[Now Official] More ntl speed changes

[Hans Gruber]

Not sure whether this has occured to NTL but all these customers they lose to ADSL due to these caps, who are being encouraged to "vote with their wallets" won't just be disconnection their broadband, they will be taking their TV and telephone custom elsewhere. There are plenty of alternatives and at cheaper prices. Personally the only reason I am with NTL is for the unlimited broadband. I will regularly go over that 30gb month cap. Once NTL kick me off my TV and telephone package will be cancelled. I'm not going to continue to pay £40+ a month for a sub-standard service when I can be with Sky for less, with a better service.

I would prefer 512k and no restrictions, to do what I want when I want, than 2mbit for a couple of weeks usage.

NTL needs to remember how lucrative their TV service is, losing customers due to restrictions on their broadband service is far from wise. But they are a company and their decisions are down to their shareholders, not their loyal customers.

[Weeble]

Originally Posted by ianathuth

Anyone that says that they can use their daily allowance up in 23 minutes is talking out of the back of their head.

Are you suggesting that the the connection quality will be so poor it will be impossible to sustain a download at that speed?

Yes, theoretically you may be able to do so if not many of the other customers on your UBR were trying to do likewise, but get real, what do you actually do that would eat it up so fast, each and every day?

I probably don't use that much, but a 170MB limit a day is going to make me think twice about doing an apt-get upgrade and having it say it wants to download 40MB of stuff.

If the only choices you had were 5Mb download, 2Mb download or 1Mb download, all for the same price and all with the same upload and all wth a 1 gig per day allowance, which would you choose, and why?

Maybe you should go read some of my other posts?

Weeb

[ian@huth]

Some people seem to think that there are only two types of users, the granny who does a little browsing and sends a few emails and the power user who uses every high bandwidth product possible 24/7. The truth is that every user has a requirement that can be anywhere between the two extremes.

Anyone that can say that it is the really heavy downloader that is important to ISPs should remember that it is only the light users who make it possible for the heavy users to have their service at the price they do. If all there was were heavy users then I dread to think what price you would have to pay.

[IanUK]

EDIT: That price is exceptionally low by the way, last time I did any serious bandwidth shopping I was quoted £40 per Mbit/s a month, 95th percentile rate. Who is that with?

Ev1Servers
http://www.ev1servers.net/english/value_series.asp

Very reliable, had several servers with them for a couple of years.

I appreciate that NTL have other overheads, but these days to cap bandwidth is pretty poor, it may be what several isp's do, but I suspect that is only because they can, not because they must

It used to be that only poor quality bandwidth was low priced (Cogent/Williams etc) but now even premium bandwidth such as Level3 and AboveNet are almost as cheap.

cheers

Ian

[Weeble]

Originally Posted by ianathuth

Some people seem to think that there are only two types of users, the granny who does a little browsing and sends a few emails and the power user who uses every high bandwidth product possible 24/7. The truth is that every user has a requirement that can be anywhere between the two extremes.

EXACTLY my point. I'm not a granny who sends one email a month, and I'm not a "power user" that hammers the thing 24/7. Which package am I "supposed" to be on? Is the intention that the (new) 1Mb service is supposed to be for super-light users only? If so I doubt they'd be willing to pay £18 a month for the privilege and will keep on using modem (is there going to be a new 150k service in there with some pitifully minute download limit for that market). Or will I be expected to cough up extra cash because I (hypothetically) use 6GB a month ?

Weeb

[Ignition]

Originally Posted by DieDieMyDarling

In your opinion what makes a 'power user'? How many hours a day do you spend on the internet? How often do you watch Internet TV, listen to Internet Radio, are you subscribed to any Music download services, film download services, do you play online games a lot? etc.

I play Planetside, download TV series if I miss them, music from time to time, remote administration, 2 PCs running, so browsing, email, also newsgroups (binary and text)

EDIT: Bandwidth: /Current Downstream: 245.37kb/s º Current Upstream: 5.73kb/s\

From what many people are saying the 1mb teir will not be a viable low speed service due to the low cap. So in my opinion 2mb will become the low teir, in many peoples minds.

Not really, I doubt many 300k users use it for big downloads, its' attractions are that it's always on on a price point close to that of freecall dialup.

