100M : VMNG300 92Mbit limit

[General Maximus]

nice on dude, you should email that to everyone at VM, especially the customer service plebs who tell you you need a shub in order to receive a speed upgrade.

[jb66]

Its capable but 30meg on each downstream channel is a big ask 24/7

[Chrysalis]

Originally Posted by jb66

Its capable but 30meg on each downstream channel is a big ask 24/7

alot bigger than 25 per channel?

100mbit was sold on 4 channels for quite a while.

[jb66]

The network was not as busy then, now with all tiers moving to docsis3 I imagine the superhub would hit 120 more often than the vmng300 will during peak times

[broadbandking]

Originally Posted by General Maximus

nice on dude, you should email that to everyone at VM, especially the customer service plebs who tell you you need a shub in order to receive a speed upgrade.

No need to call them plebs, most people in customer services are told this information by the higher ups, plus with VM rolling out more than 4 channels which the VMNG300 can only handle, I understand you think its a great modem but its about time you stop with this we all understand you prefer the VMNG300 to the snub.

[Kushan]

Originally Posted by General Maximus

nice on dude, you should email that to everyone at VM, especially the customer service plebs who tell you you need a shub in order to receive a speed upgrade.

Originally Posted by broadbandking

No need to call them plebs, most people in customer services are told this information by the higher ups, plus with VM rolling out more than 4 channels which the VMNG300 can only handle, I understand you think its a great modem but its about time you stop with this we all understand you prefer the VMNG300 to the snub.

Thank you, I came in to say exactly this. CS agents are only repeating what they've been told, it's not their fault. I remember having similar arguments with people who didn't want to give up their old Motorola Modems because they KNEW it could handle 20Mbit (Talking about an SB3100 here).

[General Maximus]

Originally Posted by broadbandking

No need to call them plebs, most people in customer services are told this information by the higher ups, plus with VM rolling out more than 4 channels which the VMNG300 can only handle, I understand you think its a great modem but its about time you stop with this we all understand you prefer the VMNG300 to the snub.

it has got nothing to go with me liking the vmng300 and not liking the shub. It is to do with how comfortable VM seem to be getting in lieing to customers, especially when it involves them palming off rubbish cpe to customers which only causes more problems which can be entirely avoided if they they did what they were supposed to and upgraded the customer or provided a decent explanation why not.

Originally Posted by jb66

Its capable but 30meg on each downstream channel is a big ask 24/7

I agree and rather than VM blaming the vmng300 for speed and saying it cant do it, I would rather them come out with something like "whilst many customers may enjoy full speed on their vmng300 due to the technology we employ on our network we recommend customers upgrade to the superhub as they will be more likely to achieve full speed". It is VMs fault they havent got the bandwidth their for the vmng300 to use, not the modem's.

[Kushan]

Originally Posted by General Maximus

it has got nothing to go with me liking the vmng300 and not liking the shub. It is to do with how comfortable VM seem to be getting in lieing to customers, especially when it involves them palming off rubbish cpe to customers which only causes more problems which can be entirely avoided if they they did what they were supposed to and upgraded the customer or provided a decent explanation why not.



I agree and rather than VM blaming the vmng300 for speed and saying it cant do it, I would rather them come out with something like "whilst many customers may enjoy full speed on their vmng300 due to the technology we employ on our network we recommend customers upgrade to the superhub as they will be more likely to achieve full speed". It is VMs fault they havent got the bandwidth their for the vmng300 to use, not the modem's.

I actually agree with your sentiment, but you're wrong about VM not having the bandwidth for the Ambit 300. It's not just bandwidth, but load balancing. The more channels you're connected to, the less congestion is an issue - if one channel gets heavily congested, you've got more to make up the load. This is part of the benefit of switching to DOCSIS3 over older DOCSIS - surely you've seen people complaining about being on "a bad channel" and reboot hopping to get a better one? The more bonded channels, the better - for everyone.
Plus, Virgin has plenty of other reasons for ditching the Ambit 300 - it's out of support for one and they're currently paying through the nose for firmware updates, plus it's easier on the CS agents if they have to support less modems. Ultimately, they want everyone on a Superhub if possible.

[General Maximus]

I understand the reasons behind the shub and why they would want everyone to have one, it makes good business sense. But, if they want to put all their eggs in one baskey so to speak then they should have made sure what they were giving out to customers was up to standard. I am not going to say anymore because I'll start the usual banter we go through everytime

[Sephiroth]

Originally Posted by Kushan

I actually agree with your sentiment, but you're wrong about VM not having the bandwidth for the Ambit 300. It's not just bandwidth, but load balancing. The more channels you're connected to, the less congestion is an issue - if one channel gets heavily congested, you've got more to make up the load. This is part of the benefit of switching to DOCSIS3 over older DOCSIS - surely you've seen people complaining about being on "a bad channel" and reboot hopping to get a better one? The more bonded channels, the better - for everyone.
Plus, Virgin has plenty of other reasons for ditching the Ambit 300 - it's out of support for one and they're currently paying through the nose for firmware updates, plus it's easier on the CS agents if they have to support less modems. Ultimately, they want everyone on a Superhub if possible.

