[bpullen]

Originally Posted by Ignition

Following the decision to kick two users off for complaining on their forums too much, which I can actually see the point to an extent, though I don't know all the facts, they are now pretty much confessing that they are lacking in capacity to handle all their customers being online at once.

Hi there,

We are not short of capacity across our network and that is not the primary reason for the proposal to introduce idle timeouts.

A few friends of mine who use their service have been complaining to me about having issues connecting, which were symptomatic of PN lacking in 'sessions' with BT, namely amount of concurrent users that can be placed through each unit of capacity.

As mentioned, we haven't any problems with capacity that would prevent a user connecting. Can I ask what symptoms would point to this being the case!?

Another friend also mentioned to me a month ago that PN were apparently very short of sessions, and were regularly disconnecting various users overnight to try and balance their session capacity.

The reason for the periods of load balancing that involved disconnecting users was nothing to do with session limits. We had an imbalance of 155Mbps and 622Mbps BT cenral pipes across our network. This inbalance saw some pipes getting full whilst others remained close to empty. This called for us to load balance the network that caused users to be disconnected. We have since decomissioned the 155Mbps pipes and replaced them with 622's that has resolved this problem outright.

Plusnet have now implemented 30 minute idle timeout on two of their broadband ADSL products. If your connection is idle for 30 minutes you'll be disconnected.

We have not implemented this. Just added a clause to the T's & C's that says we may.

This does kind of go against the idea of an always on connection, and is without a doubt a step backwards.

The ideas is to create a balance of users on each segment of central capacity so bandwidth is being used efficiently. Imagine a situation where an entire segment is full of idle users. No one else can connect to that pipe even though no bandwidth is passing through it! In addition to this a pipe full of 50:1 512K customers is not as efficient as a pipe full of 30:1 2MB users, because the bandwidth per session is lower. It is about striking a balance between the differing packages and speeds. As speeds generally increase, the eed for idle timeouts will decrease.

Kind Regards,