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Originally Posted by space
I did eventually get through to a great support bloke in Liverpool who told me that they've been bombarded by complaints. His investigations have led him to conclude that it's the cisco routers that Telewest bought in bulk. Apparently when they reach 65% capacity they start restricting bandwidth.
Now I know nothing about that side of things. that could have been just a line he was spinning me, or I misunderstood. But the upshot was that unless Telewest pulled its finger out and replaced the hardware, the problem wasn't likely to go away.  |
Hmmmz..
He's kinda right. Looks like another upstream congestion issue though, 65% is the time when upstream congestion *can* impact on pings, but won't do that much to downloading.
When you start utilising more of the upstreams and they get to a very high level of utilisation they aren't restricting bandwidth it just isn't there to give.
Due to this upstream bandwidth being over used you end up not being able to acknowledge the data that is sent to you from the internet in a timely fashion and end up with slower than normal download speeds and obviously due to the congestion higher pings.
Downstream congestion is less likely. You can still get near enough full performance out of a downstream right until it gets pretty much completely full.
This is not a feature of the Cisco routers / uBRs that Telewest bought, it's a feature of the DOCSIS protocol that nearly all cable networks run on.