Oversubscribed areas?
 

Just a random thought about oversubscribed areas (A friend of mine is in one makes playing games with him at peak time impossible because his latency is all over the place)


Wouldn't it make sense for VM to implement temporary STM/Throttling at peak time in these areas down to something like 5 - 10Mbit/s to reduce the congestion or will that not help?

As surely a slower connection that at least works would be better than the current mess you get where you're lucky to get a couple mbit/s and the latency is all over the place spiking beyond 500ms.

Obviously that wouldn't be a satisfactory permanent fix but it might at least maintain some kind of quality of service whilst the upgrades are being planned/implemented.

Edit:

Also VM would have to be transparent about what they're doing and the reasons behind it.

Re: Oversubscribed areas?
 

3 (the mobile network) is doing that and it's not earning them a very good reputation, despite having the fastest web browsing speeds and lowest latency, all people see and care about is the crappy download speed.

Re: Oversubscribed areas?
 

Which would ironically probably be better if it Were throttled ;)

Re: Oversubscribed areas?
 

It is throttled, that's the point. People prefer unthrottled with crappy pings than throttled with decent pings.

Re: Oversubscribed areas?
 

These people do not understand what happens when the backhaul gets congested :(

Or in the case of cellular the RF layer which is a lot harder to upgrade

Re: Oversubscribed areas?
 

its a good and bad idea.

There is nothing wrong with throttling to maintain latency and packet loss as long as its a temporary fix with the long term fix been more capacity.

The problem is isp's see it the ££££ signs, and if they manage to throttle successfully then they deploy it as a permanent strategy "in place" of extra capacity.

Three are the virgin media of mobile, they have a chronic congestion problem due to over utilisation of their network, so I wouldnt be happy with what they doing either.

Also if VM were to throttle bad areas they would be forbidden from selling unlimited broadband in those areas.

Re: Oversubscribed areas?
 

That would be unlawful.

VM couldn't advertise unlimited and would likely have to change advertising of their packages in a big, and unattractive, way.

There are other ways to protect gaming traffic.

Re: Oversubscribed areas?
 

Shoo them off to BT?

---------- Post added at 13:13 ---------- Previous post was at 13:12 ----------

What sort of changes? Far as I'm aware nothing major changed when they got rid of D/S STM in the first place, so the only changes I can see if they were to re-introduce it in some areas only, is changing some of the small print on the traffic management COP page, which is voluntary anyway.

Re: Oversubscribed areas?
 

It isn't just gaming traffic, it buggers up streaming and voip as well.
Mobile is a bit different than fixed as whilst it should be possible to upgrade back-haul the actual radio side may or may not be harder.

Vm aren't the only one's with congestion problems for sure it happens from time to time it's how it's dealt with that's the important thing.

Re: Oversubscribed areas?
 

although it makes sense to use it as a temporary fix (especially for short term large scale network faults) I think part of the condition of being able to implement such a policy would have to be that they advertise affected areas on some sort of status page and I think it would be very embarrassing to see the numbers tbh. As always, it is a balancing act with VM and I am sure they would rather forgo the negative publicity associated with stm and over subscribed areas (even if it maintains an excellent quality of service) and reap the benefits of advertising unlimited fibre bb where everything is perfect (including the shub).

Re: Oversubscribed areas?
 

Yes I've been at various ISP's who feared putting stuff on the status page because "it will make us look bad" :mad:

Re: Oversubscribed areas?
 

They can rate limit the bottlenecked part of their network so it can max out at say 90% utilisation.
Reduce the buffers to remove buffer bloat.
Then prioritise small packets.

This I expect would go a long way to improve latency sensitive traffic and not fall foul of ASA guidelines.

But the VM bean counters would say thats a waste of 10% of capacity. :)

Re: Oversubscribed areas?
 

VM already avoid putting utilization faults on their status pages...

Re: Oversubscribed areas?
 

Would help if they was logged first

Re: Oversubscribed areas?
 

They are often logged, they just don't show up on the status checkers as a rule.