I totally disagree. My average useage for the past few months has been about 35GB (including upstream). I have in the past used a lot more, but i just don't use the internet as much as i did. We're both guilty of the same thing, i'm looking at it from my perspective, and you're looking at it from yours. You want more speed, i like the idea of more speed, but can't justify it in light of the low caps. It always becomes an argument about P2P and illicit software/movies etc, but there are many legitimate uses of bandwidth that can take up just as much GB's.

Nope, I'm looking at it from the point of view of at what point a company can make money and afford to innovate while keeping as many customers as possible happy. Based on what I know about the UK and international internet industry these limits are a reasonable compromise, and more generous than current competition in the low price higher speed market.

Check out Wanadoo, they've added hundreds of thousands of users on the back of low cost high speed capped services. This is why I'm saying your viewpoint is that of a minority, the facts say the majority like this kind of service.

You say if these services become more common that the prices will drop and capping will be done at a higher level. P2P is already very common, the numbers of people using the various P2P methods are sky high, the UK included. Yet we're seeing companies run the opposite way, choosing to take advantage of it and charge more for it. Was it you who said if the 5% of people overusing the service were to be capped, then the companies would lower their prices? If not I apoligize, but it's a very naive mindset. ISP's rely on high users, and people that will pay for the faster speeds. Ntl will use the 3mb teir as a selling point, they can boast the fastest speeds, knowing full well that not many of their customers (in comparison with those on lower teirs) could make use of the speed. Most of the people (in my opinion) who would want and make use of a 3mb service will be those who overrun the guidelines now on the 1.5 connection.

35% of ALL internet usage is Bittorrent. Bittorrent is responsible for 55% of all P2P. ISPs are having strain placed on their networks by P2P, as they pay a metered charge to their bandwidth providers, and P2P by nature tends to use non-peered connections. Check the links I gave to see how other providers are being forced to act to keep their prices to reasonable and provide good QoS.

I'd be very interested in finding out just how many people thinking of getting 3mb will use it just to download the odd file, at a faster speed, and how many will be getting it so they can download a lot of files, and do it faster. I'd have thought most would be in the latter category. And that those people are valuable to Ntl, as if they leave and very few people subscribe to the 3mb teir, they won't have the funding or the drive to look towards 4mb, 5mb and 10mb for the future.

Agreed to an extent on the first point. Entirely disagree on the second point. If the top tier is unprofitable where's the incentive or as you put it the funding to raise speeds so that you can lose more money each month on data transfer?

Considering Ntl have their own backbone and provide all the bandwidth themselves i'm sure they could do a much better deal than that. Don't you think?

Level3, Sprint, Cogentco, Cable and Wireless.net and all the other transit providers would disagree that ntl provide all the bandwidth themselves, someone has to take your data to other countries and they expect to be paid for the use of their networks.

It's those people paying £38 for not much use that keeps Ntl earning money. The 5% of people overusing the service cost nowhere near as much sa the money Ntl are making by charging low use customers £38, £25 and £18 a month so they can send a few emails and tallk to granny simpson across the water. I agree with your argument, you shouldn't be paying £38 for a bit of occasional browsing, emails and the odd security update. In an ideal world there would be two seperate teir systems. A speed system and a bandwidth allowance system:

I wouldn't bet on the 5% not costing that much. Interesting you use the word 'overusing' there. That 5% are a big margin muncher.

Teir system 1:
1mb = £9.99 a month (5GB cap).
2mb = £14.99 a month (20GB cap)
3mb = £24.99 a month (30GB cap).

So long as you don't mind paying premium rate for tech support, supplying your own modem, paying for engineer calls if that kit goes wrong, need I go on? There's a hell of a lot more to the costs to provide the service than just bandwidth!

Teir system 2:
1mb = £17.99 a month (20GB cap).
2mb = £24.99 a month (50GB cap).
3mb = £37.99 a month (100GB cap).

If ntl's costs are per GB similar to those BT have just to take traffic from ADSL exchanges and deliver them to ISPs (NOT including external bandwidth) those costs are a non-starter, unprofitable by default.

Or something similar. That way people could choose which is more important to them, speed or cap. Or, possibly they could come up with a decent pricing system for extra GB's on top of your cap. In the same way that some mobile phone providers offer Text bolt on's etc. Maybe £1.49 for 1GB, £6.49 for 5GB, £9.99 for 10GB, £15.99 for 20GB, etc.

Good idea! Perhaps in the future this will be looked at!

