Any word from employees about capacity issues?
 

Hi all..

Any word on when NTL will be upgrading their routers/backbones? This capacity problem during peak times is just unacceptable. Im aware there are some of you out there that don't experience any problems and get 10meg or close to it all the time.

But for me and quite a few others its doing my head in. My 10meg connection slows to a 2meg during connection during peak times. This isnt a local capacity problem. The prob is futher up with NTLs main routers me thinks. As when I download a file that is local to NTLs network (my webspace) I get 1200kb/s max speed!

Why isnt this getting fixed? Surely NTL can see this problem...

The network rebalancing thats appearing on the service page alot, anyone know exactly what is being done? My area (Goodmayes) hasnt come up as of yet..


Steve

Re: Any word from employees about capacity issues?
 

I think the rebalancing is jiggling modem's on upstream channels to keep them balanced and nothing more, I am guessing tho.

Re: Any word from employees about capacity issues?
 

You would be correct.

Re: Any word from employees about capacity issues?
 

"Why isnt this getting fixed? Surely NTL can see this problem..."

Because its going to cost money, thats even if they were interested. :(

Re: Any word from employees about capacity issues?
 

My bet is that all the money is tied up for the virgin buyout. Personaly i dont care what they do now i am just waiting for my exchange to go live for BE Unlimited and then its goodbye and thanks for all the fish..

And looking at this they are cutting it fine to do Warrington :mad:


Detail As part of the ongoing project to maintain and upgrade our Broadband network, there is a requirement to carry out maintenance and upgrades on components which may result in a loss of service for the duration.
The following work will be taking place during the week commencing Monday 20th March.
On the morning of Tuesday the 21st of March between midnight and 6 AM,
Network optimisation will result in a loss of service in the Leicester, Middlesborough, Stapleford, Kempston and surrounding areas.
Network updates will result in a loss of service in the Wearside, Orpington, Bromley, Leeds, Derby, Stockport and surrounding areas.
Network rebalancing across the country will result in a brief loss of service for all customers.
On the morning of Wednesday the 22nd of March between midnight and 6 AM,
Network optimisation will result in a loss of service in the Leicester, Pintail Road, Reading, Grantham, Stevenage, Papworth and surrounding areas.
Network updates will result in a loss of service in Orpington, Bromley, Leeds, Derby, Stockport, Northfields, Shepshed, Middlesborough, Stockton, Wearside and surrounding areas
On the morning of Thursday the 23rd of March between midnight and 6 AM,
Network optimisation will result in a loss of service in the Stoke, Leicester, Newark, Stevenage and surrounding areas.
Network updates will result in a loss of service in the Leeds, Derby, Stockport, Basford, Chesterfield, Clifton, Grantham, Grimsby and surrounding areas
On the morning of Friday the 24th of March between midnight and 6 AM,
Network updates will result in a loss of service in the Leeds, Derby, Stockport and surrounding areas.
We thank you for your understanding and apologise for any inconvenience these planned works may cause.

And to show why i am upset my speed on a 2 meg

Mon, 20 Mar 2006 18:53:15 GMT
1st 128K took 1219 ms = 107524 Bytes/sec = approx 895 kbits/sec
2nd 128K took 1141 ms = 114875 Bytes/sec = approx 956 kbits/sec
3rd 128K took 1015 ms = 129135 Bytes/sec = approx 1074 kbits/sec
4th 128K took 2563 ms = 51140 Bytes/sec = approx 425 kbits/sec

Re: Any word from employees about capacity issues?
 

You probably go into the Seven Kings UBR like me :)
I get the same as you, UK sites are great full speed, but any peering involved and nine times out of ten its crapola time after about 3-4pm.

NTL know, but they don't care.
Whoever looks after the network needs to go on some courses to see how to do their job.

Re: Any word from employees about capacity issues?
 

I would imagine at some stage ntl will look at peak time traffic and put something in place, some ISP's already have such as PlusNet.

Re: Any word from employees about capacity issues?
 

Well lets hope its sooner rather than later or they will start to lose customers.

Re: Any word from employees about capacity issues?
 

They already have. ;)

Re: Any word from employees about capacity issues?
 

only a small number will leave, most customers wont have noticed their connections are slow (yet) - until word spreads via programs like watchdog or they find that their internet banking drags.

Re: Any word from employees about capacity issues?
 

Leicester must have been on the network status page 40+ times since last september for "network optimisation" and not once has my modem dropped during the maintenance which would indicate my ubr has recieved no upgrade or optimisation whatsoever since then.

Last night out of couriosity I did a speed test since I havent been using my connection much in the evenings, and I got 2mbit was at 6.30pm.

---------- Post added at 06:25 ---------- Previous post was at 06:23 ----------

Hard to point fingers, might well be they have reported problem got told to fix it without spending money hence we have all this static routing going on which is probably used to hide the true extenct of the problem.

Or you could be right and they are simply incompetant.

Re: Any word from employees about capacity issues?
 

Why don't NTL admit there is a problem, apologise to their users and drop everyones speed back to 2 and 3 meg until they update all the services as neccesary. Yes it will hit them in the short term, some users will demand money off, some will leave. But in the end everyone will be happier because their internet connection will do what it's supposed to do. Seems to make sense to me, why push equipment upto 10meg when it obviously can't take it:rolleyes:

I tried playing a game online last night and 1016 key packets in 15 mins, this made the game unplayable:mad:

Cheers

John

Re: Any word from employees about capacity issues?
 

They wont backpeddle, are'nt they the fastest cable provider in the country?
Upto 10meg? Most of which you will never see, and the bit thats left for you is unreliable and slower than before.

