channels is c. 400 Mbps. That can't be utilised > 100% obviously.

If you mean a user's cable to the home, then if the sending end can deliver at the sync speed (say 100 meg), then across the 8 bonded channels, the user is only utilising 25%.

If you mean the aggregation cable back to the optical node, then it's easy to reach 90% on those 8 downstream channels with, say, 20 users realistically downloading at 20 Mbps (a delivery rate from the sender).

Re: Best way to escalate a utilisation fault?
 

I too am affected by overutilisation in Southampton and would think that this predicted date would be when I might get better speeds in the evening. However what worries me with the reply ianch99 got was the part quoting: difficulty in obtaining the equipment required.
Anyone have an idea what this might be?
Normally people are told on the Virgin help site it is due to not obtaining permission from councils or who ever for digging and the like.

Re: Best way to escalate a utilisation fault?
 

The response I got from the CEO office was that the outstanding work required equipment due to be delivered in early May. There was then approx 8 weeks of work so realistically this is a June/July time frame for this fault.

My cable/network segment is sotn8-2-0-gw.15-1. You can get this by clicking here and noting the host name displayed. For example mine is: cpc66073-sotn8-2-0-cust72.15-1.cable.virginm.net

If you are on the same CMTS (sotn8) and the same cable (a.k.a line card??) then you almost certainly are covered by this fault (F002097435). If you are on another CMTS and/or cable then you may be covered by a different fault ..

It seems that support is told to give a standard response on why utilisation faults can take time to resolve. This includes that planning permission may be needed, etc. Customers are told this independently of the actual work needed to be done for the fault in question. VM are just giving out the worst case scenarios to cover themselves in case they are unable to complete the fix in a timely manner. It would be fascinating to know what % of utilisation faults actually requires planning permission and/or roads being dug up :)

Don't forget to ring support and claim a discount if you are being affected by consistent speed slowdowns ..

Re: Best way to escalate a utilisation fault?
 

Hello ianch99,
cpc4-sotn12-2-0 for me, perhaps a different problem, I have been quoted a Virgin fault reference of F002478187.
Will leave it a few months and check again with Virgin to how my fault ticket is going.

Re: Best way to escalate a utilisation fault?
 

Looks like you are on a different CMTS so, yes, a different fault .. The only way to pursue this is to email the CEO office. They have the ability to talk to the Network manager in Southampton and to get a realistic picture of the work need to remedy the fault. They can also give you a long term discount on your bill.

I would double check your modem power levels to rule out any local issues that could compound the problem although this is unlikely if you get ok speeds during the day

Re: Best way to escalate a utilisation fault?
 

Hi Ian,
thanks for reply, yeh my power levels are all fine, my speeds steadily drop early evening from about 6pm.

This morning 8am 52Mbps
5pm 48Mbps
8pm 35 Mbps
9pm 6.6 Mbps

No doubt when this overutilisation is sorted another load of homes and flats will be built and we'll be back to square one, or Virgin will be upping everyones speeds again with no regard to the infrastructure required :(

Re: Best way to escalate a utilisation fault?
 

I'm getting utilization problems as well but there is simply no way to get it addressed and no timescale for a fix. Actually they said my area was just below the threshold, but YouTube, Netflix and general browsing are all terrible. Like the OP I'm screwed.

Re: Best way to escalate a utilisation fault?
 

Do you have a Thinkbroadband Quality Monitor set up? It would be nice to see what 'just acceptable' looks like.

Anyone else in that boat of being just on the limit? Would be nice to compare your plots too.

Re: Best way to escalate a utilisation fault?
 

No, is there a way I can get one?

Re: Best way to escalate a utilisation fault?
 

Re: Best way to escalate a utilisation fault?
 

Ah, forgot that I already had one: https://www.cableforum.co.uk/images/...2014/04/16.png

I just re-enabled pings on my router, so over the next few days it should fill out.

Re: Best way to escalate a utilisation fault?
 

My live graph:

https://www.cableforum.co.uk/images/...2014/08/11.png

Ignore the hourly spike .. this is my speedtest.net script kicking in

I am on sotn8 (CMTS) .. seems that sotn9 is in much worse shape. There is a number of threads referencing sotn9 and most are not pretty reading

---------- Post added at 19:36 ---------- Previous post was at 19:34 ----------

I would check your router as the graph should have some activity by now. The graph is still all red for me ..

Re: Best way to escalate a utilisation fault?
 

2 Years to fix a fault (well still not fixed) is still terrible, even by VM standards.

Re: Best way to escalate a utilisation fault?
 

My IP address changed, so here is a new graph:

https://www.cableforum.co.uk/images/...2014/04/15.png

Re: Best way to escalate a utilisation fault?
 

What CMTS are you on (its part of the host name displayed in the result when clicking here: http://www.cableforum.co.uk/board/mi...?do=connection)?

Re: Best way to escalate a utilisation fault?
 

cpc33-cosh12-2-0-cust515.6-1.cable.virginm.net

Re: Best way to escalate a utilisation fault?
 

