*ALL* ntl Cap Discussion Here Please. (Part 2)
 

A Fresh New Thread for the CAP Discussions :D

Continued from here

Play nice now ...

Re: *ALL* ntl Cap Discussion Here Please. (Part 2)
 

That program never actually worked properly and any figures it gave were a guesstimate and usually quite on the low side.

Also do you actually know at which point load on a downstream or upstream becomes service affecting? It's not 100%

Just why should we allow customers to observe the traffic on the equipment of ours they connect to. If/when this stuff starts getting enforced, people will be able to check their own traffic. Load on our network isn't really any of their business - we generally require some free capacity for burst, load changes a lot during the day / night, etc.

Impractical, not to mention dangerous. The idea of BT selling to postcodes on the grounds that the CMTS card covering that area is 65% utilised isn't really a big commercial goer.

Re: *ALL* ntl Cap Discussion Here Please. (Part 2)
 

I will be affected by the cap, I use Emule and download (copyrighted) films etc. Whilst my PC is on pretty much constantly I probably don't go over the cap by all that much anymore (I used to) as I'm not maxing out my connection 24x7, in fact I hardly ever max out my connection anymore, the last time I did was shortly after upgrading when I downloaded a movie from usenet to see how long it takes at full pelt (~35 minutes!).

NTL are within their rights to introduce and enforce a cap, it's their network and it is up to them to decide, rightly or wrongly, what people can and can't do with it.

I'm against the cap and IF contacted will leave because it's MY choice to do so, yes it's a PITA for me, but as a customer I have the choice and the right to take my business elsewhere if the company I'm currently using no longer meets my needs.

The "cap" argument is a little pointless IMHO, those for the cap, will remain so despite any arguments made from the other side and those anti it will either leave when (if?) it's enforced or learn to live within it.

NTL are a private company, they exist to make money and to keep their shareholders happy. If they lose a couple of thousand (unlikely but possible) due to enforcement of their rules but maintain or increase profitability then their shareholders will be happy and they will have achieved their goal.
What their customers think of them is completely irrelevant, as long as they pony up the cash each month, the ONLY way NTL (or any private company) will re-think a policy is if it hurts them financially.

Re: *ALL* ntl Cap Discussion Here Please. (Part 2)
 

Do you know something "If "this stuff starts getting enforced or is it me reading too much into the comment

Re: *ALL* ntl Cap Discussion Here Please. (Part 2)
 

For the record, docsdiag -traffic definately doesn't work anymore, tried it yesterday after a year when it did work.

Re: *ALL* ntl Cap Discussion Here Please. (Part 2)
 

As long as ntl keep to the spirit of their promise that they'll only contact customers who are affecting the quality of service of other customers then there's generally not much to worry about.

However, as network load is the lynchpin behind ntl's capping policy then it would be reasonable for a customer to request some evidence of network load if they are ever contacted. This is where I think it could become a customer's business.

Exactly where load becomes service affecting is an interesting point and it's a question that I'd certainly want to know the answer to if I were being accused of significantly reducing other peoples service level. Perhaps you could educate me? (It wouldn't be 65% would it?) :D

Perhaps the information is commercially sensitive but penetration/homes passed figures are publically available anyway and I think these figures are of more interest to the likes of BT.

Re: *ALL* ntl Cap Discussion Here Please. (Part 2)
 

Maybe it would be worth going over a few Variables to see why people are so heated...

How much Bandwidth does a customer end box have, that is the one serving these XXX users - both download and Upload. Provided with figures, Im sure people can de-duce themself why problems occur when too many people at once download/upload at once.

People can buy a switch/network cards at very cheap prices, they see a Net connection as a extention to this, after all its shoving data around in the same fashion is it not. Maybe CM or ADSL is now the Wrong technology for the home market?? How does China, Sweden or whoever has 10/100mbit connections wire to the home?

Important one this:- It has been said many many times that a person using there connection too much costs the company money - why and how is this?? Ive asked this loads of times and not once had any answer at all. Is it costing money because they can not shove as many people on that UBR??

Warez - Been pointed out many times as the cause, why then do NTL provide a news Server that has Illegal Software on? A Average user can and will find P2P apps and before they know it - also one of them identified as a heavy user - this I have witnessed myself.

Somebody using there connection too much is told about Contention, yet surely on the same breath a person with slow speed, lag in game etc can also be chucked that same bone - thats told "sorry, its a shared service, we never said it would be 3mbit all the time m'kay"....

A cap will NOT solve the problem of the above - a better idea surely is a simple one, basically what it is now, guidelines for useage and somebody abusing this by 24/7 downloading can be warned or dropped - sounds simple to me..