Re: Any word from employees about capacity issues?
 

they cant back peddle - the market is heading for 'max' speeds (see max dsl) - they have to move with the market.

Re: Any word from employees about capacity issues?
 

Yes but if their infrastructure can't cope with this struggle for maximum speed then they will only lose customers at the rate they are now, which seems to be rather quickly:Yikes:

Re: Any word from employees about capacity issues?
 

"they will only lose customers at the rate they are now"

not true. the last results appear to say the total broadband customers of NTL has increased from 1,330,000 (last quarter of 2004) to 1,823,000 (last quarter of 2005).

http://www.ntl.com/locales/gb/en/inv...rts/2005-4.pdf
see page 15 - see line 'total broadband customers'.

approx 37% increase in broadband customers in 1 year unless I am misunderstanding the figures.

Re: Any word from employees about capacity issues?
 

The broadband market has to change and I think will change massively over the next couple of years, caps will go, as transporting data will come down in price due to the new TV over Broadband products.

The Mix06 conference currently underway in Las Vegas has had the BBC stating its aim to radically alter its way of broadcasting a lot of its content over the next few years, the internet features heavily in their plans.
Sky are already streaming their movies, as are some of the major film companies, video blogging is taking off in a big way.

NTL will need to get their network into shape or die out as customers leave them in droves, by that stage if the latest episode of Eastenders doesn't stream correctly due to foobared peering, then customers *will* notice and leave, caps will be irrelevant - TV cannot be mass streamed over the internet with caps in place, we'll probably look back in a few years and wonder how we ever put up with the current system - much like we look back at 56k dialup and see how far we have come.

The only question is which companies will be left standing ?
My guess is that NTL will have a tough fight ahead unless they are prepared to invest heavily in their network, and experts to keep it running properly.

---------- Post added at 12:10 ---------- Previous post was at 12:08 ----------

That was before the 10 meg fiasco for many customers, it will be interesting to see those figures in a years time.

Re: Any word from employees about capacity issues?
 

only a minority of customers are on the top tier.

---------- Post added at 12:17 ---------- Previous post was at 12:16 ----------

partly due to the laughable price when you compare it to what MAX dsl suppliers will be offering their products at!

Re: Any word from employees about capacity issues?
 

But no corresponding increase in network capacity by the looks of things

Re: Any word from employees about capacity issues?
 

You are wrong, wrong I say !

I'm sure I read somewhere that an extra proxy was put in in Huddersfield.


;)

Re: Any word from employees about capacity issues?
 

it didn't need to be increased, when the network was initially built there was plenty of spare capacity in place.

:p:

Re: Any word from employees about capacity issues?
 

I hope you're talking about the national network not the local ones.

Although the national network was supposed to be getting upgrades a while ago as well, at least some of which haven't happened by the looks.

Re: Any word from employees about capacity issues?
 

Haha small world! Yeah id imagine u are on the same one bein so close! It sucks dont it after 4pm! :(

Well thats a shame I got my hopes up that these upgrades are new pieces of hardware being installed and rolled out to increase capacity.. :(. My upload is always pretty solid!

They must know about this... it doesnt take much to notice that routers and central pipes are struggling to bare the load. I dont expect to have 10Mbit all the time... NTL have alot of customers, I was expecting to see a slight drop in speed during peak time.. but for a drop down to 2mbit is just a joke.

Email support about it and they blank you about what your saying with NTLs network overloading. Instead ramble on about speedtesting whats the best sites and how NTL dont support speedtest sites... hmm i didnt ask about speedtesting. Im not silly... i know that not every site/download will fill ur 10Mbit of bandwidth available it depends on on the source. But when you have 6 different downloads from around the world and ur still getting 2mbit.. something is wrong. Then after midnight comes and boom.. full speed.

Very true.. how on earth are they gonna be able to supply all these new and up coming streaming media through their network if such poor performance is how things are at present.

Ive only been with NTL for less than a month, and already im not happy how things are, the thing thats alarming is that theres no word form NTL about this massive problem they have.

Im grateful that during the small hours I do get max speed. But hmm I wanna use my internet to the fullest in daylight hours like any normal person.

Re: Any word from employees about capacity issues?
 

It could come in the form of traffic shaping, whereby ntl networks Identify the network intensive services that are throttling the network at peak times, then shape that particular piece of traffic.

It's a model that I think will cause some frustration, especially the peer 2 peer fans, but given the lack of a consistent download speed at 10MBps per sec during peak times, it may well happen. :shrug:

Re: Any word from employees about capacity issues?
 

:LOL:

---------- Post added at 06:44 ---------- Previous post was at 06:39 ----------


I think ntl's monitoring system is fubared or their upgrade threshold is set too high, I have had my ubr been investigated over the past few weeks and been told their appears to be no capacity issue they have also done some work on it but unfortenatly hasnt helped. The symptons for me remain the same, good performance after approx 2-3am upto early afternoon weekdays and upto around 10am weekends, after 3 or 4 pm massive speed drop to 2meg and below. Latency is stablish during the quiet hours as well and then spikes up during peak hours. This is signs of something been saturated between me and the ubr and considering it happened to my sister as well same ubr I would guess the ubr.

I do wonder that if their is a lot of cloned modems on a particular ubr it fools ntl and they think they using less then whats been used.

Re: Any word from employees about capacity issues?
 

Hrm nope whether legit or cloned they all use the same bandwidth.

NTL's monitoring tools are excellent, far superior to Telewest's OSS systems.

Re: Any word from employees about capacity issues?
 

Ok so it would be the case they have a high threshold then where what is seen as unacceptable by the customer is deemed fine by ntl.

Re: Any word from employees about capacity issues?
 

Which one? There are now twelve, four put in relatively recently (within about the last six to twelve months I think).