One Way Internet

Exasperation, Confusion, Boredom

2012-01-07T15:07:00.002Z

Hawkfield has been completed and now has the 10:1 upstream ratio.

Mortlake is apparently due to be ready early February with 100Mb becoming available shortly after.

I say 'apparently' as I've had a fairly constant stream of information and the dates I've had so far have been:

August 2011
October 2011
November 2011
December 2011
January 2012
February 2012.

It's starting to read less like a schedule and more like a calendar. I now understand why VM keep their cards so close to their chest, they have no idea what's going on and when.

I'm not actually that bothered on a personal level, having had VM fail to turn up to a service call for the 2nd time in 7 months, and that being the 3rd service call I've needed in the past 7 months, ignoring the network issues I had to go to the CEO's office about after Access NMC closed the ticket down without action or resolution twice I'm not especially overwhelmed.

I just recently finished backing up a considerable amount of data at a maximum of 190kB/s. Great until you realise that I'm on the highest tier available to me, 50Mb, over 90% of VM's customers on 20Mb could've gotten the task done more quickly and I had a higher upload speed in 2006.

That is actually quite depressing, in over 5 years I've gone from 22Mb downloads to 53Mb, which isn't bad, but dropped from 2.5Mb upload (ADSL2+ Annex M, 290kB/s throughput) to 1.75Mb ('Fibre optic', 190kB/s throughput).

My long and distinguished history with cable in the UK (yes there are two separate links there) continues.

It's Nothing Personal

2011-12-16T22:11:00.006Z

A swift update. The other site listed on Virgin's upstream upgrade schedule as being done this month, Hawkfield, a small site near Bristol, looks like it's missing its schedule too.

So that's both of the sites, Mortlake and Hawkfield, that are going to be late.

It's probably wise to consider the schedule as electronic toilet paper right now, given that VM clearly have no intention of keeping to it.

Sorry to those unfortunate people in New Malden, Croydon, etc, who aren't due until March / April of 2012. Given the total failure to get two small sites completed on time it's not looking overly positive for you guys, but who knows, VM certainly don't that much is evident.

Final Schedule Not So Final

2011-12-07T10:08:00.003Z

An update.

The upstream uplift schedule appears to be unreliable, and at first impression the dates picked out of the air.

Perth Pert Feb-12

Was completed last month.

Mortlake mort Dec-11

Is delayed until at least January. I say at least because while that's the time scale mentioned to me the original time scale was to try and get it done by mid-November.

The work is all done on the network but apparently some capacity upgrades have been planned for this area, the plans are based around the current network set up, and to upgrade with the newer upstream types or to do both simultaneously is too difficult.

The capacity upgrades were planned months ago, the upstream upgrades were having physical work done on them in this area since at least August, now after publishing a schedule 3 months ago it's going to be broken because one piece of work planned months ago is waiting on other pieces of work planned month ago.

Some things never change, Virgin Media's internal communication being one of them!

Virgin Media's Final Upstream Uplift Plan

2011-09-22T17:12:00.002+01:00

Virgin Media have finally released the final schedule for upstream uplifts to their 10:1 downstream to upstream ratio.

This will bring 5Mbit upstream to 50Mbit XXL customers, 3Mbit to 30Mbit XL, 2Mbit to 20Mbit XL and 1Mbit to 10Mbit L.

There is still no schedule for 100Mbit availability however in these and other areas.

The frustration is that the last areas will be enabled some 18 months after the first areas were done. Why so long? Because no significant work was done until the middle of this year.

It's also perfectly conceivable, given Neil Berkett, VM CEO wanting to have 200Mbit available in 2012 and BT releasing 80Mbit shortly which VM feel obliged to exceed by some way, that there will be areas receiving 200Mbit almost simultaneously with areas receiving availability of 100Mbit and higher upstreams for the first time - farcical.

I'm sure we would all like projects where we can largely ignore the tricky bits and carry on with the easier ones while pushing the schedule for completion back further and further.

On the upside I see from Virgin's own forums that a customer who didn't receive his upgrade on time due to not having the appropriate modem has received compensation which begs the question if a single customer can claim compensation due to not having the right modem for his free uplift, why can't all the customers in areas which don't have the right networks receive compensation?

Anyway the following 'Being Planned' areas now have dates, which are as follows:

Bristol (Aztec West) aztw Apr-12

CastleCary cast Feb-12

Croydon croy Apr-12

Dumbarton dumb Jan-12

Dundee dund Mar-12

Gateshead gate Apr-12

Glenrothes grth Apr-12

Hawkfield hawk Dec-11

Mortlake mort Dec-11

New Malden nmal Mar-12

Perth Pert Feb-12

South Gyle (Edinburgh) sgyl Mar-12

Staverton stav Apr-12

Uddingston uddi Feb-12

The irony of Croydon being a pilot site for 50Mb and being among the last to receive 5Mb upstream on the 50Mb it piloted isn't lost on me.

Overbuild Excitement

2011-08-27T12:19:00.004+01:00

So I received the card above through the post informing me of upcoming outages for network upgrade.

Outages were promised and outages there were.

Can't say I'm overwhelmed by the result so far though, all it's done is change my cable modem power levels from excellent to marginal, make one of my STBs pixellate at times and introduce low level packet loss.

As you can tell from the outages the job was finished late, they struggled to finish on time and I was informed the priority was just to get services back online, looks like there's more to do. It would be good if this had been finished in between mind you, been 3 days and things are still out of kilter!

I would welcome feedback from anyone else who has had this done as part of their upstream uplift, see if this is the normal way these things go.

Mortlake Delay

2011-07-15T20:36:00.002+01:00

I have been informed that, after having a previous date of August, my own area of Mortlake hubsite has been delayed to October for the network upgrades that are a precursor to the upstream upgrades.

Stating the obvious this doesn't bode well - Virgin realising that they would need to delay things by 2 months just 5 weeks before the work was scheduled.

Apparently, after over a year of planning, it was discovered that additional work would be required, which has been scheduled for October.

If you wish you could do your job like this put your hand up!

In other news the packet loss is almost fixed, it happens rarely and isn't too bad now. So that's one positive. Yes I'm reaching.

Addendum To Last Rant

2011-06-21T16:37:00.007+01:00

My most recent ticket for upstream problems has been closed. So it all must be fixed then!

Oh wait..

One Last Rant Post

2011-06-16T13:42:00.005+01:00

I'm going to steer back towards One Way Internet shortly, one more rant post before I move relating those experiences to their own blog. Only really abusing this one because it was there, and gets a fair few hits.

This is going to be a collection of experiences previously and so far.

First we'll go back to May of 2009. After complaining about slow speeds during peak periods, I was seeing as low as 4Mbit/s on 20Mbit service, I was fortunate enough to be the first customer to move to 50Mbit in Mortlake.

After a brief period this service dropped. For nearly a week.

It was restored but, after a string of outages of varying lengths resulting in an uptime of no more than 90%, I rid myself of the VM service in February of 2010.

Fast forward to March 2011 - myself and Mrs Carl are moving home. We simply cannot put a satellite dish up in the new place, conservation area and other issues, we must take cable if we want a significant HD service.

The address is showing as not listed however I note a drop outside, so I ask the question and am told it should be ok.

Forward to end of March, moving in day, I find a message saying that I can't have a phone service, but the rest will be installed 6th April - fine.

Shortly after that, 31st March to be exact, that install date is also cancelled, apparently civil engineering work is required. After seeing no real progress on this for a while I consulted the CEO's office and was put in touch with the lovely and fabulous Tracy, who pushed this through. Mid April a chap turns up, and finds there is no requirement at all for additional civils. No-one actually checked, it would have been good to go. 26th April I am given an install date of 7th May. Tracy managed to get this done very slightly earlier - kudos.

I begin to notice some considerable instability focussing on the Superhub. Lovely device. I also note some congestion at peak periods causing speeds to slow and games and VoIP to judder. I ended up resolving some of the reliability issues through using my own wireless access point and disabling the Superhub's wireless functionality.

Technical support confirm load is high, but not high enough to permit them to escalate the issue. For the curious this actually requires an upstream channel to be at 80% or higher utilisation for 10% of a 7 day period. Given that utilisation of around 65-70% is service affecting for gaming and VoIP VM are basically saying that considerable service impact for over 2 hours a day isn't worth investigation. The largest cable company in the world implements congestion control on upstream channels to keep them below 70% for a reason, not for their health.

So there's some degredation at peak times. I then notice some really quite nasty packet loss for the first time on Thursday 12th May. This ends up being a recurring theme.

Saturday 14th the V+ box, part of my VIP50 package fails. It was fixed pretty promptly.

Packet loss bursts continue, and the issue is finally raised to Access NMC, however as I mentioned when raising this issue this only happens during business hours. It was looked at over a long weekend and closed down as no fault found.

I notice VoD problems at peak times, with the service being unavailable for capacity reasons intermittently on SD streams and pretty much all the time on HD streams. These are ongoing and there appears to be a fault reference:

You will currently be experiencing a loss of Video On Demand service. Our engineers are aware of this issue and are currently working to fix it fast. We apologise for any inconvenience this may be causing.

Date Issue raised:June 09 2011, 21:33
Estimated repair time:June 17 2011, 01:29
Fault reference:F001632007

The estimated repair time has been moved back twice so far, it gets pushed back every time that particular time is near. 8 days must be a new definition of 'fix it fast' I haven't seen before, although it's not surprising.

UPDATE:

The above VoD ticket now has an estimated repair of June 18th, however according to technical support it was closed yesterday, 16th. The issue persists, it hasn't been resolved.

14th June, packet loss continues, surprisingly enough given nothing was done the fault persists.

I have been informed this area is going to receive the upgrades it should have had 2 years ago in August. This is, however, debatable. This is a conservation area, the work requires moving of underground equipment above ground, this may well mean that new cabinets need to be built. There have been no planning permissions requested according to local authority information.

A new fault reference, F001638850, has been raised for this, to go along with the previously closed F001618845

Under normal circumstances I would be gone, however VM are the only game in town for the TV service, so I'm quite stuck.

