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Originally Posted by daxx
3 words to all detracors
WAIT AND SEE |
Ah yes, NTL's catch phrase
(with the emphasis on 'wait'
).
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Originally Posted by JediMaster
NTL offer a GREAT package. (Maybe service is not 100%)
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More like the service is about 10%. There's no point offering cheap fast speeds if the service is crap. I'm much rather NTL charged more to be honest and use the money to invest in the network.
As for 5Gb cap on 1Mbps, that's dead easy to break through without having to resort to "dodgy" downloads, particularly with more and more legitimate on-demand media content which will run into 100s of Mb per download, e.g. BBCi's service, and things like linux ISOs, game demos such as Star Wars Galaxies which is a 2Gb download and then there are the daily patches, legit game downloads by Steam are fairly chunky. Even more so if the cap counts both downstream and upstream (especially if you run a web server or use RemoteDesktop/VPN).
And then you've got home networks with multiple PC users, PS2s and Xbox's all consuming bandwidth with legitimate content.
Personally I think the solution is to offer tiered caps and/or PAYG elements if you go over the caps. You want a bigger cap, pay a bit more. Seems fair enough and would be in competition with the likes of PlusNet who offer a similar service. Given the low prices NTL are talking about I'm sure NTL can match PlusNet's uncapped prices if not beat them, or at least offer sufficiently high caps at a price to keep everyone happy (so long as they can keep modems from rebooting all the time).
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Originally Posted by Ignition
Force9 / Plus.net ya.
My one concern about plus although I've heard a lot of good things about them is that since they switched their buying method from BT they are running their network bloody close to the wire now:
http://www.plus.net/support/adsl/adsl_utilisation.shtml
Bear in mind that last week they added another 155Mbps.
I was considering their services, 2Mbps, no limits for £40 a month is a good deal, I'm just rather nervous about how viable it is and how close to its' limits they are running their connectivity. They lose a single 622Mbps circuit from BT and it's congestion city, they lose a single 155Mbps and it's marginal  |
There's an article on it here...
http://bbs.adslguide.org.uk/showflat...1425869&page=0
Of particular note...
"If you look at Plusnet's Bandwidth Utilisation graphs, this shows that they are not exceeding available capacity. To put it into perspective, although it may look a little bit "full", there is over 150Mbps of spare bandwidth at peak times; this is more than some ISPs run their whole business on! "
The important thing is that it's a BT problem and could effect any ISP, it's just that PlusNet's success has meant they have hit it first, but as they have far more investment they have the capacity to cope.
So far with a month on the service I've not seen any problems and I've had 100% reliability (never seen that on NTL), and vastly better ping times with no packet loss (haven't had the luxury zero packet loss on NTL for ages). Just browsing web sites is amazingly fast compared to NTL. I put it down to the zero packet loss, low pings, no transparent proxies and better backbone connectivity (or generally better infrastructure).
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In ntl's case core network is more than capable of supporting twice the load it currently does, and very few users see congestion, the uBRs as a whole have a lot of overhead free now due to the big upgrades that have been done.
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I'm not so convinced "very few" users see congestion. NTL seem to need to do resegmentation on a frequent basis and there are many UBRs which seem to struggle. Though one of the problems is few users realise what their problem is, most resorting to either putting up with it or attempting to phone NTL and when they eventually get through, get treated to the "all users are dumb, it must be their PC" routine. In my experience it takes a lot of complaints for NTL to even remotely believe there may be a problem somewhere.
Remembering that congestion is a little different with cable. It's less of an issue at the fat-pipe end and far more at the UBR end, especially in the upstream channels which is where there are major problems.