[Ignitionnet]

Originally Posted by Chrysalis

I can guess and my guess is the congestion is actually also caused by normal traffic like ack packets and video streaming etc. things that are taking off and are reasonably popular, for things like live blogs. The shaping seems brutal enough as we seeing complaints of unuseable services going at sub dialup speeds.

Sorry, are you saying that Acks are a cause of congestion?

Do you know how large these are? 40 bytes. Per 1500 bytes downstream. It is impossible for them to cause congestion. Are you also aware of TurboDox and PHS, both functions which minimise TCP overheads on cable networks?

Video streaming isn't close to mainstream, very few people feel the need to display their lives online and the number of live webcams operating are minimal. P2P is still over 75% of all upstream traffic according to Arbor Networks.

Originally Posted by Chrysalis

Wrong type of regulation, its regulating competition but not consumer experience.

Nothing stopping customers from going elsewhere if unhappy with the service.

Originally Posted by Chrysalis

They havent, trading standards if get involved in individual cases normally lead to VM (or any company for that matter) offering some kind of bribe to the consumer or personal attention given to their situation which stops anything from escalating.

In other words you have no evidence of your comment as it has not been tested.

Originally Posted by Chrysalis

When have I said otherwise? You know money is an issue but yet dont see raising more of it from customers as the solution.

You don't seem to appreciate how price sensitive most consumers are. We still see posts complaining about pricing both here and elsewhere.

Originally Posted by Chrysalis

Lets say I was supplying you with goods. I then realise after we signed contracts that to supply you with what you paying for doesnt make me as much money as I liked so I think start diluting the goods watering them down so to speak so I make more money, you find this acceptable practice? Or you buy a can of lager from the supermarket but its only half full because the lager company says they forced to by competition to sell at low price but can only make money by half filling it? thats ok? profit comes before providing what you market and sell?

Last I checked you are buying a can of lager with a fixed amount in it, 440ml, 500ml, 568ml.

Originally Posted by Chrysalis

What you basically saying is that heavy users arent profiteable, I agree with this statement. This is of course true for decades and applies to any isp. Your opinion is loss making users should not be subsidised and its ok for consumers sharing resources with them to have a 'not fit for purpose' service (look up not fit for purpose on trading standards), unfortenatly this type of service and anything bandwidth related works on subsidy with the exception of PAYG type services. It works on averages, Its highly likely VM actually underprovide capacity in areas with lower usage than average.

Funny tho when I showed you my service situation in february you considered it unacceptable and that was the same thing, 'high utilisation' as described by VM.

VM describe everything as 'high utilisation' - they are hardly likely to say 'Yes we've put too many modems on the port.' High utilisation is a perfectly accurate description, it is after all the amount of utilisation on the port that causes issues, not the number of devices on it.

---------- Post added at 12:26 ---------- Previous post was at 12:12 ----------

Originally Posted by Chrysalis

What has VM not been a reseller have to do with them having to pander to the "I want everything for nothing" brigade? Even BT themselves have a usage cap on their cheaper products.

I would love to see you try that argument to a judge.

Judge - So why did you not give a service fit for purpose?
Defendant - Because I was making no money, surely the need to make a profit comes before the law?
Judge - Not quite.

Nice to see you completely ignored my scenario points ignition, do you think this high utilisation issue is 1-2% or a much higher number like double digits? if its very low then to subsidise those areas to a acceptable service should be very possible. If its over 10% then I think its defenitly wrong to call it unexpected high usage and is a simple matter of selling something cant provide.

I am not sure why you keep going on about costs, trading standards as an example dont care one bit for such things. In basic transactions the seller offers something for a price, the buyer agrees to pay for it or doesnt. It is 100% up to the seller to ensure that price is enough to provide what they selling as fit for purpose and it makes them money.

You have gave no valid reason. VM do not have to sell unlimited 10mbit connections for the price they do. It is 100% their choice. They do not have to dish out retention deals to 10s if not 100s of thousands of people, again their choice. You have even said yourself that you think people bluff and would likely not leave anyway if retention deals were withdrawn, these things suck money out of the company. Someone who knows what they doing would budget for extra bandwidth in student areas from day 1, it would be taken into account for the price on the whole customer base.

I am working, which sadly leaves me little time to debate this.

I have given complete explanations, I am offering no excuses merely stating things as VM and every other cable company see them.

Your points of view on financial matters are rather unusual (asking companies to donate dividends from shares you own to charity for example), I'm being pragmatic. VM do what they do for a reason, I may not agree with it but they don't price their products low for their health and don't market them as they do for fun. I disagree with their advertising of unlimited but understand why they do it.

I have no idea what % of areas suffer utilisation issues, it will be single digits, more precisely than that I've no idea.

It is interesting that you complain about a 'one size fits all' contention ratio, while you also complain about VM charging too little when that 'one size fits all' price is perfectly adequate to pay for capacity to serve the vast majority of the customer base.

You want a 'one size fits all' contention ratio that's high enough to ensure that even areas with extremely high usage per active modem run perfectly, with a price to match. This is not a viable business model for them. Dropping contention down to the 10:1 or less that extremely heavy users require along with charging a price to match isn't an option, increasing prices to everyone to ensure that heavily utilised areas run without issue isn't an option and is unfair, expecting others to subsidise the heavy usage of the few is unfair.

You comment on limits, sure the FUP where they warn customers who are heavily using their services at peak times is a form of control?

As far as fit for purpose goes that's a matter of perspective. Many aren't working from a home office managing web servers via their connections and don't notice impact from a relatively minimal amount of jitter. Oddly I don't notice particularly even though my current connection's jitter is awful.

Pinging www.linx.net [195.66.232.53] with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 195.66.232.53: bytes=32 time=40ms TTL=51
Reply from 195.66.232.53: bytes=32 time=27ms TTL=51
Reply from 195.66.232.53: bytes=32 time=23ms TTL=51
Reply from 195.66.232.53: bytes=32 time=25ms TTL=51

I'm not getting into a debate on the morality of this. You've made statements regarding goods being fit for purpose, etc, that are untested in this context. I'm not interested in how moral or otherwise it is for VM to allow certain nodes to become heavily utilised as I don't see it as an issue of morality. If people have issues with the service they can take their business elsewhere just as I did.

We cannot have the services we do at the prices we do and expect SLAs or performance guarantees. Even Comhem, who I am a huge fan of, on their speed guarantee merely lower prices to the next tier down if customers hit slow speeds and don't promise anything in terms of latency and jitter as well as only promising that the tier will outperform the next one down or 50% of maximum which in the case of their 100Mbit service means anything above 50.01Mbit they consider acceptable and anything over 100Mbit acceptable on their 200Mbit. Latency and jitter do not form a part of this performance guarantee, as they don't on any other cable service worldwide.