Thanks all for reading and bearing with my ranting, I'll get back on topic for One Way Internet now.

No Fault Found

2011-06-15T22:23:00.003+01:00

Apparently no fault in this area. Please note my earlier post.

3 weeks down the line and a fault raised and closed as no fault found - glad to hear that as it's been a spectacular day today.

I must confess to finding it rather boring seeing VoD not working due to too much demand, connection becoming unusable whenever the wind is wrong, be good to stop complaining, pay my just over £100/month for my triple-play, and get a decent service in return. Too much to ask?

The Problem With Old Cable Networks

2011-05-27T20:29:00.004+01:00

My cable here in the Mortlake, South London area is to be upgraded in the not too distant future - this is good!

Oddly for the author of One Way Internet I'm not actually that worried about the upstream upgrade, I'm more looking forward to the reliability upgrades.

Picking on the last 4 days:

None of the outages / packet loss bursts last for that long, but this is all too regular for 'fibre optic' broadband.

Hoping this upgrade can happen sooner rather than later - this service isn't really good enough especially for someone who works from home at least once a week, including using VoIP to the company PBX.

Being Planned Going Live

2011-05-16T08:58:00.002+01:00

Just read some quite encouraging news on a forum. Customers in the Staple Hill area of Bristol (VM Hubsite Chapel / Morley Road) are reporting receiving the upgrade as are customers in Jarrow, South Tyneside.

This is noteworthy as both of these sites are listed as 'Being Planned' and are the first reports I've seen of overbuilt areas going live.

Next Issue

2011-05-14T23:13:00.003+01:00

Just to add to my Virgin Media related grief today, a mere 8 days since install, the V+HD box in the living room has breathed its last.

I so look forward to being asked to turn it off and on again. The only thing that changes is that sometimes it sits on the below, other times the lights all flash on then all go dark.

So, wonder what's next! Must be the phone line's turn now.

Anyone know a method to install a Sky dish internally? :)

Give Me My Packets Back!

2011-05-12T17:35:00.000+01:00

Per previous updates this is the local DNS cache:

Ping statistics for 194.168.4.100:
Packets: Sent = 100, Received = 48, Lost = 52 (52% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 9ms, Maximum = 66ms, Average = 15ms

The impediment is on the upstream / return path it seems, downstream UDP flows are fine.

High, jittery pings and occasional slow speeds at peak times, and presently extremely difficult to use service. Also worth noting that my details on the website linked me to a fault reference for a total service loss, the second such loss in this area in the last 6 days.

Any suggestions where I should suggest Virgin Media put their broadband service most appreciated. The more inventive and amusing the better!

Now to see how many tries it takes to get this posted...

Update: Now fixed, must've read this post ;)

We Are Sorry For Any Inconvenience....

2011-05-09T23:28:00.004+01:00

VM tech support inform:

I have checked your local chassis (router) and can see that there are periods of high load which will cause your speed to slow. If this load continues to increase this will be passed to our network teams to look at ways to alleviate some of the load. We are sorry for any inconvenience this may be causing you.

Ya.

Ouchy 50Mbit

2011-05-08T14:51:00.008+01:00

Anyway onto some discussion of the service.

For gaming the connection is sub-optimal. It's very jittery - the below is to the DNS cache in Croydon. Should be maybe 8ms if all is working properly:

Ping statistics for 194.168.4.100:

Packets: Sent = 100, Received = 100, Lost = 0 (0% loss),

Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:

Minimum = 8ms, Maximum = 221ms, Average = 62ms

Here's the ever pervasive ThinkBroadband Monitor.

Then there's the speeds...

Download Speed: 10265 kbps (1283.1 KB/sec ) Upload Speed: 1168 kbps (146 KB/sec )

The service should be achieving close to 50Mbps download and 1.6Mbps upload, it's capped to 53Mbps download and 1.75Mbps upload.

Offpeak I've never reached above 1.4Mbps upload.

Reliability. Here's today's little log from an IRC channel of the amount of times I've had to reboot the Superhub because it stopped passing traffic.

[07:37:40] * Disconnected

[08:45:36] * Disconnected

[09:55:00] * Disconnected

[11:32:53] * Disconnected

[14:26:38] * Disconnected

[17:22:47] * Disconnected

It doesn't really enthuse, and really does rub in that most of the network has 5Mbps upload and 100Mbps download, 10Mbps upload is being deployed aggressively while VM are only just starting work on areas like this one which actually didn't just need work for the upgrade but to properly provide the existing services being sold on them.

A month of delay to have this delivered. Not great.

What has however been great has been the customer service I've received. Nothing has been too much work, calls have come when promised, genuinely ownership was taken, the installation issues seen through and the lady dealing with my case has been amazing - a gift will be en route to her office shortly.

A Quick Thought

2011-05-08T13:12:00.002+01:00

Further update incoming when I've time, for now though I thought I'd share a quick thought on my Superhub / Virgin Media experience so far.

Not safe for work or kids.

Upstream Upgrade Work Started - South London

2011-05-03T13:55:00.002+01:00

Work on the VM network has now started in South / South West London to provide the infrastructure necessary for the upstream upgrades and 100Mbit/s service.

This work consists of replacing all amplifiers and optical nodes that are incapable of supporting a full DOCSIS 3 service - this being capability to support upstream frequencies up to 85MHz and downstream frequencies up to 1GHz.

This will take a while, but I hope people in New Malden, Croydon, Mortlake areas will feel a bit better knowing that work is in progress rather than just 'Being Planned'.

Gotta Laugh

2011-04-28T10:00:00.004+01:00

Received a call from Virgin Media thanking me for taking out a new cell phone contract (Blackberry Torch no less) and asking me if I had considered their cable services. A bit of an upsell effort.

After laughing briefly the situation was duly explained to the poor unsuspecting lady on the other end of the line.

Bit of a cognitive disconnect, not taking it personally though of course as it'd be like bathing a wound in lemon juice.

There is no need to upsell to me, just completing the existing sale would be perfectly adequate.

Excess Construction - Or Not

2011-04-26T16:28:00.004+01:00

Today a VM contractor / engineer type chap came around, he had just received a job to connect us and popped around on the off chance he could do something quickly.

He stuck a cable down the drop point, the hole outside the property that was apparently blocked and unusable. It kept going, and going, and going, until it reached the tap where he did the necessary.

In short no excess construction was ever required, we should have been a standard install, and the drop point outside our home is now connected to the Virgin Media network.

Good news.

Bad news - we can't be installed until Saturday 7th May.

VM screwed up, didn't bother to check and put our install off wasting our time, their time and the council's time because they thought the drop outside the property wasn't usable. This pushed an install scheduled for April 6th back to 'whenever'. They've now noted this oversight, it should be mentioned that an engineer wasn't tasked for this job until today so we were pretty lucky he was passing and thought he'd have a look, even though they quoted a 2 - 3 week timescale from 31st March in total for the process, and it's still nearly 2 weeks before install.

Call me selfish but I'm of the opinion that given the delay is entirely their mistake I should be at or near the top of the queue, not joining the back.

We'll see where things go. Overall I'm not especially impressed. While it is all about how mistakes are rectified this isn't good and giving me an install date nearly 2 weeks away is throwing salt on the wound somewhat. This isn't really rectifying the original mistake, it's pure luck that the engineer came by, he was not under any obligation to and had been informed he would have significant construction to do.

Sadly VM have an entirely captive audience here - I've no other HD DTV options.

Can't Get Cable? We Are Helping!

2011-04-22T10:31:00.003+01:00

Full credit to Virgin Media on this one. They returned my mail yesterday with a call this morning, Good Friday, very good!

They inform that they have a reference for the work from the Council and are following up with the area manager, so it looks as though the confusion is on this side of things and permissions and contractors are indeed the delay.

I'm actually very impressed with how they have handled this, and quite pleased I didn't outright blame them for the issue in the previous post. The adage that problems happen and it's how they are dealt with that's the key thing holds true.

Thanks to Tracy at VM for this information and being so responsive! Top notch.

Can't Get Cable? Maybe We Can Help!

2011-04-21T20:52:00.002+01:00

Maybe!

OK I've recently moved to a lovely new place in Twickenham. Gorgeous town, highly recommended, however we aren't allowed a satellite dish and having 2 HD sets with no HD service would be such a waste!

Got in touch with Virgin Media in March, had a spotter out, very professional, and I was informed that all seemed ok and they would be happy to install me.

Date duly arranged, shortly after moving in due to needing permission from landlord but all fine!

Or not - the week of installation we were informed that additional construction was needed, so there would be a 2 - 3 week delay. Not ideal, but it is what it is, permission was being requested from the local authority then their contractor would do the necessary, ETA 21st April or earlier, possible install by Easter! Cool!

20th April rolls around, a distinct lack of action, so a quick email later and I receive a prompt response - very good! The response itself not so good, assuring me that things were happening, that permission was being sought, no idea of an ETA. Evidently VM are pretty good to their contractors given they have no idea when they'll be doing the tasks assigned to them and don't appear to have a service level agreement.

Feeling a bit nervous today I reached out to the Borough and received the following from the Streetworks team:

From New Roads and Streetworks Act point of view, I haven't received any notification from Virgin Media to conduct these works. This notice must be submitted electronically by Virgin Media streetworks noticing dept.

Once this is submitted, out inspector will make an assessment of the Traffic Management etc applicable and the works will be given the go ahead.

But first of all, Virgin needs to send in the notice which they haven't done so far.

Thanks,

Maybe there's just a load of confusion there, it is in fact all in hand and being dealt with by another team within the Borough Council. The alternative is that absolutely nothing has happened and VM have spent the past 3 weeks doing nothing.

Be interesting to see how this pans out. Either way a disaster, I was annoyed with BT potentially making me wait until today for broadband so left it with VM. Kinda regretting that now, not least because I may end up going into the office on Easter Sunday.

'Being Planned'

2011-04-19T22:11:00.006+01:00

Thought I'd pop up quickly to point out that Virgin Media have now upgraded a big swathe of their network to a 10:1 upstream ratio.

