120M : Virgin Media 150Mb Coming 2014

[ianch99]

Originally Posted by Ignitionnet

Content provider in pulling figures from their hindmost to overstate piracy shock.

This is out and out untrue:



If you are unhappy at the prospect of having your legitimate traffic slowed down by bandwidth used by unlawful downloads the managed network Plusnet operate should be right up your alley.

I am only unhappy because this traffic could be the contributory cause of our slowdowns i.e. without it the network segment would be not be over utilised *if* you believe the figures .. which are as you say are open to debate. As I said before, this is a moot point .. it is what it is ..

PlusNet is no good .. don't fancy going back to 6Mbps down 0.7 up

[qasdfdsaq]

Originally Posted by Ignitionnet

In this day and age with memory being as cheap as it is there is absolutely no excuse for a router to not be able to handle several thousand simultaneous connections.

Pfft. No excuse, but memory prices are still nearly twice as high now than they were four years ago.

[Ignitionnet]

Originally Posted by ianch99

I am only unhappy because this traffic could be the contributory cause of our slowdowns i.e. without it the network segment would be not be over utilised *if* you believe the figures .. which are as you say are open to debate. As I said before, this is a moot point .. it is what it is .

Without it your network segment would have less capacity provisioned to it. VM aren't going to provision 400Mb if they can get away with 300Mb or less.

[qasdfdsaq]

Sounds more like they'll provision 200 if they think they can get away with "300 or less"

[Mr K]

Originally Posted by chrisjones

Just popped on here to catch up with how the roll outs are going... seems there are plenty of people in the same boat, the proposed upgrade dates keep being pushed back and back. We started off at March, then May, now it's June to August. Cheeky Virgin Monkeys!

---------- Post added at 12:20 ---------- Previous post was at 11:37 ----------

Scratch that.... called them up just now and they pushed the codes through. Happy Days!

That's weird, I'm in the same area as you, rang up (retentions) asked the same question and got a no. I'd have to change my package and pay more to get the upgrade now. Bit different if I was a new customer I bet !

Maybe be I'll try again next week, suspect its more about who you get on the phone rather than what area you're in........

[BenMcr]

Originally Posted by Mr K

That's weird, I'm in the same area as you, rang up (retentions) asked the same question and got a no. I'd have to change my package and pay more to get the upgrade now. Bit different if I was a new customer I bet !

Maybe be I'll try again next week, suspect its more about who you get on the phone rather than what area you're in........

Whether you can do it early without changing your package is all down to whether the Networks team release capacity to do it.

Both new customers and upgrades are factored into network planning, so that's why they are normally always possible.

[ianch99]

Originally Posted by BenMcr

Whether you can do it early without changing your package is all down to whether the Networks team release capacity to do it.

Both new customers and upgrades are factored into network planning, so that's why they are normally always possible.

This is not true for my area (Southampton)

[BenMcr]

In what respect?

[ianch99]

Originally Posted by BenMcr

In what respect?

CMTS's sotn8 and sotn9 are over utilised to various degrees as far as I know, possibly more are as well. Some chronically, some less so. I was speaking to one of the Southampton area Principal Engineers yesterday (he came out to replace my shub2) about the Southampton problems. He gave me an update on my utilisation fault for my sotn8 network segment and the other works that are in progress to address the sotn capacity issues.

I know for a fact that new customers are being added and existing customers are being upgraded who would route into the Southampton head end. I do not believe for one minute that "the Networks team release(s) capacity" for upgrades, at least not in my area they don't. They are too busy trying to resegment and add capacity to a 20+ year old fibre network original designed for pockets of Cable TV subscribers in order to address the demands of the current customer base. The problem is that the fibre network topology as laid down 20+ years ago is no longer a optimal fit for the population centre now trying to use it. He said that you can get situations where you can go from one house that has chronic peak utilisation problems, walk across the road and get your headline speed 24x7.

[Sephiroth]

Originally Posted by ianch99

......

I know for a fact that new customers are being added and existing customers are being upgraded who would route into the Southampton head end. I do not believe for one minute that "the Networks team release(s) capacity" for upgrades, at least not in my area they don't.
[SEPH]: They add capacity for upgrades although capacity can be won by releasing channel capacity from the legacy network, including the Upstream. There are other ways of increasing capacity by reducing capacity on the legacy network (QAM, bandwidth and so on. I've got a calculation somewhere - it surprised me but I don't remember the number; it was significant.)

