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Originally Posted by thenry

qas can they, VM improve latency etc? capacity is one thing thats obviously going to help but additional technologies.. would it cost them much to put such technology to good use?

They certainly can, and they are doing a few things to do so (upstream bonding for example, has been in the works for over a year now). As I say guaranteed QoS has been incorporated in the standard since DOCSIS 1.1 so it's easily possible. But it has implications for what VM sells and how they market their product.

Part of the problem is competition, BT's massive upload ratio has pushed VM to improve their upstreams (remember the 33:1 ratio on 50mb?) and this push is straining the network as VM has historically had pretty crap return paths in some areas. Cable networks were never built to take data, they were initially intended for one-way analogue TV. But if it weren't for competition we'd probably still be languishing on 30:1 download to upload ratios or worse.

also cabinet side.. i know therres the old old csbs that need upgrading but the newish ones? could they be upgraded to a better standard without fibre pulls?

I couldn't say as I know very little about VM's cabinet infrastructure. For the most part the HFC network is using very little of it's theoretical capacity. It's more stuff in the middle than the cabinets themselves. And optical nodes.