The most recent schedule, dated 20th April, is here.

Many have had dates moved forwards which is good, a very few have been moved back. The really disappointing thing is that the areas that were being planned on the very first published list from 26th November 2010 are still apparently 'Being Planned'.

It has been mooted that this is due to a requirement to relocate underground network equipment, amplifiers, etc, above ground. All well and good except that according to the websites of Croydon, Richmond and Kingston Boroughs, served by Croydon headend and Mortlake and New Malden hubsites respectively, no planning permission has been requested either by Virgin Media or their contractors Fujitsu to perform such work.

Still on the drawing board it would seem, and apparently being left until the easier stuff is all done.

Virgin Media Upload Upgrade Schedule Published

2010-11-29T21:05:00.002Z

Yep, here it is, accurate as of 26th November - this will be updated regularly, I will try and keep this post updated accordingly.

They will be upgrading it regularly as this is quite a dynamic process.

Please remember that these are indicative dates, some areas will be ready earlier, some perhaps not so early.

The irony of the owner of the blog One Way Internet being in one of the few areas that have no date and are 'Being planned' isn't lost on me - thanks Telewest ;)

Virgin Upgrades - Official

2010-09-30T12:42:00.005+01:00

Virgin Media have announced the long awaited 10:1 ratio upgrade. All services are to have their upstream upgraded to 10% of downstream.

It comes with, as suspected, protocol based shaping - the first time that Virgin Media have used this on their cable network. Oddly this is only mentioned downstream.

Subscriber Traffic Management limits are being increased considerably, which is a good thing. This limit applies between 3PM and 8PM and if breached results in upload speed being reduced.

The updated policy is here.

I am unsure if any shaping will be applied to upstream usage apart from the STM - will check!

Confirmed - shaping is in both directions to avoid upstreams getting overwhelmed by bulk uploads and drowning out acknowledgements. It is an unfortunate effect of cable that uploading large amounts of data takes priority over smaller amounts such as acknowledgements by virtue of how the underlying protocols function.

Virgin Upgrades - Not For Me!

2010-06-17T19:02:00.002+01:00

I've made some enquiries and it would appear that the upstream uplift is extremely unlikely to arrive in my area this side of calendar Q2 / financial Q1 2011 at the very earliest - no budget for upgrades of the scale required here it would seem.

BT's FTTC will not be available here until, at the earliest, calendar Q2 / financial Q1 2011.

Must be some irony there somewhere. :)

Virgin 10:1 Ratio Upgrades (Quietly) Commence

2010-06-16T17:06:00.006+01:00

Virgin Media have begun (quietly) upgrading upstream speeds on their cable products. There is a target to have all tiers on a 10:1 ratio this year and some customers on both 50Mbit XXL and 20Mbit XL are reporting seeing 5Mbps and 2Mbps upstream configurations hitting their modems.

According to my information the upgrade cycle will commence properly in July, after the World Cup change freeze is done. Expect announcements, rollout plans, timescales, etc, then.

This will be a staged roll out a port at a time as the areas they serve are upgraded, node splits are completed and upgrade from the present DOCSIS 1 upstreams to DOCSIS 2 ATDMA upstreams are completed. These upgrades are also part of readiness for the 100Mbit product.

If your modem has a configuration of this 10:1 ratio and you aren't seeing those speeds yet fear not - Virgin's network runs DOCSIS 1.1 almost universally and the configuration files no longer control the speeds you receive so that configuration file is cosmetic, but promising!

To check if your area is upgraded and potentially ready go to your cable modem's upstream information pages and note the symbol rate and modulation there. If the symbol rate is 5.12Msym/s or 5120ksym/s or the modulation says QAM64 or 64QAM you may not be too far away!

Again this will be very staged. Some areas, especially in Ex-Telewest Ex-Eurobell areas, have to wait for quite a bit more love before they can support these speeds due to Telewest being a bit investment-shy while waiting for ntl to acquire them, so will be towards the back of the queue.

Finally, with this and BT's 2, 10 and 15Mbps FTTC products it seems the UK internet is finding its' second lane.

15Mbps Upstream In The UK

2010-05-27T18:06:00.004+01:00

According to the BT Openreach website:

Up to 40Mbit/s downstream with an Upstream up to 15Mbit/s

Goes live 30th September.

Yep, 15Mbps upstream on their 40Mbps service.

Virgin Media are still delivering 1.75Mbps upstream on their 50Mbps service.

Not really a hugely flattering comparison as far as Virgin's often advertised fibre optic advantage goes ;)

Yes I'm Slack

2010-04-21T11:09:00.003+01:00

OK! A few things have happened since I last typed my incoherent ramblings.

Virgin Media continue to trial 5 and 10Mbps upstream on their 50Mbps service and 2 and 4Mbps on 20Mbps.

Rumours reach me that the most likely course of events is:

10Mbps downstream, 1Mbps upstream

20Mbps downstream, 2Mbps upstream

50Mbps downstream, 5Mbps upstream

Joined at the end of the year by a 100Mbps downstream 10Mbps upstream service.

BT have of course announced their deployment plans for their Fibre To The Cabinet technology, bringing 40Mbps downstream and 10Mbps upstream to more homes. The catch? So far no LLU operator has started using the service. There are a few issues, it costs too much, the LLU operator can't do voice at the cabinet but has to do voice at the exchange, operators wanting more control over the ports in the cabinet housed MSAN, etc, etc. The end result is that the main operator is BT Retail whose Infinity offering, though allegedly unlimited, has a 100GB/month FUP after which one is slowed to a magnificent 2Mbps.

I have my O2 service running on Annex M at home. It has a higher upstream than the VM 50Mbps service does right now:

The irony of having a better upstream speed over 'old copper wires' is not lost on me.

Apart from this really as you were. Virgin continue to do nothing but trial, hopefully they'll have something more solid to announce with their Q1 results, BT continue to deploy FTTC though have no operators using it I'd want to give my money to.

Wholesale Cable Coming Soon?

2010-02-23T11:16:00.004Z

I've seen an advert for a job in the UK for a design engineer with the following skill set:

Docsis, CMTS, PPPoE, VLAN Mapping and Cisco 10k

DOCSIS, CMTS and Cisco 10k are fairly non-descript things for a cable company to want. PPPoE and VLAN Mapping on the other hand are interesting.

In a fairly standard design where Virgin were allowing others to use their hardware they would use PPPoE to identify which ISP the subscribers are connected to and encapsulate their traffic, they would then have a VLAN mapped from each CMTS to the end user's ISP or an aggregation point for delivery to the end user's ISP.

The PPPoE allows VM to run multiple user domains on the same hardware, VLANs allow them to keep multiple end user ISPs separate from one another and deliver the traffic to them without hops on the VM network appearing. This is actually similar to how BT Openreach run their Fibre To The Cabinet network.

Of course, it could also be to allow static IP addresses - PPPoE would allow a business customer to log in to the network and have their router receive the same IP addresses wherever on the Virgin network they are. Not entirely clear on where VLANs would fit in to this, perhaps for offering cable customers layer 2 VPNs over the DOCSIS network.

Keep your eyes open ladies and gentlemen.

Pastures New?

2010-02-21T12:43:00.005Z

Strange as it may seem for a guy so preoccupied with speed I've minimal use for 53Mbit downstream and laughable upstream so have switched to O2. Once my line is all settled down and I've ensured things are as they should be I'll switch it to Annex M / Premium which will give me a better upstream than VM's 50Mbit service. I still have the 50Mbit but will reduce when its' contract is up.

Speed is great, but the O2 deal was a very persuasive one and I find myself wanting to distance myself from a company that uses nonsense advertising like this.

Don't do the ad campaigns while reading Sunday Sport and drinking Stella guys, last time you did that you advertised being able to download Spiderman months before DVD release. Perhaps, just a thought, fix the widespread congestion issues instead of commenting on how 'customers should demand what they are being promised from their internet providers'. Whoever dreamt up that gem obviously hadn't read the capacity reports. I'm sure the probably tens of thousands of VM customers seeing poor peak time performance due to the upstream capacity crunch I expected and posted about after the rushed and cheap rollout of 50Mbit in 2008/9 and inadequate provisioning of business as usual upgrades due to the mistaken belief this would fix everything would quite like to see what they are being promised from their internet provider.

O2 provided me an estimated speed, they actually underestimated slightly which was fine. Virgin Media do no such estimation and happily sell new customers onto congested networks.

One way VM appear to be trying to tackle these congested networks, rather than upgrading them or admitting they can't support the services they are selling, is to send nasty-o-grams to some customers. These are triggered in part by whether an area is congested. More confusing on this issue is that Virgin refuse to tell customers who receive these how much bandwidth they have used or what the limit is. Rather odd for a company that claims compliance with Ofcom's Voluntary Code of Practise though perhaps not so odd when one notes that Virgin have always just taken the bits they like the look of to comply with and ignored anything awkward.

It's time all ISPs stopped with this nonsense about FUPs / AUPs etc and give us solid figures on what level of usage is acceptable along with a robust meter to show us our usage as their systems provide it. Any ISP advertising unlimited services either needs to qualify them as being 'unlimited time online' or just stop using it. Seeing ISPs advertising unlimited services with a 'Fair Use Policy' is simply a win:win for the ISP. They both get to advertise an unlimited service and get to add a random unspecified limit to the service.

February Update - VM JFDI

2010-02-04T08:10:00.003Z

Well it's not much of an update. Update wise I've got nothing. Literally nothing.

Virgin Media appear to continue to need a strong dose of JFDI (nice forms Just Focus and Do It / Just 'Freaking' do It).

You'd think VM would be wanting to do a nice spoiler of BT's commercial announcement of the 10Mbps upstream Infinity product, however their silence is deafening and coincides with rumours I'm getting that the powers that be somewhat underestimated the work that's going to be required. Having largely ignored the networks for years and in some areas done anything to avoid actually upgrading them in order to get the job done would appear to be catching up with them. My own will need a not inconsiderable amount of work, whether using bonding or stand-alone DOCSIS 2 it won't work. Extrapolate that across the various areas that were historically bodged and I can see this stuff taking a while, that is even when the programme actually starts and there is no evidence at all that it has gotten off the drawing board, or even that it's on the drawing board in anger.