I disagree, as i pointed out above, companies rely on the people who overuse the service, as they are the ones prepared to pay for the newer, faster speeds, so they can get MORE downloads, and keep the ISP driving towards still faster speeds. It's how Ntl advertised broadband in the first place, UNLIMITED service. It's an interesting point you make about the quality of the service, Ntl's quality has been disgraceful! Email servers that work when they want to, Newsgroups that hardly EVER work, outages at least once a month in most area's. AOL are uncapped, and i've not heard of many problems with them.

Point re: driving forward addressed above. Newsgroups from what I've seen of them are being very well behaved. Outages once a month? Due to the size of the network outages are inevitable. To say everyone has an outage once a month is pretty unfair. AOL use BT's network for most of their ADSL service. As a comparison how many problems have you seen with the ntl operated virgin.net? If ntl are this atrocious how come despite only covering about 35% of the country they are the 2nd biggest retail ISP?

Btw, another point about contention etc. Most people who use P2P and the likes, tend to do most of their downloading at night, when the service isn't being used as much, it'll be interesting to see how the new 3mb speed will affect daytime useage, when the people who just want to download their updates faster, are doing so at the same time as peak service, when people on all the other teirs are downloading too. Compared to the 5% of users that download lots of files overnight, when most people on the other teirs aren't using their bandwidth.

Doesn't really make much odds when people are piling up loads of stuff to download in a queue. Those really hammering their service are just as likely to be doing it in peak time, when there are at the PC queueing stuff up. I doubt that many are up in the middle of the night just to queue up. Also uploading is rarely done just overnight. Can think of at least 2 people I know who are respectively uploading 24x7 on emule to improve their credits and seeding torrents 24x7. 1 person using 1/15th-ish of an upstream that should hold 250+ people. On 3Mbit they can munch 1/10th of a downstream expected to hold several hundred happily.

[DeadKenny]

Originally Posted by Ignition

Less than 1% - the main problem area will be resolved within the next month or so. Any more questions?

So I was either one of the 1% on an overcapacity UBR or there were other fundamental problems beyond just overcapacity that led me to finally chuck in the towel

All this major investment didn't see to do a think for my unreliable connection. In fact when they started mucking about it got worse!!

Still, I'm sure I would have been better off with waiting for 3Mbps and have a cheap super fast connection... that is useless because the connection is unreliable.

[Stuart]

Originally Posted by DieDieMyDarling

<snip>
I disagree, as i pointed out above, companies rely on the people who overuse the service, as they are the ones prepared to pay for the newer, faster speeds, so they can get MORE downloads, and keep the ISP driving towards still faster speeds. It's how Ntl advertised broadband in the first place, UNLIMITED service.

Interesting point. Bear in mind that that one 1.5 Meg user uses the same bandwidth as 5 300K users. Which do you think is more profitable for NTL? 1x£37.9 9 or 5x£17.9 9?

Even taking in to account costs of service provision, I would say it's the 300K users who are more profitable. IIRC most NTL users are on the lower bandwidth as well.

It's an interesting point you make about the quality of the service, Ntl's quality has been disgraceful! Email servers that work when they want to, Newsgroups that hardly EVER work, outages at least once a month in most area's. AOL are uncapped, and i've not heard of many problems with them.

You don't know many AOL users then... NTL do have problems, but they are not as bad as you have made out. Well, maybe the email servers are.

Btw, another point about contention etc. Most people who use P2P and the likes, tend to do most of their downloading at night, when the service isn't being used as much, it'll be interesting to see how the new 3mb speed will affect daytime useage, when the people who just want to download their updates faster, are doing so at the same time as peak service, when people on all the other teirs are downloading too. Compared to the 5% of users that download lots of files overnight, when most people on the other teirs aren't using their bandwidth.

In my experience, people are not considerate enough to do that..

300K 1MB †“ £17.99. (5GB* usage) + £5 for unlimited usage

Can some one tell me if that is what NTL said, if so I'll pay the extra £5 for unlimited bandwidth.

[Ignition]

Originally Posted by DeadKenny

So I was either one of the 1% on an overcapacity UBR or there were other fundamental problems beyond just overcapacity that led me to finally chuck in the towel

All this major investment didn't see to do a think for my unreliable connection. In fact when they started mucking about it got worse!!

Still, I'm sure I would have been better off with waiting for 3Mbps and have a cheap super fast connection... that is useless because the connection is unreliable.