You are routing into a different head end than us in Southampton, your CMTS (cosh12) lives in Cosham.

Also seems to route via Birmingham when I traceroute your wan ip address:

which means any problems in Southampton should not affect you (I think!)

Re: Best way to escalate a utilisation fault?
 

I know, I was just adding that Southampton isn't unique. Virgin has problems all over, and it is extremely difficult to get them to do anything about it even when your connection is awful.

Re: Best way to escalate a utilisation fault?
 

Fault for over-utilization opened, let's see if they can fix it any faster than poor Southampton: F003034782

Re: Best way to escalate a utilisation fault?
 

Annoying thing they'll be mis selling to loads of people and making the problem worse. To be honest this should be illegal. I'll know they'll point out to xxx speed but really it's disgusting they're allowed to do it and allowed to get away with it.
I think longest fault I heard of is three years. Dunno if that one has been fixed or not.
I suppose you pass out flyers to people in your area and get them to complain. That may make Virgin move a bit.

Re: Best way to escalate a utilisation fault?
 

Unfortunately, the reason it's legal is because they sell an "up to" service. It's not much different to how DSL providers sell "up to" knowing that the further away you are, the less you're likely to receive.

I know that OFCOM has clamped down on this a lot and they're all forced to indicate what speeds you should realistically achieve. In an uncongested Area, Virgin can say that you'll get the 50, 100 or 152MBit speeds they advertise but I don't think they've got any tool for sales to check congestion levels and estimate speeds then.

However, I don't know what OFCOM's rules on this is - they dictate that a certain % of customers must be able to obtain that speed, but I don't know if that's in a given area or the ISP as a whole. That would explain why they've over provisioned so much, so that average speed is pulled higher by the uncongested areas.

Re: Best way to escalate a utilisation fault?
 

They should be required to publish independent stats on their speeds, latency and packet loss with every advert. So when it says "150Mb" in brackets afterwards it would say "(average 95Mb, 45ms, 1.2% packet loss, streaming quality poor)".

Also I should be allowed to pay them "up to" £45/month.

Re: Best way to escalate a utilisation fault?
 

As much as I agree with the above, I'm not sure the average joe will understand what packet loss or latency is or how it affects them. Plus, while they concentrate on just headline speeds, they can have whatever latency they want, it isn't false advertising.

Re: Best way to escalate a utilisation fault?
 

Speed, latency and packet loss to what? Mean or median speeds? What sample size? Judging streaming quality how? Is average Joe going to understand this?

Re: Best way to escalate a utilisation fault?
 

They need to publish detailed stats, and then others can interpret them and produce guides. Perhaps in advertising they could have a simple traffic light system similar to food labelling. Categories like "speed", "gaming" and "video" would be easy enough to understand. Virgin would get say green for speed, yellow for gaming (because of crap latency) and red for streaming (because Netflix doesn't work in some places).

The numbers would always be the lowest found anywhere on the network that doesn't have a temporary (<1 month to fix) fault, encouraging the ISP not to simply deal with the cheap and easy areas to get good stats.

Re: Best way to escalate a utilisation fault?
 

Our utilisation fault is now two years old (happy birthday!) and is as bad as ever:

http://www.thinkbroadband.com/ping/s...10-08-2014.png

so I got back in touch with the VM Complaints Dept (via the CEO Office) and the lady I spoke to emailed the Network Manager in charge of the works and got back to me with some of the comments from her email thread:

She said she will try and push for more information but what is interesting, in a wider context, is the pending 12 DS channel push ..

Re: Best way to escalate a utilisation fault?
 

interesting, it looks like they are going to have to some major upgrades to do to fix that problem rather than just add more channels to the service group.

Re: Best way to escalate a utilisation fault?
 

Business as usual resegmentation / node split. Evidently not a simple one though!

Re: Best way to escalate a utilisation fault?
 

sad that with all the upgrade work that has been going on over the last two years for the speed doubling and the new tiers now, that it hasn't been addressed.

Re: Best way to escalate a utilisation fault?
 

Aye rather than boosting everyones speed maybe they should give everyone the speeds theyre paying for firstly...

My utilisation fault was meant to be fixed in march...and then it was may. and then june and then july. Now its going to be done in january 2015. How busy are VM that they cant do any work on something for almost an entire year....am not confident itll be done then either!

They keep saying ill get a credit on my bill if i keep calling up. They never do it though!

Re: Best way to escalate a utilisation fault?
 

and the extremely frustrating think about all this is that VM typically announce a new upgrade/speed increase in November in lieu of price increase due in February. So by the time they get round to doing your relief work in January, they'll be starting the new rollout of whatever speed increase and you'll be back to square one again.

Re: Best way to escalate a utilisation fault?
 

While I'm not going to claim that Virgin don't often take the **** when it comes to dealing with utilisation, lately they've been better at it so I wonder what's really going on in your area. There must be some complication, or some red tape causing delays.

Re: Best way to escalate a utilisation fault?
 

What do you think would be the cause of the 2 year delay in my case?

Re: Best way to escalate a utilisation fault?
 