I've had a chat with BT and gotten nowhere. It appears that in no small part a criteria for getting their next generation access products is who shouts loudest. Didcot for example appears to make a strange choice until you note its' MP could well be their regulator's boss after the election.

For those who want BT to get around to their areas sooner rather than later I recommend engaging your local council, your MP and your ISP. Find your Openreach regional director / manager and get onto them. That or risk selection by dartboard. I've spoken with people far, far more experienced and familiar with this stuff than me and no-one can figure out how BT Openreach are making these decisions. Saying that I've not been able to speak to anyone in BT Wholesale yet ;)

Just noticed a nice news story at Broadband Reports - Comcast, largest Cableco in the world appear to be doing some upgrades.

A Comcast insider tells Broadband Reports that the company will soon be shaking up their broadband tiers, which are currently 12/2, 16/2, 22/5, 50/10 (and 100 Mbps in Minneapolis). According to the source, Comcast will be eliminating the 22/5 Mbps tier. They'll also be upgrading 16/2 Mbps users to a new, 20/4 Mbps tier.

VM All Tier Uplift / Cview

2010-01-27T18:37:00.004Z

For the curious I. can now happily state that Virgin Media will indeed, as widely expected, be upgrading all tiers with shiny new and higher upstreams.

Some XL / 20Mbit customers in Huddersfield will note their upstreams have gone from 768kbit to 2Mbps.

I will also very, very briefly touch on CView.

I am not remotely interested in the arguments on the legality of this device as I've had those elsewhere and I'm not qualified to have strong opinions either way, however this technology is there for three purposes.

1) Future compliance with the IMP.

2) Supplying extra intelligence to a potential future traffic shaping system, IE not only will Virgin know and be able to target certain protocols such as Bittorrent in a similar manner to BT, Plusnet, etc, they will also be able to target individual files on those networks. For this extra investment to make sense they must first demonstrate the levels of file sharing.

3) Compliance with the copyright protection detailed in the Digital Economy Bill.

That's it. No mass conspiracy theory, no interest from Virgin in stitching up iTunes in favour of their own product. Network management and legal compliance.

Is it the right thing to do? I'm not here to debate or judge. It may well in the near future be the only thing to do.

The Plot Thickens Slightly

2010-01-23T13:04:00.002Z

Hello dearest readers.

I thought I'd just draw your attention to the fact that BT Retail have now announced their 40Mbps/2Mbps and 40Mbps/10Mbps products under the very Buzz Lightyear name BT Infinity.

This service, it should be noted, will be traffic shaped and will have their usual FUPs. If you are a heavy user my suggestion would be to continue to avoid BT's products. Due to how they purchase their access to your phone line from other segments of BT they pay a fortune for bandwidth, around a hundred Great British Pounds per Megabit per second per month. Doesn't leave them much room to keep your shiny 40Mbps/10Mbps 'unlimited' service awash with bandwidth for 25 quid a month after paying 14 pounds a month in line rental.

More interesting is that Sky are showing interest. They presently offer an 'up to' 20Mbps service with no limits and no fair use policy and could certainly deliver a strong FTTC offering. They are offering it with the 10Mbps upstream option and are, just as BT are, making sure that Virgin know about it. Absolutely free too for those lucky, lucky trialists :)

Virgin have no need to be too scared - yet - but if Sky's trial goes well and they start really throwing their weight behind this, well, VM need to start making things happen.

Incidentally slightly late post - cable was down for a day and a half. Reliability in this area is legendary. There was a fault relating to a fibre optic node in this area which made the service status page and one involving a patch cord which is apparently the one that took my service out. Working nicely now but I am getting a BT line put in on 4th February, can't afford to risk Virgin's service with no back up when I work from home twice a week. I don't demand 5 9's (99.999%) uptime but 2 of them would be good.

On that note back to communicating with my local council about BT's lack of interest in our Borough. Last communication was them telling me that BT would be providing them information on the rollout by the end of this month and are engaging them and me pointing out that BT had published this information for public consumption 2 days before.

Virgin Upstream Uplift Trial Crawls Along

2010-01-19T10:45:00.002Z

Happy New Year!

Hope everyone reading this had a pleasant holiday season.

Just a couple of quick notes - Virgin Media are now trialling 5Mbps upstream in Coventry. This was widely expected to be the next trial area.

It should, however, be noted that the upstream trials were originally announced in mid July. Nearly 6 months to get the trials to two areas.

Here's hoping someone lights a fire under this project and it kicks into gear!

In their FTTP / Fibre To The Home areas, Ebbsfleet which is live now, Highams Park, London and Milton Keynes both of which go live shortly, BT will be offering services ranging from 40Mbit downstream 2Mbit upstream to 100Mbit downstream and 15Mbit upstream.

BT announced further exchanges to be upgraded to their FTTC / Fibre To The Cabinet network which will offer speeds of up to 40Mbit downstream and 10Mbit upstream.

I have been trying to get my Borough Council to find out what is happening in this area given that none of it is yet planned for FTTC or FTTP, they informed me that BT would be giving them information on the year's rollout plans at the end of the month, this response was a couple of days after BT had announced and Think Broadband published said plans. Clearly the council is very in-tune and pushing BT hard for information, though I'm not even remotely surprised as very few public servants 'get it' when it comes to these things which is probably why BT and others are able to keep raiding the public purse.

That's about it. Apologies for the slack updates but everything is either moving really slowly or not doing that much of interest!

End Of The Year

2009-12-18T09:13:00.002Z

2009 is nearly over, so where are we?

Virgin Media haven't really done much since this press release. A small part of Huddersfield has seen 5 and 10Mbps trialled for a few 50Mbps customers using 16QAM 6.4MHz upstreams. The higher upstreams remain no closer to commercial release than the 200Mbps services that have been rolling around a small area in Kent for a while.

BT's 'fibre to the press release' network is nearing a commercial release of its' first phase, next month should see the first couple of hundred thousand homes passed going live with services up to 40Mbps downstream and 10Mbps upstream.

On the concerning side of things Virgin Media appear to be having issues with the existing upstream speeds. The Virgin Media support newsgroup has had an influx of faults diagnosed as upstream congestion. Virgin appear to be having issues balancing load between their legacy and new overlay networks, balancing load on the new overlay network and indeed with Advanced Spectrum Management. This technology would probably be a part of a rushed out higher upstream service, configure the areas up, use this for some fallback if the areas can't handle the new configurations, accept any congestion complaints and do the actual work to make the areas properly suitable later. VM wouldn't be the first to do this by any means!

Sadly while a compliment was due to them for getting the 50Mbps service deployed in record time some misgivings I posted about in forums in the past have come back to haunt somewhat - that in the rush to get these services out the bandwidth provisioned was horribly asymmetrical and not easy to upgrade. We're talking 200Mbps downstream and 4 x 9Mbps upstream best case, however each modem is only able to use 1 of the 4 upstreams. This has resulted in congestion, some areas having just a handful of modems on an upstream while others that even share the same downstream bandwidth have 100 or more modems on an upstream.

The lack of drive within Virgin Media for deploying DOCSIS 2 upstreams is disappointing. I would have thought that it would be a great way to resolve congestion issues in the short term rather than splitting nodes or changing how nodes are combined at the hubsites and headends. It's more disappointing as DOCSIS 2 upstreams are widely deployed with good results elsewhere.

Another confusing point is that Virgin, in common with every other ISP in the UK because they're all so cheap, is looking at ways to 'monetise' the customer base some more. Something confusing about this is Virgin's dropping of their prices for their 50Mbps XXL service, however upstream upgrades can be a monetiser themselves. Note the services offered by Comhem in Sweden.

Something immediately noteworthy about Comhem is that they are actually more expensive than Virgin on some product tiers, shows how crazily cheap and reluctant to pay up the UK consumer is for internet services thanks in no small part to over-regulation, we still demand top notch performance though! Another point is that they have performance guarantees. They offer a minimum speed both upstream and downstream. These diversions aside they actually offer upgrades on their services on upstream. A customer can pay more for extra upstream. This runs as follows:

24Mbit down 1Mbit up, performance guarantee 12Mbit down 700kbit up, and for an extra fiver a month you can upgrade to 24Mbit down 10Mbit up with a performance guarantee of 12Mbit down and 7Mbit up.

10Mbit down, 1Mbit up, performance guarantee 7Mbit down 700kbit up, and again for that extra fiver you can take the upstream up to 10Mbit with the 7Mbit guarantee.

The 2Mbit down, 0.5Mbit up service, guarantee 1.5Mbit down and 0.35Mbit up, and for a bit under a fiver upstream can be upgraded to 2Mbit with a 1.5Mbit guarantee.

If Virgin want more cash out of us why not consider something like this? If the network is in place, which it will have to be at some point anyway, costs would be negligible and it would generate some revenue.

Looking seriously into something like this would be a far more productive use of a 'Senior Product Delivery Manger's' time than playing PR man with comments like:

The issue would be more in the segmentation and capacity management of the networks, which is intracite and this would add quite a number of additional considerations into the capacity management models in order to ensure the high quality of service we deliver and will continue to do so.

Which seems odd when it's very clear that capacity management on the VM network tends to consist these days of how hard the network can be pushed before there are too many complaints, as was the case with Telewest back in 'the day'. VM's capacity planning is reactive a lot of the time, anyone who reads the VM newsgroup virginmedia.support.broadband.cable would note this from the amount of cases technical support raise for oversubscription. Basic guidelines are no doubt in place but otherwise waiting until load goes too high and stays too high or enough complaints come in from a particular card is how areas are marked for upgrade. I fail to see how offering a more flexible upstream structure would change this. Clearly Comhem have no issues with it given that they guarantee 70% or higher performance on all upstream tiers. Perhaps their capacity management involves The Oracle ;)

Virgin Media 10Mbit Upstream Triallists

2009-10-29T17:43:00.002Z

Any 10Mbps upstream Virgin Media triallists out there?