Other issues in your case sir, all fixed and all good last time I checked.

You have a PM.

[Ignition]

Originally Posted by Scott

Can some one tell me if that is what NTL said, if so I'll pay the extra £5 for unlimited bandwidth.

It isn't. 1Mbit unlimited for £22.99 a month? Not likely.

[DieDieMyDarling]

Not really, I doubt many 300k users use it for big downloads, its' attractions are that it's always on on a price point close to that of freecall dialup.

A good few people on here would disagree. Some people just couldn't afford to get a higher speed, now they'll be forced to either upgrade to 2mb or look elsewhere, as the cap just isn't good enough for them.

Check out Wanadoo, they've added hundreds of thousands of users on the back of low cost high speed capped services. This is why I'm saying your viewpoint is that of a minority, the facts say the majority like this kind of service.

On lower teirs i can understand how a lot of people wouldn't mind, if they're just getting emails etc. My real argument is with the higher teirs, 3mb mainly.

35% of ALL internet usage is Bittorrent. Bittorrent is responsible for 55% of all P2P. ISPs are having strain placed on their networks by P2P, as they pay a metered charge to their bandwidth providers, and P2P by nature tends to use non-peered connections. Check the links I gave to see how other providers are being forced to act to keep their prices to reasonable and provide good QoS.

In an earlier post you stated that if these services became more common then the charges would drop, now you're saying they're a stain on the system and costing companies too much money.

If the top tier is unprofitable where's the incentive or as you put it the funding to raise speeds so that you can lose more money each month on data transfer?

I still think they make much more money from the underusers than they lose with the overusers. And in return the overusers keep them ahead of the competition, wanting the fastest speeds possible, and paying enough to keep it viable, so they can use it in advertising, that they are the fastest provider in the UK.

So long as you don't mind paying premium rate for tech support, supplying your own modem, paying for engineer calls if that kit goes wrong, need I go on? There's a hell of a lot more to the costs to provide the service than just bandwidth!

Getting through to Tech Support would be nice, maybe with a premium service they'd HAVE to answer calls faster. But points taken.

Point re: driving forward addressed above. Newsgroups from what I've seen of them are being very well behaved. Outages once a month? Due to the size of the network outages are inevitable. To say everyone has an outage once a month is pretty unfair. AOL use BT's network for most of their ADSL service. As a comparison how many problems have you seen with the ntl operated virgin.net? If ntl are this atrocious how come despite only covering about 35% of the country they are the 2nd biggest retail ISP?

I'm still having problems with a lot of newsgroups, i don't use them much myself, mainly because i'm put off by them not working very often. I have problems with email at least once a week, sometimes it's only for a few mins, sometimes it can be all day, sometimes it's a lot more than once a week, and judging by the posts on this forum it's not just me suffering from it.

They're one of the biggest because they aren't just an internet company. They bundle TV, Phone and Internet together. Most people prefer to simplify things by buying all 3 products from the same provider. The only reason i haven't moved to another provider when going through problems with Ntl was it would mean taking my phone to BT. So i stuck with it in hope that they'd sort it out. It's better now, but far from acceptable at times. A lot of people on this board didn't wait as long as me, as can be seen in countless posts.

Doesn't really make much odds when people are piling up loads of stuff to download in a queue. Those really hammering their service are just as likely to be doing it in peak time, when there are at the PC queueing stuff up. I doubt that many are up in the middle of the night just to queue up. Also uploading is rarely done just overnight. Can think of at least 2 people I know who are respectively uploading 24x7 on emule to improve their credits and seeding torrents 24x7. 1 person using 1/15th-ish of an upstream that should hold 250+ people. On 3Mbit they can munch 1/10th of a downstream expected to hold several hundred happily.

It makes more sense to do your downloading at night, it doesn't get in the way of what you're doing through the day, browsing, emails etc, and also more people are on the foreign networks at night, so you get more people to share from.
THe thing is though, if that were the case, where the 5% of people overusing the service were crippling it, why have Ntl taken the speeds up so high? Whereas before most people on ntl were downloading at 30k/sec, standard, they'll be able to download at 124k/sec now. They've just put 4 times the strain on the network at any given time. When people were on the 1mb service as the highest teir, it was argued that they were at fault for slowing down other peoples service, downloading at 124k/sec constantly. Now the network is going to be flooded with people using at LEAST 124k/sec, while browsing etc. Is there less people on each UBR now to allow for that, or will people just suffer slow speeds?