Re: *ALL* ntl Cap Discussion Here Please. (Part 2)
 

http://www.chetnet.co.uk/faq.htm#uBR is a good starting placeI know this doesn't answer all your questions but it's a start.

Re: *ALL* ntl Cap Discussion Here Please. (Part 2)
 

I was just typing a post moaning about NTL speeds today.

Thinking it could not get worse when my computer crashed.

Thanks to NTL .any way after a restart it all seems to be working at full

Speed again. So I will have my say about the speed

Upgrate. insteat and the cap who here would pay for the NTL

TV serves if they were tolled they could only watch it so many

Hours a day so why accept what they want to do with an internet

Cap I for one will not if they get in touch with me and say I am

Downloading too much I will tell them to get stuffed cancel

My NTL phone NTL TV and NTL broadband witch in all comes

To well over £100 a month. And get a new isp that as no cap and

Join sky. I think they are looking at the capping from the

Wrong end witch is what you might except from them they say

They will monitor people with a 1mp a day cap for excessive

Use. So take me I download a film its 1.50g when I get my

Speed upgrade that should take me 3 or 4 hours and then my modem

Will not be in use but I will have gone over there 1g a day limit

But my modem as only been on for 4 hours and then we get the people

On a 3g a month limit who are not being monitor say they want to get

The same film to get it there modem will be on 24\7 because of there

Slow speed so who do you think NTL should be monitoring yes NTL

Have got it back to front again. :confused: :confused: :confused: :confused:

Re: *ALL* ntl Cap Discussion Here Please. (Part 2)
 

It would take a lot of inside information to give a full answer but some of ntl's fixed and variable costs can be seen in the quarterly/yearly reports. They are getting around £30Mill ion a month in broadband subscriptions and as I mentioned a couple of times earlier each GB of external bandwidth costs them around 10p.

Bandwidth costs would seem to me to be a small percentage of broadband revenue.

Historically, the provision of newsgroup access within the ntl network saved them money because they wouldn't have to pay those external transit bandwidth costs over and over again for newsgroups. Recently this has been made a mockery of as they now only carry a small fraction of the daily feeds so people end up subscribing to pay news servers outside of ntl's network and not only do ntl end up paying each time the same article is downloaded by a different customer (I dont think they cache nntp to any degree) but customers will tend to download more as the pay providers have a much 'better' selection.

Re: *ALL* ntl Cap Discussion Here Please. (Part 2)
 

Those figures assume that everyone is behaving like the model which is rarely the case.

If you take that example a little further and try to give users the full speed they are on then the total number of simultaneously active subscribers has to be limited to 27000000/3072000 ~= 9. Any more than 9 and those 9 will be affecting the service of every user on that card. See how easy it is for only 9 users to affect around a thousand other users.
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Where does that £30 million a month come from? It seems rather high.

Re: *ALL* ntl Cap Discussion Here Please. (Part 2)
 

That's a bit of an insult to the model makers who are in the business. It's not about 'everyone' behaving like the model. It's a business of averages. But I guess you're right and they're wrong as usual.

Your figures do not take into account any statistical probability.

£25 * 1,200,000. It's not an exact figure just a working estimate. If we assume ARPU on broadband to be £20 then it would be £24Mill ion a month.

Re: *ALL* ntl Cap Discussion Here Please. (Part 2)
 

As I recall they have about 1.1 million BB customers, of which about 60% are on the lowest tier, 30% on the middle and 10% on the high (actually I think it may have been < 10% on the high).

Working on those figures they are getting about £22 million per month - which is then about £19 million after VAT is removed.

Re: *ALL* ntl Cap Discussion Here Please. (Part 2)
 

And bear in mind that the bulk of their costs are likely to be the purchase, installation and operation of the hardware/software used to provide that bandwidth that costs them £0.10 a gig to the user. After all, there are a hell of a lot of staff, and a hell of a lot of equipment between the user and NTLs link to the net. I have it on fairly good authority that it can cost NTL thousands of pounds to upgrade the network sufficiently so that that one heavy downloader does not impact all the other users in their area. That one heavy downloader will only pay 37.99 a month. How long do you think they should wait for a return on the investment?

Re: *ALL* ntl Cap Discussion Here Please. (Part 2)
 

It's impossible for 1 heavy user to affect anyone elses service. It's when they are all doing it at the same time that the model fails and problems occur.

The most recent reports suggest a userbase of 1.2million at least.

60% (720,000) @ £18 = £12,960 ,000
30% (360,000) @ £25 = £9,000, 000
10% (120,000) @ £38 = £4,560, 000

Revised total would then be £26,520 ,000 a month

I've no idea offhand of ntl's tax situation so will ignore that for the moment.