I understand things are proceeding albeit slowly, and there's a lot of work to be done in some places to get this done, so any feedback from triallists which will, of course, be treated in total confidence would be welcome!

In other news I understand that Virgin are sending letters to their most extreme users - I wonder if this is a precursor to the upstream increases mentioned given they would have some quite unpleasant effects on their local areas on the VM network.

Sorry I've nothing more concrete to tell you, people have totally clammed up!

BT Starting To Care About Upstream?

2009-10-08T14:18:00.003+01:00

First I see this quote on a BT webpage:

These FTTP and FTTC products will offer end users the highest upstream speeds currently available in the UK, at up to 10Mbit/s. These speeds are ideal for consumers or businesses wanting to send large files with rich graphics or upload pictures and videos in a fraction of the time that is possible using products with slower downstream speeds.

Then this appears in my email:

This email is to inform you that the Access Charge Change Notice (ACCN) Number - OR151concerning a GEA Fibre to the Cabinet (FTTC) 10M upstream Product

Which is effective 23/11/2009, will be available shortly via the Openreach Price Notification webpage which can be found at:...

BT are replacing the additional upstream product which increased upstream on FTTC from 2Mbit to 5Mbit with an increase of 2Mbit to 10Mbit.

Same price too, service providers pay BT Openreach an extra 25p/month.

8Mbit of extra upstream for 3 pounds a year. Can anyone say no brainer?

Also I note that BT's fibre to the premises trials will be running at 100Mbit downstream 10Mbit up. Still fairly pants but an improvement on 100Mbit downstream 2Mbit upstream.

So over to Virgin Media, who are apparently trialling 10Mbit upstream on their network at some point, some time soon. They need to do something because right now 50/1.75 seems pretty poor compared with 40/10.

Ofcom's Support For New Infrastructure

2009-08-25T12:03:00.002+01:00

Ofcom's ideas of how to enhance infrastructure in the UK is brought nicely into focus by comments from Internal Communications Systems, a relatively small deployer of FTTP in the UK.

'After a fee of £ 10,000 to Ofcom they granted us Code Powers on the condition that we laid 50% more ducts than we required to expansion and replacement for worn out electricity cables.'

Yep force small fibre providers to supply ducting to National Grid plc, who proudly on their website describe themselves as 'one of the world's largest utilities'. There's how to progress broadband UK. Or how to ensure the BT/VM duopoly and BT monopoly in non-cabled areas.

The ignorance of local councils is likewise astounding.

'Four years ago we were invited by the resident of Lyndhurst, Hampshire to roll out FTTH in the Area. We now have a building to deploy our fibre from, but run up against local problems. The local District Council told us BT were doing a great job and would we go away.'

I also wonder how much truth is in this. If it is true it's not nice:

'At a meeting in London of the Government Advisery(sic) Commuttee(sic) sent abroad to study foreign FTTH deployment, I was told that BT had received in one form or another 5 Billion Pounds to provide Broadband coverage.'

Links to the posts mentioning these things are here and here.

So in between Mandelson (no offense to his homosexuality by the way) wanting to take file sharers by the hindmost, and Ofcom happily guarding BT and Virgin Media from the evils of smaller operators who could potentially supply better services to areas that want them, if the district councils don't try and ignore the wishes of their residents and electorate to likewise stick up for BT, it's all looking fantastic for the UK.

I'm looking forward to the advertisement: 'Coming soon, 100Mbit downstream, 2Mbit upstream, and if you file share on it you'll be disconnected and fined 50 grand. Go Broadband Britain!'

Incidentally BT's Ebbsfleet FTTP pilot has 2Mbit upstream whether one takes the 10, 30 or 100Mbit downstream residential option, so I wasn't actually making that bit up :)

I Don't Generally Get Political But...

2009-08-25T11:22:00.006+01:00

A few things appear to be going on that are somewhat irritating me.

Firstly let's deal with the unelected de facto Prime Minister Peter Mandelson, one of a number of unelected policy makers with the Brown government. Twice he has resigned from elected office under a cloud.

Resignation Number One

In December 1998, it was revealed Mandelson had bought a home in Notting Hill in 1996 with the assistance of an interest-free loan of £373,000 from Geoffrey Robinson, a millionaire Labour MP who was also in the Government, but was subject to an inquiry into his business dealings by Mandelson's department.^[10] Although Mandelson alleged he had deliberately not taken part in any decisions relating to Robinson, he knew he should have declared the loan as an interest, and he resigned on 23 December 1998.

Resignation Number Two

In January 2001, it was revealed Mandelson had phoned Home Office minister Mike O'Brien on behalf of Srichand Hinduja, an Indian businessman who was seeking British citizenship, and whose family firm was to become the main sponsor of the "Faith Zone" in the Millennium Dome. At the time, Hinduja and his brothers were under investigation by the Indian government for alleged involvement in the Bofors scandal. On 24 January 2001, Mandelson resigned from the Government for a second time,^[16]^[17] insisting he had done nothing wrong.

Of course, in the first case Mandelson cliamed to have done nothing wrong. In the second an 'independent' enquiry found he had done nothing wrong. Not really the point though.

Following this a few other controversies relating to possible misuse of political power, and it seems as though he can't help himself.

On 16th August The Independent reported that after an extensive lobbying campaign Mandelson had taken a strong interest in file sharing, with potential sanctions including removal of internet access and a 50,000GBP (57,3000 Euro, 81,900 USD) fine.

On 17th August The Daily Mail reported Mandelson had suddenly taken an interest in file sharing after spending dinner with David Geffen a record executive and film producer. It also reported that 'an insider' within one of Mandelson's many departments reported that he had previously shown no interest and suddenly following this dinner became very interested in legislation criminalising file sharing. Mandelson's spokesman naturally claimed that it was not discussed. It is reported this legislation will form a considerable part of new legislation to be presented to Parliament next month.

25th August the BBC reports that while file sharing was originally considered to be worked on within the Digital Britain report with measures due for implementation by 2012 the timescales are now considered by Mandelson's department to be 'too long to wait'.

Clearly nothing untoward about any of this. Not at all.

Just how stupid, Mandelson, do you think we are? Much as those of us who either have an IQ above 10 or aren't benefitting from your policy would love to get shot of you thanks to that coward Gordon Brown appointing you to government because he couldn't hack it and needed to hide behind you you're not subject to any kind of balances and checks, your immediate underlings being 50% unelected also, and it's not like we can vote you personally out as we didn't vote for you in the first place!

So this is democracy?

It Appears ISPs Underestimate Upstream Too

2009-07-30T18:46:00.005+01:00

In a hotel, on a Swisscom 15GBP a day wireless connection.

This is an 802.1b connection, and its' performance is, err, less than ideal.

Download Speed: 1964 kbps (245.5 KB/sec ) Upload Speed: 47 kbps (5.9 KB/sec )

That they are kindly proxying DNS and their DNS resolver is hopelessly overloaded doesn't really appeal either.

Your ISP's DNS resolver requires 3500 msec to conduct an external lookup, and 3300 msec to lookup an item in the cache.

This is particularly slow, and you may see significant performance degradation as a result.

It seems that some ISPs underestimate upstream, and this is the business service too. The standard service is 12GBP a day and limited to 256kbps with a 500MB transfer limit. This is supposed to be unlimited but isn't, 250MB/session upstream cap, and the downstream is throttled to 2Mbps while the upstream is throttled to 48 - 96kbps, and runs off DSL which I've probably just paid a week of subscription for.

Thank goodness for money back guarantees if unsatisfied. For 15 quid a day I'd be expecting a tad more than 2M / 96k with ports blocked and an upstream limit. Call me demanding and all that but... :)

ISPs, ISPs, Where Art Thou ISPs?

2009-07-21T20:53:00.004+01:00

As ISP watchers in the UK will know BT are trialling a VDSL2 based FTTN service, presently at 'up to' 40Mbit downstream and 2Mbit upstream, with the trial moving to a massive 5Mbit upstream later. This is followed by a commercial rollout which is in progress with commercial exchanges beginning to be released August 2009.

As part of the process for BT Openreach in developing this product they'd have consulted their customers, and the largest of these would sadly have been BT Wholesale who would presumably have had the greatest input into the product. This doesn't really answer though why other customers of theirs haven't made a touch more noise. BT Wholesale will certainly be the largest customer but other ISPs who are going to be using their existing LLU connectivity to hook directly into the BT Openreach FTTN network could perhaps have shouted louder.

Then there's those who will be buying the FTTN connectivity from BT Wholesale who will be reselling the product to them via the current ADSL backhauls. These guys seriously needed to shout some more. BT Retail are the largest customer here, and the only reason one can give for them not shouting would be that they were under instruction not to tread on Wholesale's shoes.

This FTTN product will for a large amount of its' initial rollout be a total exercise in futility from the retail point of view. How are those selling this in areas where Virgin have cable going to be selling this? They will almost certainly be having to charge more to compensate for the much increased burst bandwidth utilisation so one would expect them to be competing on speed, except Virgin will have faster downstream and upstream even if Openreach go to the 60Mbit maximum they mentioned Virgin have the capacity to go to 75 with a matter of keystrokes and a new configuration file.

VDSL2 can go right the way to 100Mbit symmetrical at short distances, such as the 30 metres I would be away from the MSAN. BT Openreach crippling this down to 40/2 and 40/5 makes very little sense, especially with their now few years of experience with ADSL Max and allowing DSL to rate adapt as high as it can go. The DLM systems are certainly a known technology to BT and exist in the field already, there is no viable reason for BT to restrain speeds to heavily, especially on upstream. Upstream is simply the only direction in which VDSL2 can beat DOCSIS 3 cable at the moment.

A rather lowly rated US telco, Qwest, have released their VDSL plans. 40/5 as standard, 40/20 for a few extra bucks a month. More noteworthy from the POV of this blog is that they will also be allowing their customers on their 7, 12 and 20Mbit downstream products to take a 5Mbit upstream. This would be the same upstream that Openreach are offering as an absolute maximum and that, at first glance from those of us on the outside, the rest of the ISP world is perfectly happy with. Does anyone have any explanation for all of this?