One of my professional roles in the networking field is Performance & Reliability Engineer (for safety of life systems). At risk of blowing my credibilty, I'd agree with you on the load balancing provided that its is actually so. It is indeed right to replace all the VMNG300s with SHs so that in any area no channel imbalance is introduced.

The last thing you want is channel imbalance because that can introduce latency when reassembling the packets distributed and interleaved on the bonded channels.

Finally, VM have the unenvious task of ensuring that SNR is maintained high overall the bonded channels so that there is no tendency on one channel for irrecoverable FEC errors to occur. There's much that can go wrong with 8 bonded channels, IMO and thus infrastructure standard has to be high.

[Kushan]

Originally Posted by General Maximus

I understand the reasons behind the shub and why they would want everyone to have one, it makes good business sense. But, if they want to put all their eggs in one baskey so to speak then they should have made sure what they were giving out to customers was up to standard. I am not going to say anymore because I'll start the usual banter we go through everytime

I don't think anyone's going to argue about the Superhub being an inferior router or whatever - we've heard all that before. However, at least as a Modem, it's no less capable than the Ambit 300.

Originally Posted by Sephiroth

Finally, VM have the unenvious task of ensuring that SNR is maintained high overall the bonded channels so that there is no tendency on one channel for irrecoverable FEC errors to occur. There's much that can go wrong with 8 bonded channels, IMO and thus infrastructure standard has to be high.

Indeed, this is probably why Virgin tends to insist on Engineer visits for a lot of installs that could be simple modem swaps, particularly when a customer is going from DOCSIS1/2 to DOCSIS3. While it sounds daft, being that swapping a Modem is easy, as you've stated there's a lot more that can go wrong with it. You seem to see this a lot with virgin, they make questionable decisions with a hint that there's a valid reason behind it that gets lost in the ether.

[qasdfdsaq]

Originally Posted by Sephiroth

One of my professional roles in the networking field is Performance & Reliability Engineer (for safety of life systems). At risk of blowing my credibilty, I'd agree with you on the load balancing provided that its is actually so. It is indeed right to replace all the VMNG300s with SHs so that in any area no channel imbalance is introduced.

That won't help when you still have hundreds of legacy DOCSIS 1/2 modems that can only use the primary channel in any set and cannot be load balanced. They're a far bigger problem than any VMNG300 will ever be...

[Sephiroth]

Not sure that's entirely true. Some D1 services live on the D3 frequency plan and they, as you say, buggerate the load balancing. But a huge chunk are still on legacy frequencies not yet gathered into the D3 range. But it matters not a jot as to whether it's VMNG300 or Ambit 256 - we are agreed that they buggerate load balancing.

[qasdfdsaq]

They do, but VMNG300 being DOCSIS 3 compliant can be load balanced across all channels, just not all at the same time. Say you got 10 VMNG300's across an 8 channel set, 5 could use channels 1-4 and the other 5 would be on channels 5-8. The VMNG300 has a 16-channel wide tuner and can use just about any 4 channels out of 16. Not all need to be on the same subset of channels. DOCSIS 2 modems would all have to be on channel 1.

Well it's not quite that simple but you get the idea. Still nowhere near as bad as a bunch of legacy modems.

[Coffeeguy]

Originally Posted by Kushan

Indeed, this is probably why Virgin tends to insist on Engineer visits for a lot of installs that could be simple modem swaps, particularly when a customer is going from DOCSIS1/2 to DOCSIS3. While it sounds daft, being that swapping a Modem is easy, as you've stated there's a lot more that can go wrong with it. You seem to see this a lot with virgin, they make questionable decisions with a hint that there's a valid reason behind it that gets lost in the ether.

It's a shame as some of these visits are a complete waste of time. I had 2 in a row after my install. After the original swap, the engineer didn't bother checking my power levels and left me with 58 upstream power. The second engineer who was booked to fix the power level told it was perfectly within limit until I told him about my line dropping out and second line telling me high upstream was the cause.

Back on topic my area has recently been upgraded to double speeds. Before the area upgrade my speeds would hit 12000KB/s but now I barely sustain 9000KB/s. Come on VM stop starving our VMNG300 modems