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Originally Posted by cook1984
Stuart, that's a load of rubbish. The 5% using 95% of the bandwidth lie has been touted over and over, but most studies show for an average ISP it's more like the top 5% using 40-50% of the bandwidth. Unless VM are extra special...
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It's not actually rubbish. I got that figure from someone who (at that point) was working within VM on the network side of things.
However, regardless of whether the 95% figure is actually right if the top 5% of users are using even 40 or 50% of the bandwidth, the people who aren't using that bandwidth are still subsidising them, so my argument stands.
It's also worth noting that I don't think the upload is enough (for the reasons I outlined elsewhere)
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I think the problem here is the standard British lack of vision and aversion to risk. In Japan, you can get a network DVR, meaning you can record programs at home and watch them anywhere you have a network connection. You need a good upload speed but 100/100 fibre is cheap and widely available. UK companies arn't interested in pushing stuff like that in case the consumer doesn't like it, so instead they just sit back and try to stay just slightly ahead of the competition while spending the minimum amount possible on upgrades.
VM's userbase hasn't grown that much and we have had 20 meg for years now, yet the traffic shaping is getting worse and eating up more hours of the day, not less. That doesn't sound like they are spending much on upgrading their network, does it?
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In an article (which was written by someone who used to work at Psion, so is admittedly biased) I read, they said the problem is that the City demands a quick return on any investment made in new tech. The team that worked at Psion went on to develop a *lot* of successful devices (not least what became the iPod), but because the netbook and DAB failed, the city didn't fund Psion.
Any large speed increase in Broadband will not generate a quick return purely because it costs a *lot* of money to perform the upgrades needed and the market won't take the kind of prices consumers would need to pay to generate a return quickly.
This is, as I understand it, the reason that (apart from Japan) a lot of the countries with ultra high speed access (100 meg up) have networks that even if the government didn't finance them, they are at least heavily involved (such as Sweden changing the law to enable easy fibre installation and establish a non-profit wholesaler ISP).
Our government tends to let big business invest the money and seems to be frightened to get involved.
I am not saying that our government, the city, or Virgin are right. They aren't.
The government needs to at least look at the Swedish example (at least in large towns/cities), even if they don't want to finance a fibre network.
The City needs to be a little more ready to take a chance on new technology and not demand a return quickly (a large broadband network may take decades to provide a return).
Finally, Virgin need to look at what people are actually doing on their network and plan for it.