Simply - if other operators weren't screaming loudly at BT Openreach for a 'VDSL Max' service they were doing themselves and their customers a disservice. If BT Wholesale's customers weren't screaming at them to push Openreach to supply a 'VDSL Max' service they were doing their own customers a disservice. If BT Retail weren't screaming at Wholesale they are abusing the concept of structural separation as not pushing for the very best wholesale products for their use goes against their concept of being purely a retail face to BT with no concerns for the other parts of the business beyond purchase of wholesale products and services from them. If BT Wholesale were receiving the requests but ignoring them, and therefore have the power to set the tone of Openreach products, structural separation is a waste of time.

Incoming politics bit - If structural separation is a waste of time one can only suggest Ed Richards stops contemplating his political career after Ofcom and deals with this issue, it makes a mockery of Ofcom as a telecomms regulator and seriously enhances both the Conservative party's case for Ofcom to be gutted and the popularly held view of them as being a strongly New Labour organisation where they send their chosen to feast at the public trough. That said one would have to suggest having a former PM's advisor heading their agency and a previous head of it before that with a long career in PR being a former Labour activist and presently high ranking non-elected official in the cabinet and life peer makes that reputation very difficult to shift.

Money Where Mouth Is

2009-07-17T13:35:00.002+01:00

I have read and duly noted this press release from Virgin Media informing that 10Mbit upstreams will be trialled.

I know that my area would be potentially problematic, and I'm curious as to if they'll be tackling not so nice areas, and of course there's my natural cynicism but if the press release has been done it usually means that the money is going to be put up.

So... if VM can get this area running, reliably, on a 10Mbit upstream before the end of 2009 I'll donate 50GBP to a charity of one of my VM contacts' choosing. Why that date? Bonded upstreams are expected next year, so they can 'cheat'. To do it this year will need some serious work and serious investment.

I will also shut up about them on this blog. I've commented on wanting to see 10:1 or better ratio, 5:1 is exemplory considering cable technology restriction.

In other news the 50Mbit deployment is the fastest such deployment I'm aware of. Amazing work by all those involved getting over 12 million homes covered by DOCSIS 3 overlay within a year.

Credit Where Due

2009-07-16T15:43:00.001+01:00

Today Virgin Media had 2 vans and a car, 2 network engineers and a presumably senior engineer, present in this area working on the network issues.

So credit where due, a strong response to the issues here, and given the ongoing resource issues outstanding.

Thank you Virgin Media - this restores a little faith!

My 50Mbit Timeline

2009-07-11T11:40:00.007+01:00

Your experiences may, and I hope will, vary. Here though are my experiences on Virgin Media's 50Mbit service. Note that these are only times when I've engaged support, minor issues of slight performance degredation or a connection drop here and there where I didn't contact the newsgroup guys, who are probably sick of the sight of me and I apologise chaps, are not featured.

I suspect Virgin are punishing me for commenting on One Way Internet with No Way Internet :)

My thanks both to the wonderful lady in the CEO's office and to the staff manning VM's newsgroups for their assistance so far sadly even the very high standard of support and customer service offered by them thusfar cannot cover up that the network here appears to suck.

Timeline!

06/05 - 50Mbit install

13/05 - Reported on groups some connection drops, modem swapped 17/05 and appeared to resolve.

24/05 - Heavily degraded performance, improved later on in day.

25/05 - Connection unstable intermittently, resolved itself.

31/05 - Connection again unstable, resolved itself.

07/06 - Packet loss, slow performance, resolved itself.

25/06 - Connection very unstable (less time working than not). No upstream / return path.

26/06 - Connection failed. No upstream / return path.

29/06 - Connection returned to service, unsure of fault.

02/07 - Connection very unstable (less time working than not), resolved itself.

09/07 - Connection failed. No upstream / return path.

13/07 - Engineer attends, concludes network fault. Network engineer cannot find the issue but service comes back at 2pm. Given that original fault not found further disruptions are likely. Newsgroup support inform of a new fault on the network.

14/07 - 8:30AM - 50Mbit is performing like this:

File size transferred : 100.0 MB (104857600 bytes)

Total time taken : 406.34 seconds (406344 milliseconds)

Throughput : 258.0 KB/sec [Kilobyte-per-second]

= 0.26 MB/sec [Megabyte-per-second]

= 2064.0 Kbps [Kilobit-per-second]

= 2.06 Mbps [Megabit-per-second]

Very next-gen ;)

14/07 - 3:30PM - Aaaand after a few hours of service being ok-ish off we go again.

Powerful stuff this 'fibre optic' broadband... Certainly having a powerful effect on my blood pressure!

NextGen Roadshow

2009-07-03T12:06:00.009+01:00

James Enck of EuroTelcoBlog fame has linked some excellent videos from NextGen09 including his own talk. I can't recommend these highly enough, just watch them!

In other news the heat from Amsterdam Citynet appears to be getting to UPC a bit going by their upgraded service tiers. Oh the joys of infrastructure competition, the thing Ofcom appear to think we don't need.

Quick Article From The USA

2009-06-23T10:24:00.004+01:00

Hey!

Very busy today, loads to do but thought I'd post this link. It's from Verizon, a telco / fibre operator in the USA and discusses upstream speeds.

One very entertaining thing to note is this:

'According to a survey ofU.S. residential broadband users (“US Broadband Speeds on the Rise,” In-Stat, Feb. 2009), the average upstream connection speed used by cable broadband customers is 2.68 Mbps'

Oh to be able to get 2.68Mbps upstream on UK cable full stop!

No, I Have To Stay!

2009-06-22T21:03:00.002+01:00

Very, very quick update - more detail coming soon.

I was planning as some might know on moving out of the UK to The Netherlands, where I would enjoy broadband nirvana in the form of a nice symmetrical PtP fibre connection. Sadly this isn't going to happen now, personal reasons and all that. So... I will take extreme pleasure in sharing my thoughts on the Digital Britain report in the not too distant future. I did very much enjoy laughing as I was reading it though sadly it soon turned to tears.

More soon.

A Chat With An Industry Man

2009-06-03T16:05:00.003+01:00

I was having a chat, as you do, with a friend and ex-colleague on MSN. He is Swedish though previously he lived in the UK for a while. He's assisted with set ups of ISPs, worked for a couple of very large operators here, and we were just discussing a few things about UK and how it compares to Sweden. He explained how Stockholm formed a muni fibre operator and rolled out fibre as widely as possible, even going as far as doing that weird thing of liaising with other utilities and when they were digging the roads taking the opportunities to lay ducting, and pushing fibre out to buildings whether the demand were there or not and selling use of it open access. The result of course being that when the demand did begin to appear the infrastructure was waiting.

I think between the two of us we managed an interim report on Broadband Britain.

Him: 'If I was a country/location looking into how to improve infrastructure for IT I know how I would do it.

I would look at UK and especially London, and then do something else'.

Me: 'Take an investment shy telco whose only real competition is an investment shy cableco and add in a government that actively dissuades fibre deployment by taxing it and that's what you get'.

Your comments welcome of all kinds, be they disgruntled consumers, BT shareholders, or even Lord Carter and his well industry connected group. They being the people who are offering thusfar very little of anything interesting beyond an absolutely bare minimum which will allow this affluent and very densely populated nation to continue to have a broadband infrastructure plan that is more worthy of laughter than enthusiasm.

Who would have thought the interim report from a career PR man would be so light on substance, oh the humanity! :-)

UK Consumers Consider Broadband A Utility

2009-06-03T08:56:00.002+01:00

Yep a quick note not to do with upstream, but the other direction for a change!

According to this story by the BBC the majority of people in the UK regard a high speed connection as important, and these findings will be submitted to Lord Carter's Digital Britain review. Perhaps a tad late to the party given that virtually every advertisement on TV gives a website to go to, as do many TV programmes. In Britain today you simply do not get the full benefit from most medias if you do not have a reasonable Internet connection.

This is a good thing in a way of course, and will back up that massive 2Mbps Universal Service target by 2012 that was mentioned in the interim review. It's also a bad thing of course as it'll allow Lord Carter's review to continue ignoring that 2Mbps is below average by today's standards and by all accounts will be pedestrian by 2012.

When I have the time, inclination and am in a serious enough mood to not treat the news from the review thusfar with contempt and amusement I'll write up some more on it. Anyway well done Britain and welcome to the 21st Century, who knows maybe Lord Carter's team will pay attention more to people and less to corporate interests!

BT's FTTC - Fibre To The Cabinet

2009-06-02T20:32:00.002+01:00

Posted by bezuk about 1 hour ago

There was a brilliant blog on this called One Way Internet but it rarely gets updated these days

---

Thank you kind sir and my apologies for my slack updates, not a huge amount to speak about, until now.

I read the Openreach documents but it didn't sink in. I read forum posts and still didn't quite get there. Then I read a news article from Thinkbroadband and finally I understand. The future of most of the UK's broadband services from BT, Fibre To The Cabinet over VDSL2.

Fibre To The Cabinet is not a complicated technology. It is simply attempting to overcome that major restriction of DSL technologies, the length of the copper loop and the signal degredation that is induced by the attenuation of signals on the copper. This is done by moving the MSAN, the device which terminates the supplier side of the DSL link from the exchange / CO into a cabinet nearer the customer and then replacing the rest of the copper run with fibre optic cable.

The potentials of these technologies are enormous, especially upstream. What are BT doing in this field, are they taking this network which as built will be able to dominate Virgin Media's current DOCSIS 1.1 upstream network?

Nope.

2 variants - 40Mbit downstream and 2Mbit upstream, and for an extra 50p + VAT per month to the service provider 40Mbit downstream and 5Mbit upstream.

It could be worse. The Fibre to the Premises trials, where we are dealing with a network of 2.4Gbps downstream and 1.2Gbps upstream delivered to each 32 or 64 homes offers speeds downstream of 10, up to 30 and up to 100Mbit/s. The upstream on all of these? The familiar 2Mbps.

Some 'Next Generation Access' when existing CO/exchange based ADSL2+ Annex M products such at those from Be and O2 offer better.

BT - Virgin's reasons, and indeed excuse are that their network isn't really built for higher order upstream, and they haven't done the work to make it ready for higher order upstream. Yours as built will be more than ready but crippled so what's your excuse?

We are truly unique in the UK. If most of our ISPs are to be believed we aren't interested in upstream. It's really rather odd, you'd think someone like, I don't know, BT, would seize the day and use this as a valuable marketing opportunity. Virgin Media's 50Mbit service has an upstream of a mere 1.5Mbit overcapped slightly to 1.75Mbit. Why the heck isn't anyone using this as a marketing tool? People like to upload stuff from time to time, a high upstream is an almost unique selling point as it's something that pretty much no-one else in the UK cares less about.

I did see a comment that we have no real use for high upstreams. It could be said that we don't really have much use for 50Mbit downstream, yet by the end of the summer this product will be available to the majority of the UK. Just because someone might not think there's a pervasive need it doesn't mean you don't do it, especially when, as in the case of the BT FTTC and FTTP rollout, it will cost you nothing to open up the upstream on the product.

We could also ask just why the following offer better upstream ratios on their high bandwidth products if there's no point in them:

Comhem Sweden (Cable) - Varies between 24:1 and 5:1 with 5:1 - 1:1 available as an additional cost option.

Comcast USA (Cable) - 5:1 or better on >20Mbit products.

Cablevision USA (Cable) - 10:1 or better

Charter USA (Cable) - 10:1 or better

Cox Comms USA (Cable) - 10:1 or better

Even going down this list of ISPs in North America I am struggling to find any with worse than 20:1 ratio.

Even UPC in Ireland offer better than 20:1 ratios on their cable products, UPC Netherlands apart from their 120Mbit product which is at 12:1 run at between 4:1 and 10:1.

So they're doing it for fun, right?

Well of course those are cable operators so let's pick on a VDSL operator...

Bredbandsbolaget Sweden.

They have one service over VDSL, up to 60/20. No messing around with paying extra for a whole extra 3Mbit upstream.

They quote the following:

At less than 800m from the 'telephone station' customers will usually achieve between 40 and 60Mbit downstream and 5 to 20Mbit upstream.

At 800 - 1600m this will slow to 20 to 40Mbit downstream and 3 to 10Mbit upstream.

Here in the UK with BT Openreach, after years of research and trialling this technology without any larger scale commercial deployment they have decided that we merit 2Mbit upstream and up to 5Mbit upstream if we ask nicely and pay more. I look for a robust technical justification, but on BT's FTTC network virtually all lines will be within the range that Bredbandsbolaget quote for 40-60Mbit down and 5-20Mbit up.

I am very keen to have this explained to me some more. I'd like to think of myself as a reasonably smart guy, I've done my years in the Internet industry and still am, but I just don't get it. Surely a telco wouldn't waste capacity on the fibres from the MSANs, wouldn't waste the opportunity to grab market share from the cable company by offering a strong upstream solution for those who desire it, and wouldn't waste the capabilities of their technology?

Surely not?

Wakey Wakey

2009-05-09T09:35:00.005+01:00

Huge thanks to James Enck of EuroTelcoblog for his mention of this rather dormant recently blog, and for the consistently enjoyable articles.

No huge update beyond to mention that I now have Virgin Media's 50Mbit service - the 20Mbit was quite congested so an upgrade was needed.

It's good, but also not so good!

ftp> put 10MB_nonzero.bin

200 PORT command successful

150 Connecting to port 5002

226-File successfully transferred

226 64.305 seconds (measured here), 159.24 Kbytes per second

ftp: 10485760 bytes sent in 64.28Seconds 163.13Kbytes/sec.

ftp> get 10MB_nonzero.bin

200 PORT command successful

150-Connecting to port 5003

150 10240.0 kbytes to download

226-File successfully transferred

226 2.638 seconds (measured here), 3.79 Mbytes per second

ftp: 10485760 bytes received in 2.64Seconds 3970.37Kbytes/sec.

4 compressed shots on a digital camera. Download time a shade over 2.5 seconds, my 50Mbit never even got the chance to get to full speed, if it had it'd be done in 1.7 seconds.

To actually put that 4 anywhere? Just over a minute.

Say it was 40, perhaps from a day out. OK, just under 11 minutes. 17 second download.

Say it was 400, from 2 weeks away. Hour and 47 minutes, less than 3 minute download. On the fastest tier the cable operator has. Next tier down 3 and a half hours. Standard DSL getting on towards 7 hours.

As Promised 50Mbit Comparison

2009-02-05T17:12:00.005Z

In an earlier post I mentioned some comparisons of 50Mbit+ products, the one we have in the UK and others.

I mentioned UPC who are Europe wide, ONO from Spain, Comhem from Sweden, Videotron from Canada, Comcast from the US and Charter from the US.

UPC - 60Mbit downstream 6Mbit upstream

ONO - 50Mbit downstream 3Mbit upstream

Comhem - 50Mbit downstream 7-10Mbit upstream

Videotron - 50Mbit downstream 1Mbit upstream

Comcast - 50Mbit downstream 10Mbit upstream

Charter - 60Mbit downstream 5Mbit upstream

Virgin Media - 50Mbit downstream 1.5Mbit upstream, actual 53Mbit downstream 1.75Mbit upstream.

So VM are one off the bottom of the pile. We can't blame Virgin for this, this is the environment they are in in the UK, note these statistics from http://www.speedtest.net - a worldwide network of speed tests:

It's hardly inspiring stuff and speaks volumes about the attitude of providers and indeed the government and regulation in the UK. We are the gateway between continental Europe and North America, yet are not up to the standards of Australasia. While an obligation to provide 2Mbps downstream has been mentioned there is nothing regarding upstream there.

I guess this is the British stiff upper lip, evidently it extends to broadband, as far as data goes we sit here and take it!

Think You Have Broadband?

2009-01-31T21:48:00.001Z

Well do you?

In light of the Obama administration in the US defining broadband as 5Mbit downstream and 1Mbit upstream some guy has registered the domain thinkyouhavebroadband.co.uk.

Website coming when 'some guy' has the time to produce it, looking to getting an upload speed test in place, along with some examples of what you could do with that upload.

I raise a mojito to you all, and will be back with you shortly!

US Broadband Stimulus Package Defines Broadband

2009-01-31T15:41:00.004Z

The stimulus package making its' way through the US government at the moment has a very interesting couple of phrases that define what is considered as broadband for purposes of collecting the credits and incentives available.

The package defines 'High Speed Internet' as being services that deliver 5Mbit/s downstream and 1Mbit/s upstream. It defines 'Next Generation' services as being those that deliver 100Mbit/s downstream and 20Mbit/s upstream.

So how many services that are widely available in the UK meet these requirements.

As far as 'Next Generation' goes this is easy - there are none that are available widely. There are services with very limited availability that meet this but nothing widely available.

As far as meeting the lower standard, 'High Speed Internet' how many services do we have?

Well not many - these are they:

UKOnline Premier - 16Mbit/1Mbit

Bethere - All tiers of service.

O2 - All tiers.

Virgin Media Cable - 53Mbit/1.75Mbit

Virgin Media DSL - 16Mbit / 1Mbit

Talk Talk - 8Mbit / 1Mbit

I would welcome correction if I've missed any, but this is all I had.

Of course, a lot of ISPs that use BT Wholesale or normal ADSL are unable to reach that standard however a number do have the technology but choose not to use it, BSkyB / UKOnline being a notable one.

I did note that Virgin Media offnet customers in their LLU areas, using the dreaded copper wires, get better upload speeds than all on-net fibre optic / cable residential customers apart from those on the 50Mbit, and pay less. Odd.

Quote Of The Day

2009-01-30T23:52:00.005Z

No real post, just a quote from someone having some issues with their Virgin Media cable service:

'I've phoned VM again today to complain about my upload performance issue to be told that VM don't support upload speed...'

This explains why the upload speed of the tiers is buried within the AUP / throttling pages rather than on the 'sales' pages I guess!

Makes you feel all warm and fuzzy inside, and sadly this would probably be the case with a number of large ISPs. So long as the download is fine the upload isn't their problem.

Back and Tidied Up

2009-01-29T17:41:00.002Z

Welcome back!

More to follow, placeholder post, but just a quick note to say that the blog has had a few posts removed, and a bit of general tidying up to try and keep things 'constructive'.

Much more to follow, addressing the following:

Virgin Media's 50Mbit product, from a technical and practical standpoint.

Similar products around the world from: UPC (Europe-Wide), Comcast (USA), Charter (USA), Videotron (Canada), ONO (Spain), Comhem (Sweden).

A look at what options there are in the UK for those who might want to do more than just download (Won't take long).

If there's any prospect of this changing any time soon.

Watch this space!

This Is Technical - The Science Bit!

2008-09-28T22:54:00.010+01:00

So.... I've heard a few things about Virgin Media people, obviously including the marketing team, and of course customers not really knowing how the Hybrid Fibre-Coaxial Virgin Media cable network actually works, and from that not being sure about the whole upstream thing.

I'm dealing purely with broadband here, so this isn't going to cover TV apart from where it's vaguely relevant to broadband services.

Here's a fantastic diagram of what essentially a cable network looks like, even Virgin Media's which supplies their 'fibre optic broadband'.

A quick explanation, distribution hubs are usually where the uBRs / CMTSes are. uBR is a Cisco term which stands for Universal Broadband Router. It's known generically as a CMTS - Cable Modem Termination System. It does exactly what it suggests, it terminates cable modem connections. It's the devices that cable modems connect to, which converts the protocol used on the HFC network into the internet standard IP / Internet Protocol. The CMTS output is actually copper - it's over coaxial cable which is merged with all the TV signals which are then sent to nodes via a laser and fibre optic cable.