I don't know enough about that side of the business to say. I know that some areas are harder to upgrade than others, there's only so much splitting and stuff that they can do before they need to throw in more planning permission from councils and that kind of thing.

Re: Best way to escalate a utilisation fault?
 

Same is true of all ISPs, mobile providers, even enterprise/business leased lines.

VM have indeed improved a great deal over the past few years, but are still far from perfect. Similarly though, even their best competitor (in terms of lowest congestion) isn't perfect either and every ISP in the country has at some point had some congestion somewhere.

---------- Post added at 13:07 ---------- Previous post was at 13:06 ----------

Pile of poop network? My (old) area always used to be scheduled last (i.e. 18 months behind everyone else) for upgrades and always ran behind schedule too, both local techs and national planners have described it as due to the network in said area as being... lets say... sub-par.

Re: Best way to escalate a utilisation fault?
 

I've heard a few different techs and such claim that such and such an area was "crumbling apart".

Re: Best way to escalate a utilisation fault?
 

Interesting development: email from Access HeadEnd Manager – South Coast and South London via CEO/Faults office:
9am today, modem reboot and I have new wan ip because I am now on a new CMTS (sotn13)

Power levels and d/s SNR have changed slightly, possibly for the worse? Time will tell I guess:

New BQM graph:

https://www.cableforum.co.uk/images/...2014/12/18.png

with old graph:

https://www.cableforum.co.uk/images/...2014/08/11.png

New one seems to have a higher base latency :( Not sure why latency would be up when routing to the same headend ..

Re: Best way to escalate a utilisation fault?
 

New graph doesn't look all that great tbh either.

Latency can vary for a whole host of reasons. As you can see from the graph the base latency changes over time as well. Mostly this is due to load balancing within VM's core network, where there are multiple paths from A to B that are not all the same length and traffic is shared between them.

Re: Best way to escalate a utilisation fault?
 

Not sure that that 12 downstream change has actually worked - you're still on the standard 8 channel frequency plan.

Switch your Superhub off for a few minutes and then reactivate it, see if you get a different set of downstream channels.

Re: Best way to escalate a utilisation fault?
 

I am not sure they meant 12 d/s channel for the shub, rather it referred to the number of available downstream channel frequencies?

Have restarted the shub2 a couple of times with no observable change. I think the problem may be in the network beyond the headend. Here are two speed tests, the first is London Namesco. This has always been a reliable fast site for me. The second is a VM site in Brentford but crucially inside the VM network:

https://www.cableforum.co.uk/images/local/2014/08/8.png

https://www.cableforum.co.uk/images/local/2014/08/9.png

I did this test a number of times and the VM site was always 160+Mbps and around 10ms latency. The Namesco site was always variable in speed and never near 150 plus ~3 times the latency

This seems to indicate the CMTS hop is now no longer the gating factor (where is was before). If I can get consistent headline speeds to an internal VM site but not to the internet then this raises question about the network path from the headend to the internet. It may also account for the latency difference.

Here are BQM graphs for two CMTS gateways: the first my former sotn8 gateway and the second my new sotn13 one:

http://www.thinkbroadband.com/ping/m...92567ebaab.png

http://www.thinkbroadband.com/ping/m...462bf4052c.png

You can see the base latency difference .. and this is not involving the CMTS to cable modem segment. What is strange is that these should be in the same (Sotn) headend so why the latency increase for sotn13? Weird ..

Re: Best way to escalate a utilisation fault?
 

I think they have made more channels available in the bonding group so that the cmts can load balance across more channels. As an example. over the last 2 years we have seen bonding groups increase in size from 4, to 5, 6, 7 and 8 channels as VM have been trying to increase capacity and reduce congestion. Even though 8 channels may have been available in my area, when I was on my vmng300 it could only use 4 channels and sometimes they were 1, 2, 3 and 4 and other times it was 1, 2, 5 and 6.
Shub's can only use 8 channels so up and till now shub's have sort of been ahead of the game and been able to fully utilise whatever has been made available to it. As VM haven't provided us with 16 channels modems yet, I think the temporary fix is to make more channels available so instead of locking onto the same 8 congested channels, there are other less congested channels available (as in the case of my vmng300). So now instead of using channels 1-8 all the time, you might use 1, 2, 3, 4, 9, 10, 11, 12 as an example.

Re: Best way to escalate a utilisation fault?
 

I'm pretty sure my superhub2 has connected to channels 8+ for quite some time now?

Re: Best way to escalate a utilisation fault?
 

I didn't mean channels numbers, I was talking about channel quantity. There are channel numbers in the hundreds. I was talking about more than 8 channels (in quantity) being available in a bonding group even through the shub can only lock onto 8 (in quantity) at any one time.

Re: Best way to escalate a utilisation fault?
 

That surely depends on the quality of the processor in the S/H. Not guaranteed!

Re: Best way to escalate a utilisation fault?
 

:erm: nope, the cmts is responsible for load balancing and it will allocate the channels to the modem. The shub doesn't decide which channels it wants to use. I hate to say but in this case you are wrong Rom Doll. I still love you though :romance: