[James Henry]

Ah you can't just upgrade the uBRs beyond a certain point. Under the current standards no local area can be supplied with more than 38Mb downstream capacity and 6 x 9.6Mbit/s upstream capacity.

When that isn't enough you can add more downstream channels, which Telewest do, up to a point. Think Telewest only run up to 2 downstream channels at the mo, so that's 76Mb/s downstream and 57.6Mb/s upstream available to a local area.

Please note that pings and speeds will get shaky with 40Mb/s or less of upload used, and that it's very difficult to have all 6 upstreams equally balanced for load so you're probably talking 30 - 35Mb/s of upstream available before some customers begin to notice issues.

At that point you have to do the big upgrade, network resegmentation which consists of splitting a single fibre optic link into two links so that an area that was fed from a single fibre link is split into two areas with fibre, then Telewest would have the capability to supply the 2 x 38Mb/s and 6 x 9.6Mb/s to each of those areas.

The difficulty of resegmentation varies between a little irritating and taking days right up to having to pull new fibre in and taking weeks.