[JackSon]

Yet another view linking agreement with shaping with poor interlect. They really should do debating in schools, as incinuating insults in an argument, however subtle, detracts credibility from it.


But taking the bait, and continuing along that line of thought I think there is poor sense in trying to discuss broadband service in analogies of other services which actually do not cater for the whole story. Electric supply is one situation, car sales is another; and similarly, broadband is its own specific entity. You cannot describe one by talking about another, as they are not really the same thing having different deciding factors.

As for praising the job VM are doing, I'll just re-explain what I have put before hand. I praise the fact they are putting forth policies in the public eye in order to maintain constant usability from their network after recognising a potential service limitation. Now, this line has to be drawn somewhere, and no matter where it is drawn, there is always going to be some people on the wrong side of it. This line of fair use, outlined by VM, has the implication that anybody exceeding such during the peak usage period (when every man and his dog wants to use the service) is going beyond the amount set aside for their personal use out of the bandwidth pool available to everyone. It is by this definition that some customers are labelled as 'abusers', as is defined by VM and their imposed limits. So in respect of that, yes, for as long as they exceed the fair usage policy, I will continue to use the term 'abusers' seeing as they are using their fair share and portions thereof of other customers. However, it is easily overlooked that despite breeching the fair usage during peak hours, VM are NOT cutting off access to these people, they only decide to turn their speed down for a period. Usually, the penalties for exceeding usage is service termination or extra fees - the policy VM have encompasses none of those measure, it allows service to continue uninterrupted, and that isn't fair? To me, that is worthy of a bit of praise as it is meeting in the middle ground. It is a lenient punishment. However, I will concede, it would be approrpiate for VM to change the 'unlimited' advertising of the service as it is a little misleading in terms of traffic shaping, but it is only the marketing I have a gripe with.


As for money, NTL/VM has been recouping losses for some time as we all know. Therefore investment in the network is also, by no means unlimited, but there is also no doubt that if things are going to improve, it is going to take good old fashioned cash. What's a good way to increase your revenue? Of course, it's the old chestnut of bump up the prices a wee bit. Now, most of us, myself included, would have been a little bit narked if the XL price went up £2 a month extra if nothing else was changing to the service, and I think VM were able to forsee that. So really their only option was to include a speed increase to justify the future rise in broadband rental - and a significant speed increase would also bring in some new customers as well which would help the cash flow. With the existing network, it seems VM were aware that it would not be able to support this huge speed for everbody the whole time so they had to decide what to do. Traffic shaping was obviously their solution, and if it keeps things running, giving us all a fair share of fast access whilst they get themselves and hopefully their network sorted out in the near future, then I don't see it as a waste.

In closing, I am happy to debate why my opion is that shaping is not a bad thing. However, keep insults out of your arguments - let's be grown up about this shall we?