Originally Posted by Ignition

It isn't. 1Mbit unlimited for £22.99 a month? Not likely.

Darn it. I don't want to pay £25 a month just for the extra bandwidth, and the 2MB speed, as I don't need it. I would pay £23 for 1MB and 30-40GB bandwidth per month though.

[DieDieMyDarling]

Originally Posted by scastle

Interesting point. Bear in mind that that one 1.5 Meg user uses the same bandwidth as 5 300K users. Which do you think is more profitable for NTL? 1x£37.9 9 or 5x£17.9 9?

I didn't say they were more profitable. They help by taking the highest speed, and giving them the need for a faster speed in the first place, so they can boast of having the fastest connection in the UK.

You don't know many AOL users then... NTL do have problems, but they are not as bad as you have made out. Well, maybe the email servers are.

I actually know quite a few people on AOL, and they are mostly very happy with the service. Being uncapped just makes it even sweeter.

And the Ntl service IS as bad as i think. It has been getting better, but it's by no means good enough yet. I've never had a single problem of speed, i always get my full bandwidth, on whichever connection i've been on. Even when i was downloading 24/7. But i've always had problems with email, newsgroups, complete loss of service for hours and days at a time, waiting for Tech Support to answer the phone, finding someone in Tech Support who actually knew anything (there are some that are fantastic help, all welsh in my experience, but a lot that don't know what they're talking about, instead following keyword based instructions on a screen.), etc.

[Ignition]

Originally Posted by DieDieMyDarling

A good few people on here would disagree. Some people just couldn't afford to get a higher speed, now they'll be forced to either upgrade to 2mb or look elsewhere, as the cap just isn't good enough for them.

Sorry, like everything else pretty much you get what you pay for.

In an earlier post you stated that if these services became more common then the charges would drop, now you're saying they're a stain on the system and costing companies too much money.

No, you were talking about people streaming DVDs, etc. I don't really think that P2P is everyone's idea of a great new service, especially as no-one makes any money out of it. When there's money to be made service providers will step up to the plate. At the momet giving the majority of your network's bandwidth away so that people can down / upload for the most part copyrighted material for free is a big revenue maker....

I still think they make much more money from the underusers than they lose with the overusers. And in return the overusers keep them ahead of the competition, wanting the fastest speeds possible, and paying enough to keep it viable, so they can use it in advertising, that they are the fastest provider in the UK.

The point that you are missing is that the overusers AREN'T the ones paying enough to keep it 'viable' it's all the people who pay over the odds to offset these people that make it viable! Market forces inspire changes like this.

They're one of the biggest because they aren't just an internet company. They bundle TV, Phone and Internet together. Most people prefer to simplify things by buying all 3 products from the same provider. The only reason i haven't moved to another provider when going through problems with Ntl was it would mean taking my phone to BT. So i stuck with it in hope that they'd sort it out. It's better now, but far from acceptable at times. A lot of people on this board didn't wait as long as me, as can be seen in countless posts.

For everyone on this board with issues there are literally hundreds of thousands of happy bunnies. If it were any other way ntl would be out of business.

It makes more sense to do your downloading at night, it doesn't get in the way of what you're doing through the day, browsing, emails etc, and also more people are on the foreign networks at night, so you get more people to share from.
THe thing is though, if that were the case, where the 5% of people overusing the service were crippling it, why have Ntl taken the speeds up so high? Whereas before most people on ntl were downloading at 30k/sec, standard, they'll be able to download at 124k/sec now. They've just put 4 times the strain on the network at any given time. When people were on the 1mb service as the highest teir, it was argued that they were at fault for slowing down other peoples service, downloading at 124k/sec constantly. Now the network is going to be flooded with people using at LEAST 124k/sec, while browsing etc. Is there less people on each UBR now to allow for that, or will people just suffer slow speeds?

Less people on a uBR, loads of network upgrades, and the network won't be flooded with people pulling that rate all the time. Most people's traffic is bursty, and the usage allowances act as a disincentive to people who may want to download full pelt all the time. 1 person downloading at 180k/s 90% of the time is far worse than several people downloading at 360k/s 5% of the time...

Think we can safely agree to disagree though on this. I accept your points even though I disagree with most of them, and have as much as possible supplied evidence to that effect.