They are too busy trying to resegment and add capacity to a 20+ year old fibre network original designed for pockets of Cable TV subscribers in order to address the demands of the current customer base.
[SEPH]: While I can't argue with the headline statement, the detail of it is what counts. You and I have no idea what fibre plant replacement has been during the last 20 years - but we do know that lasers get tired and fibre technology has improved in transmission terms. VM will be pulling new fibre in noisy segments and will be refreshing the optical nodes where necessary for the same reason. As you say, though, the resegmentation is where capacity can be augmented as long as the added fibres go with it.

The problem is that the fibre network topology as laid down 20+ years ago is no longer a optimal fit for the population centre now trying to use it. He said that you can get situations where you can go from one house that has chronic peak utilisation problems, walk across the road and get your headline speed 24x7.
[SEPH]: I can quite believe that. If, for example, across the road were in a different segment, their performance would not be susceptible to the other side's usage. Also there might be a degree of imprecision on the SE's part - for example his sample is 1 vs 1 and you know how the Internet various minute by minute.

[chrisjones]

Originally Posted by Mr K

That's weird, I'm in the same area as you, rang up (retentions) asked the same question and got a no. I'd have to change my package and pay more to get the upgrade now. Bit different if I was a new customer I bet !

Maybe be I'll try again next week, suspect its more about who you get on the phone rather than what area you're in........

We've been a customer since the early NTL days so its nothing to do with being a new customer I'm afraid.

I simply explained that I had been putting off paying to upgrade on the basis that our free upgrade was originally sue in March... Which changed to May..... Then to June etc. I explained it was a little frustrating constantly seeing the dates move and that my family were wanting to use the connection more and more (Netflix, Xbox, YouTube etc..) Didn't get grumpy, just politely asked what could be done.

To add, I didn't call retentions, I always call the regular package change dept FIRST prior to retentions. ;-)

[ianch99]

I can only go by a) my personal experience over the last 5 years and b) what the Principal Engineer told me. Anything else is conjecture I suppose. The phrase "They add capacity for upgrades" means nothing if it does not reach the end user ..

What would be interesting is if other Southampton customers on this forum could give their assessment of their VM connection over the time they have had it.

[Ignitionnet]

I can tell you for free that the Southampton network, as far as Southampton itself goes, as built by Videotron was trash. ntl had to do some work on it to support interactive services, which lead to broadband being released on it somewhat prematurely.

Following on from this a series of upgrades and rebuilds were done both to bring the digitised sections up to scratch and to bring some of the analogue only areas into the digital fold.

I'm talking about the city of Southampton here. The Southampton headend serves somewhat more than just the city.

[ianch99]

Originally Posted by Ignitionnet

I can tell you for free that the Southampton network, as far as Southampton itself goes, as built by Videotron was trash. ntl had to do some work on it to support interactive services, which lead to broadband being released on it somewhat prematurely.

Following on from this a series of upgrades and rebuilds were done both to bring the digitised sections up to scratch and to bring some of the analogue only areas into the digital fold.

I'm talking about the city of Southampton here. The Southampton headend serves somewhat more than just the city.

Agreed .. when I say "Southampton" customers I mean those that route into the Southampton headend and so have a sotn CMTS number in their VM hostname

If you live around Southampton, you might route into the Andover or Cosham headends ..

[PaulH225]

Originally Posted by ianch99

What would be interesting is if other Southampton customers on this forum could give their assessment of their VM connection over the time they have had it.

I'm on sotn12 in SO16 and haven't had any capacity issues lately but I haven't been upgraded to 152Mbps yet (despite registering as soon as it was available). I pretty much always get 120Mb/11Mb on speed tests, best that BT could offer up until recently was 5Mbps as I'm miles from the exchange. In fact if anything things have improved a lot over the last 6 - 12 months which to me says that they have been investing in the network in Southampton.

I did have terrible issues with my signal last year (high upstream power level) which finally went away (touch wood!) this year despite visits from engineers who would fix it temporarily (or refer it to networks) and then the fault would re-occur about a month later. Now it's pretty much perfect in the mid 40s upstream and -2 ish downstream with an FPA attached. We've also gone from 6 channels downstream to 8 channels downstream in the last couple of months.

So I guess, in summary, my experience has been pretty good of late.

Paul