[Ignition]

Blimey I wander off for a while and it all goes pearshaped.

Th'Eng, nice glib remark, I'm aware we're in the UK, a poster mentioned an unmetered 4/1 ISP in the US and I asked which one it was. Turned out he was referring to Bell / Sympatico in Canada, which I was already aware of (moving out there soon I need to know these things )

Now then...

Originally Posted by Chrysalis

Contrary to what people might thing a bigger network results on LOWER costs as the cost per user is lower.

Doesn't do much for costs on local HFC network though.

1 - Buying bandwidth in larger amounts = more purchasing power so less price paid per mbit.

Doesn't do anything for the major cost, HFC upgrade, maintenance, resegmentation, etc.

2 - Having bigger pipes results in less visible contention, eg. try doing 20:1 contention on a 2mbit pipe for 512kbit users, you would be lucky to get 8 on there without seeing issues and thats only 2:1 contention so when you have smaller pipes you are forced to lower contention to maintain qos this means higher cost per user.

Statistical contention yes. Shame that on an HFC network one needs to either improve the quality of the HFC or split nodes in order to increase bandwidth.

3 - Ntl use transperent proxies again reducing costs, most of the isp's I mentioned if not all dont do this so their costs will be higher.

No idea what those beasties do for the bottom line, personally I'd get shot of them or use them for caching more bandwidth hungry traffic.

So in short if ntl do all this and they have to cap to make a profit then something is f**ked up somewhere, they are either making a obscene profit for their shareholders (i think some of you posting here own shares ) or their directors need replacing because they should be making a large profit with all the above practices.

Actually no, Telewest are much more profitable operating wise.

I keep saying it again and again, although ntl dont compete with telewest it doesnt mean we cant ask questions why telewest are able to provide so much more then ntl and expect a good answer instead of abusive remarks made against those who dont like it.

Oki doki. A while ago there was this cable company, the biggest in the UK in terms of homes passed, called Consumer Co. Owned by Cable and Wireless. At this time Telewest were number 2 and ntl were number 3. Consumer Co. was put up for sale and both ntl and Telewest bid obscene amounts but ntl won as more of their bid was cash and less shares compared to TW. Due to the slower than expected take up of CATV (Sky took a much higher share of market than satellite in North America and more homes use CATV for standard analogue channels there rather than terrestrial antennae and aerials) essentially both cable companies crashed and burned. ntl were running on fumes for a while and were restructuring debt a full year before Telewest did. While ntl were restructuring Telewest were doing extensive resegmentation and upgrades on their (smaller and with no Ex-Videotron, Bell Cablemedia instead IIRC) hybrid networks.

In a sentence it comes down to cash. Had Telewest won the bidding for CoCo positions would probably be reversed.

The isp's I mentioned do I know if they have issues?, well I read adslguide regurly following the latest adsl news and I know which isp's have problems and which dont, and the ones I mentioned do not have problems related to contention and speed, nildram is the best example of this their customers consist of lots of online gamers and their pings will be very sensitive to contention so I am sure I would know about it if there was any issues there.

Heh cba to read back + find said list. Nildram certainly aren't without issues though, Datastream customers complaining of poor pings / speeds, they traffic shaped at one point after running out of bandwidth amongst other things.

Time of day cap - have cap for peak time usage and then make it unmetered for say 1am to 8am.

Most consistent traffic is upstream, which doesn't drop much between those times. If it's getting caned overnight as people don't have to worry about limitation late night gamers, maybe playing clan matches in the USA, will moan like hell.

Unmetered package - unmetered 24/7 but speeds reduced to 150kbit at peak time.

Ummm. Because it's peak time, when people generally want to use their connections. People don't pay enough to be able to download @ 3Mbit for 18 hours a day all month either.

Sell static ip's and other extras - It is proven on many adsl isp's that people want these things and they can have a high profit margin for isp's and as such subsidise other parts of the operation.

Because cable IPs delivered via standard means cannot be static. Without a static IP there goes the extras like IP blocks, custom reverse DNS, etc. Can I point out to you that ntl is the biggest retail ISP. Do BTBroadband or Wanadoo offer these extras? ntl as a company cannot be everything to everyone and have to tend to the majority like every other huge ISP. Most people don't give a monkey's about a static IP or rDNS, that's where ISPs like Zen, Nildram, A+A etc have their niche offering these services.

Reintroduce install fee - This free install has gone on for year's now when is it going to come back.

Is that any of your business? Presumably if you change back to BT you'll complain that part of your line rental is subsidising someone in the Outer Hebrides whose phone line costs several hundred a month to operate.

Introduce support tiering - For those who are newbies and will need tech support add £5 to monthly fee and provide 0800 (150) support, the experienced ones of us use premium rate support.

Because 95% or more of customers *are* newbies and nearly all customers will have to call support at some point. Less 'newbies' will sign up due to the extra fiver a month on the headline price, less 'experienced' ones of you will sign up due to the premium rate support, or will be peeved when you have to ring.

In short there are many sides of the argument, some of you may say you subisidise my bandwidth usage, whilst I could argue I subsidise you having to ring up tech support every day when you get confused as to why your drivers broken etc..

In EVERY company without exception some customers subsidise others. I will happily argue that those using extreme amounts of bandwidth are being heavily subsidised by others, yes even those 'newbies' who ring tech support from time to time (also known as pretty much everyone). I rang tech support 3 times while working for ntl several levels above them because I needed and engineer and they are the people who sort it, presumably that makes me a newbie?

Try and engage brain before fingers, most of your arguments are fatally flawed and take no consideration of any viewpoint other than you own, which is highly polarised and not very well informed of either the business or technical side of cable and telecomms.