Quote:
Originally Posted by Kushan
I actually agree with your sentiment, but you're wrong about VM not having the bandwidth for the Ambit 300. It's not just bandwidth, but load balancing. The more channels you're connected to, the less congestion is an issue - if one channel gets heavily congested, you've got more to make up the load. This is part of the benefit of switching to DOCSIS3 over older DOCSIS - surely you've seen people complaining about being on "a bad channel" and reboot hopping to get a better one? The more bonded channels, the better - for everyone.
Plus, Virgin has plenty of other reasons for ditching the Ambit 300 - it's out of support for one and they're currently paying through the nose for firmware updates, plus it's easier on the CS agents if they have to support less modems. Ultimately, they want everyone on a Superhub if possible.
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One of my professional roles in the networking field is Performance & Reliability Engineer (for safety of life systems). At risk of blowing my credibilty, I'd agree with you on the load balancing provided that its is actually so. It is indeed right to replace all the VMNG300s with SHs so that in any area no channel imbalance is introduced.
The last thing you want is channel imbalance because that can introduce latency when reassembling the packets distributed and interleaved on the bonded channels.
Finally, VM have the unenvious task of ensuring that SNR is maintained high overall the bonded channels so that there is no tendency on one channel for irrecoverable FEC errors to occur. There's much that can go wrong with 8 bonded channels, IMO and thus infrastructure standard has to be high.