[Ignition]

Originally Posted by kronas

i can see your point my dear freind but how can you expect a market to grow and be prosperous if your not 'pushing the envelope' interms of providing a faster service ? im sure demand for bandwidth will contine to surge ahead as more bandwidth intensive services come online day by day.....

Indeed Kroneh I absolutely agree with you However at the moment price is the main thing for most people so people are slurping up the 300k service as it's quicker than dialup and not much more expensive. The potentially £50 or so a month for 3Mbps may not be as pleasant.

this is how company's loose out in the future, there will always be a company out there willing to push a new product if the market is ready for it.

but sometimes you have to be the one to do it first, this is in NTL's case, im not talking about ridiculously high speeds, but maybe the next level 3mbit ?

The uptake of 1Mbit / 1.5Mbit is at the moment very low, in low single fingers % of total customer base. I would guess that the biggest product is now the 300k service. Simply most people are interested more in price than in how fast it is. For the average customer 300k is more than good enough and most can't justify the expense of higher. (Until they discover P2P / FTP / binary usenet obviously!) Simply - if people want the higher speeds they need to be prepared to pay for them, and right now the evidence says they aren't. BT also aren't interested in pushing the speed envelope either - they've been on 2Mbit down 256k up as an absolute max since the beginning of ADSL. (Note for smart arses I said A DSL not SDSL).

the upgrades will be short term costs, am i right in assuming that NTL pay for the bandwidth they use ?

Some but not all, there's also peering where ISPs agree to discount charges to each other for carrying traffic or not charge each other at all.

since 2001, when i joined the broadband service, i have had 100% speeds, i expect near to that with other isp's, not below half the rated speed, you should be getting 60% of the time

Where would you draw the line tho Kroneh, if NTL gave you 3Mbit would you be happy only achieving 2Mbit at peak times? Some people believe it's a leased line, these are the same people who leave P2P apps on all the time, usually stuff like kazaa, and think it's their absolute duty to download as much as possible all the time because 'They are paying for it.'. Where do you draw the line between acceptable performance for a shared service and giving the impression of no contention, the price paid for this is innovation to be honest.

FWIW I'm a massive advocate of higher speeds, however in this case I am, necessarily, playing devil's advocate. If people want the speeds they need to show demand, the applications are SLOWLY but surely arriving to push this forward, especially in the upstream direction, however those wanting more upstream to improve their share ratio on P2P apps or host the latest leet warez are I suspect going to be disappointed.

Yes this ISPs feed isn't good, however I'm moving to another one that will supply the 100% speeds that I should get at the contention ratio.