[graf_von_anonym]

Originally Posted by Mike_A

What seems to pervade VM operations is policy which appears as indoctrination.

Your techniques have the whiff of The Manchurian Candidate to them, but I was responding in jest to something I took not entirely seriously. It's hard to operate within an organisation that does things a particular way without picking up that way of doing things. In many cases Virgin's explanations for the whys and wherefores of Traffic Management are brought about because that is how the network is understood to work. Now how close how the network is understood to work and how it actually works I leave as an exercise for the reader, though I would point towards the difficulties in treating a complex system as anything other.

Originally Posted by Mike_A

But what do I want? The service I paid very high rates for. I do not want a service never higher (during times of normally expected use) than someone who is paying for the low or medium bandwidth service (which VM engineers confirmed at my premises). At times I receive substantially less service delivery than paid for I want a rebate because I have overpaid, mostly because of what amounts to deception by VM. And if I succeed in the court action, I want VM to abide by the court orders - to provide the service contracted, the side effect of which is no capping without clear accounting and reason for why they are doing so. If they cannot deliver line speed in the area, and that means they can only ever offer something not beyond a middle or low package level, then that's what I should pay and it gives me the opportunity to get better elsewhere - along with about 200 people in the area who will follow.

Okay. I'll state some things here that I believe to be fact, which you are entitled to dispute but I regard them as solid.

Firstly, the contract you took with Virgin Media (or any previous entity) was to provide you with an Internet connection subject to (variable) Terms & Conditions. Now, there's a case that variation of Terms & Conditions in the way that Virgin Media (and countless others) deploy is tantamount to sharp practise, but as I understand it predicating a contractual agreement upon another is not in and of itself illegal, and it could (and probably would) be argued that the speed of a connection is ancillary to delivery of a connection in and of itself. You don't get a discount if a 1st class letter you send isn't delivered until the day after tomorrow. By framing their broadband as "up to" it's aspiration, not goal. Virgin promise nothing*, no matter what interpretation their marketing department seeks to create.

Secondly, if you haven't been getting the service you expected, then I would say that you do deserve a rebate. If you've contacted Virgin about slow speeds in the past, then it's usually within the bounds of possibility for them to charge you a rate equivalent to the connection that you do tend to achieve while keeping you on your current package. Where this becomes difficult is when you have expectations of service that Virgin do not share. You are not the only contracting party, and it's based on shared understanding. If you are looking for something from Virgin that they don't believe they are obligated to provide then you've got a recipe for contractual chaos.

Thirdly, remedy in contract is a difficult process. If Virgin state that they have endeavoured to provide you with the service you looked for (and in their defence your multiple technician visits and so on would speak to that) and have continued to fail to be able to do so, then no Judge in his right mind would order them to do so. In their infinite wisdom no Justice can fill sacks with grain that is not there for the filling. So your likely remedy past compensation is termination of contract. That's not to dissuade you, I hasten to add, just to suggest that I do not think it is possible for you to get what you want.

Fourthly, regarding the core of the issue, I think there are two things at play. As has been discussed, oversubscription is a consequence of Virgin (and its predecessors) business models and market exposure. As a listed company who are in direct competition with a former monopoly that is mandated to attempt ADSL provision to all, it effectively cannot refuse a customer broadband. As a company that employs the bulk of its staff in a customer service role through call-centres, it is very hard for it to provide staff capable of comprehending these issues at the point of sale, were it in their interest to do so. Capitalism is the beast within us, given teeth enough to swallow us and our desires. While it provides the service it can, as demand increases (more customers, and more and different usage by customers) supply is obviously stretched. Supply is more costly to provide. Therefore as a stop-gap Subscriber Traffic Management was introduced to mitigate the effects of increased demand while capacity was increased.

Fifthly, STM can be a contributory factor to packet loss, but is not intended to do so. It is a reduction of bandwidth, yes, indisputable, but the only reasons I have seen for packet loss are - A: saturation of connection as upload, resulting in what is tantamount to buffer-overrun (and in my experience this is by far the most common). B: a theoretical (and this is based on my current understanding which is subject to change) opportunity for packet loss when the QoS is changed at the UBR, such that the transport stream to the UBR finds itself wider than that from it to the modem, but with packets that require receipt acknowledgement this should cause no problems, but with UDP being 'best effort' there is a chance that packets sent would be discarded, but and I cannot stress this enough, this would be the product of the protocol and its inability to respond to a change in conditions, rather than a change in conditions themselves. We aren't talking circuits here, after all.

Sixthly, and it's important to remember, other things can slow connections.

Originally Posted by Mike_A

I want nice people within a nice supplier who doesn't cheat.

Pff. Hippie.

*Save disappointment, obviously.