Quote:
Originally Posted by lordy
All companies expect a bit of moaning when they do stuff like this. The only thing that will be a disaster is if profitability is affected or branding is 'hurt'. And thanks to contract lock-in, it's early days yet.
However my guesstimate is most normal people go for 10mb or 20mb.
People that get 50mb now (and 100mb in future) either
1) dont really need or use the extra speed, but have lots of disposable income and just like to have "the best"
2) Really do want to "download 15GB HD movies in one hour" as the product is advertised.
All people in group 1 will be unaffected.
As for people in group 2, I don't know what they will do. I'm going to wait a month to see the full impact, maybe Virgin will relax the throttling?
I'm guessing they are not even doing prioritisation, they are just capping all p2p bandwidth, even if the rest of the network has spare capacity.
Virgin might not even care in the short term, if peering and infrastructure savings are greater than the amount lost by people avoiding the product (defecting or downgrading etc), then they will be happy.
They really should change the way they market the product though, as right now there are not many (any?) legitimate unthrottled download services available in the UK where you can get 15GB HD movies at full-speed (not streaming).
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I know they are not having disaster - it was a figure of speech.
Indeed - the traffic management policies don't affect the majority of their customers, most probably don't know what they are or understand them. Its quite possible Virgin see this as a forum for moaning geeks - who don't really represent the views/desires and of their average customer - i.e. most of there customers wont have heard of never mind used the newsgroups.
Anyway putting that to the side - why I would say they are having a problem is that they feel the need to introduce such stringent traffic policy rules. It suggests that their network infrastructure is not good enough, there crap at project management or they are not interested in quality just high markup sales.
Hence, they are pushing for 100MB and the undoubted high mark up sales it will bring, rather than increasing the durability and performance of the whole network.
---------- Post added at 22:35 ---------- Previous post was at 22:16 ----------
And whilst I say most VM users dont use the newsgroups etc. In the next 10 years I am sure there will be rapid increases in HD streaming, game/film downloads and VM at the moment are saying they cant handle that.