VM 20mb Business - No Static Address
 

Just a quick question, can anyone explain why VM don't offer static ip's on their 20mb service yet will offer them on the 10mb service?
Bloke on the phone couldn't really offer an explaination to why they couldn't do and just said, "i'm not quite sure why". Just seemed a little odd.

Cheers all :)

Re: VM 20mb Business - No Static Address
 

Commercial decison in the past not technical.

However from early next year they will be offering a static IP address on the 20 Mb/s service. Their new 50 Mb/s service will also have an option of a static IP address too.

Re: VM 20mb Business - No Static Address
 

VM seem completely out of touch for their business offerings.

Re: VM 20mb Business - No Static Address
 

You are absolutely right. However I think they also acknowledge that now and from what I understand from a recent call to Business Sales, they will be launching revised business broadband options early in the new year.

I think the key thing for them now is to ensure that they don't have such a long lag in the future before revising their offerings.

Re: VM 20mb Business - No Static Address
 

I get asked that all the time and no one seems to know the answer. However hopefully it will start to get offered soon.

Re: VM 20mb Business - No Static Address
 

Do you work in Provide, Stephen? Just a wild guess from your location.

Re: VM 20mb Business - No Static Address
 

Yes I do work in Provide.

Re: VM 20mb Business - No Static Address
 

Faults myself.

Re: VM 20mb Business - No Static Address
 

Yep, I switched to business to escape VM's traffic shaping policy a few years ago only to have it introduced on business connections(!) which is fair enough BUT the rate at which residential has sped up and grown etc has now WAY surpassed the business options

To add insult to injury when I tried to switch back to VM, I found out I'm tied into a new contract because I made a change to my phone to bring it into line with what new customers are paying I wasn't told this when I changed that and I'm unhappy that it's left me stuck with an inferior broadband service!

I'll sit out my time with VMB because I have no choice, BUT I would NEVER recommend them despite having done so in the past.

Re: VM 20mb Business - No Static Address
 

It's pretty simple actually, in order to preserve quality of service it would be necessary to have 20Mbps business customers able to be load balanced across two different chassis on the VM network, the legacy DOCSIS 1.1 chassis and the newer next-gen CMTS which serves DOCSIS 3 customers. When a customer goes from one chassis to the other they cannot keep the same IP address at this time.

The solution to this, coming soon, is to use a router which will open a tunnel to a centralised location within the VM network in a similar manner to how ADSL customers are tunnelled via lower level protocols to a BRAS where they obtain their IP level connectivity.

For those who have been within VM back in ntl times remember how the AOL wholesale service worked? Customers logged on with their AOL client and were tunnelled to AOL with the CMTS acting as a LAC.

Re: VM 20mb Business - No Static Address
 

This is going to provide true static IP services - with the option for reverse DNS which is good news. I also understand multiple fixed IP addresses will then be supported, which will be needed in order to provide a public rouable adress on the LAN side (which I will need for a VPN router).

The Business services are going to be consolidated into 2 services - 20 MB/s and 50 MB/s, with the 20 Mb/s increasing to 30 MB/s.

Upstream will be 2 Mb/s ont he 20 Mb/s service, 3 Mb/s on the 30 and 5 Mb/s on the 50. The slightly disappointing thing is this equals residential but doesn't exceed it as the original VMB profiles did.

All in all this sounds very promising news for VMB customers. I agree it's taken a while but hopefully the anticipated Q1 launch will be met.

I did hear that migrations/upgrades though might not be possible from existing servcies at first - does anyone have info on that?

Re: VM 20mb Business - No Static Address
 

Hmm, I wonder what tunnelling protocol they will use, and whether this will (deliberately or as a side effect) bypass the traffic shaping that seems to have put in place on business packages (or does the guy actually mean traffic management aka throttling)?

Re: VM 20mb Business - No Static Address
 

I understand it with be L2TP that is used.

The current 20 MB/s business package does have STM, but at higher thresholds than the residential service and only outside the normal business hours (though with the 24/7 nature of some business I am not really sure how valid this is). So in effect yes it's throttling as opposed to traffic shaping.

The current 10 Mb/s business service is free of any form of STM.

It will be interestign to see what VMB do with the 50 Mb/s offering, as I don't see them imposing greater limits on that than residential.

Re: VM 20mb Business - No Static Address
 

No need to do anything special to ensure business services don't get shaped, just not configuring the routers their PPP sessions terminate on to enforce the QoS is just fine.

Re: VM 20mb Business - No Static Address
 

REALLY?? Mine isn't it drops to 1/4 speed after a certain amount of downloading, should it not be doing that?