From these hubs are several pairs of fibres which each go to an optical node. The pair run one in each direction, one upstream and one downstream. This optical node converts the light from the fibres into electrical signals, RF, and convert the electrical signals coming upstream from customers into light and send it back to the CMTS. They are optical transceivers.

From these optical nodes the downstream, now Radio Frequency / RF, is amplified and sent towards customers, and the upstream traffic from customers is received by the node, converted into optical signals and forwarded to the distribution hub.

Downstream as the diagram suggests goes through some amplification, and is eventually tapped off and onto individual customer drops. The network is best described as a tree, each node being the root of its' tree, and the large cable run from the node being the trunk which splits into branches which then go into local cabinets and are fed to individual customer homes, leaves.

Upstream is the reverse, all customer upstream collects together at the node.

One obvious question, how are downstream and upstream separated, as they travel on the same cable? They are separated through Frequency Division Multiplexing and diplex filters. It sounds scary but it really isn't. At the coaxial amplifiers and optical nodes are diplex filters. Simply these block all but the wanted frequencies for each direction, so only the upstream frequencies are fed to the upstream part of the amplifiers and only the downstream frequencies reach the downstream amplification. Frequency Division Multiplexing is nothing more than having upstream and downstream on different frequencies.

Unconscious yet?

How does this affect upstream bandwidth available on cable broadband? It's said that due to them being originally intended to transport television (again even Virgin Media's fibre optic broadband network contrary to the advertising) these networks are naturally asymmetrical, which is true. However, when it comes purely to broadband this isn't necessarily the case. See the below for the asymmetry of cable networks at the RF / electrical layer.

There are three main types of network on Virgin Media and other EuroDOCSIS cable networks, the below charts show the capacities of them at the Radio Frequency layer.

That's what can be coming down the cable going to your home. The DOCSIS build shows 3 different ranges at the end of the downstream spectrum, these are varying values depending on the standard of the local network, same with the EuroDOCSIS.

This is all well and good but how does it relate to how much bandwidth is available on the broadband services?

Bandwidth is usually shared between the customers on optical nodes. Virgin Media make use of the Cisco MC28U line card on their CMTS. This supplies 2 downstream ports and 8 upstream ports, which would tend to be split between two optical nodes. Each downstream port does not use much bandwidth on the cable network, only 8MHz, each upstream 3.2MHz of the upstream range. So from the Cisco line card that goes to each area to say 2 nodes it would look somewhat like this:

Each node would get 1 downstream and 4 upstreams. What does this mean for bandwidth? It means that each node gets 38Mbit downstream and 4 x 8.8Mbit upstream. It's not as asymettrical as it might at first appear from the RF side. Please note that this is not necessarily the case, there are a number of other permutations that might be possible both with the MC28U line card and with the MC16 series of line cards. Here's an example:

Again a reminder, we are assuming that each downstream is 38Mbit, each upstream 8.8Mbit. This leaves in the MC28 deployment 38Mbit downstream to each area, and 35.2Mbit upstream to each area. In the MC16 deployment this ratio is 38Mbit shared between 2 areas, so 19Mbit each area downstream and 26.4Mbit upstream. Yep asymmetrical, but the other way around.

A 'buzz word' that I've heard is statistical contention. It's a reason I've heard for upstream to not be high. Basically this is the mathematics that it's less likely for a number of people to be using their bandwidth at the same time than for a smaller group to be, even when they are the same percentage of the total. For example it is considered less likely that 50 out of 5000 people would be downloading at the same time than 5 out of 500. From this, sharing 10Mbit between 10 people is not as good as sharing 100Mbit between 100 people, as it's less likely that enough of the 100 will be using their net at the same time to saturate the 100Mbit.

This doesn't work anymore as an excuse for low upstream. Why? Simple, because Virgin and others offer 10Mbit and 20Mbit downstream speeds, so 2 or 4 customers on these tiers can saturate a downstream. Those same 2 20Mbit customers would use barely 1/6th of one of the 3 or 4 upstreams that their area shares.

So where are the problems?

One possible problem is that to use the upstreams at 8.8Mbit is more strenuous on the cable network, and due to lack of maintenance or old networks that haven't been upgraded some areas have serious issues with the amount of upstream traffic they can cope with. For some areas running 4 upstreams at 8.8Mbit is a pipe dream. Fixable for sure, but a pipe dream without some expenditure.

In my diagram above I pointed out some areas that only have upstream on 5 to 30MHz, and broadband internet isn't the only thing that needs upstream. Add to that that some upstream won't be usable and you reduce your options.

Why wouldn't upstream be usable? I mentioned above that upstream is funnelled in from an entire node and collects together at the receiver on the node. Along with this come any unwanted signals. The cable network can have open connectors, or devices attached to it which make unwanted signals and make some upstream unusable. This is something that can also be resolved through network maintenance and screening.

What Is The Solution?

Take these areas that can only go 5 to 30MHz or 5 to 42MHz and upgrade them to the full EuroDOCSIS / Extended DOCSIS spec I mentioned, allowing upstream up to 50 or ideally 65MHz upstreams. They ensure that the optical transmitters are capable of transporting at least 4 8.8Mbit carrying upstreams and ideally the 6 that some areas do, in addition to whatever else they are transporting for TV and the like. While doing this they can upgrade the areas from the 550MHz to 880MHz or even 1GHz downstream to give ample room for many HD channels and broadband channels.

Ensure that the existing networks are clean enough to permit them to run all areas with 8.8Mbit upstreams and potentially better, and employ standards that will increase these 8.8Mbit upstreams to 13.2 or even 26.4Mbit.

This is not something that customers need to pay megabucks for. It's a matter of will for the most part. I strongly suspect that most of the network is more than capable of offering more than it does but as marketing has no interest and these things are not up to engineering there's no drive there.

We're bored of mega downstream packages, you can only do so much and the higher the bandwidths go the less difference there is between the tiers, it's a case of diminishing returns. Also let's face it STM makes downloading a pain in the evenings. One does wonder why it's acceptable to have downstream rates where 2 customers can saturate an entire optical node, while 10 top tier customers could not use 1/4th of the upstream capacity on an optical node.

Why not show off the fibre optic network, give us the sort of upload speeds that ADSL can only dream of? And I'm not talking about bodging it with bonding, invest, show us all, not just the people on the future 50Mbit, what you can do. If you need evidence see above! :)

When Fibre Optics Are One Way Only - Virgin Media

2008-09-10T17:11:00.013+01:00

As a Virgin Media subscriber, or one of the half the population in the UK who is in a Virgin Media area, you're probably used to seeing ads like those on this Virgin Media site promising super fast fibre optic broadband. You may even see something in there about how Virgin Media don't use copper wire so offer the fastest broadband around. Unfortunately it seems Virgin's fibre only goes one way. Sure, you can download fast, but sending your own data back to the internet you certainly won't get that 'fibre optic' experience.

Sure some people might not care about how fast they can send data to the internet, how many people do? Well you probably upload a lot more than you think. Take a 5MB MP3, to download this file will take less than 2.5 seconds on Virgin Media's top 20Mbit service. To send that same file to a friend will take you about a minute. Nothing too alarming there, you can wait a minute, right?

Now take that 500MB of holiday pictures from your latest trip to wherever. You've got a nice 3 billion megapixel camera with a huge memory card so you were taking photos like crazy. To send those to a friend, to a website, to facebook, to wherever will take you over 1.5 hours. While you are doing this everything on your internet connection will be very, very slow. Browsing will take an age, gaming just won't happen.

Then there's when you really have something to say, or want to share some video on youtube. If you're a gamer it's quite possible that you are patching your game using BitTorrent or a similar Peer to Peer protocol, and in the case of BitTorrent at least the more you upload the faster you're likely to download.

Then we get to the other side of this issue. Sure it's not great having a slow upload if you're uploading, but what about the person who is receiving your data? The BBC, Sky, Joost. All have Peer to Peer video services. If you're trying to watch a stream and it is stuttering, buffering, breaking up it's really pretty irritating. Why is it this bad? The people sending you the stream don't have enough upload bandwidth to keep that running smoothly. When you're sitting there watching that World of Warcraft latest patch creeping down so slowly you wish you could just have it sent you on a DVD? Not enough upload from your peers.

Going back to Virgin Media. Their 'XL' service offers 20Mbit download, however the upload is not even 1/20th of that at 768kbit. This provider advertises their 'fibre optic broadband' as being the fastest in the country because it doesn't use copper wires, while another provider, Bethere, delivers up to 2.5Mbit upload over these copper wires. It's not even about the technology that Virgin Media are providing these speeds, it's not about people not wanting this upload that they don't provide it, but a lack of will to provide it. I'll explain.

For all their advertising Virgin Media are, in common with UPC, Comhem, Chello, Comcast, et al providing cable broadband. Fibre to your neighbourhood, then coaxial cable from there to the home. Comcast are the largest cable operator in the world and offer 2Mbit upload on an 8Mbit download service, a ratio of 4:1. Comhem in Sweden offer 7-10Mbit upload on a 24Mbit download service, a ratio of 3:1. I struggle to believe that the UK uses our internet so differently from Sweden and the US that there is no demand for upload here. Virgin may claim there are technical issues that prevent them from offering higher upload speeds. Again this is a struggle to believe. The US uses a different TV system from Europe, meaning that on the actual cable network itself they have less than 2/3rds the upload bandwidth available.

Then we come to perhaps people will 'abuse' their service by uploading should Virgin increase their upload speeds. Ignoring that people pay for these speeds and should be able to 'use' rather than 'abuse' them Virgin cap the amount that people can upload during the period of 4pm - 9pm anyway then throttle customers to 1/4th of their billed speed, so that's not an issue either.

The Virgin name is synonymous with giving people what they want. Virgin Media are not a part of the Virgin Group but they carry the name, while appearing to give us what they want. Having this crazy asymettry on the Virgin Media cable service affects Virgin Media customers, but anyone who may use a peer to peer application who connects with a Virgin Media broadband customer, and there are over 3 million of us, so if you do use P2P chances are you've peered with someone from Virgin Media at some time. Just look for that ntl.com or blueyonder.co.uk in your peers list.

The odd part is that these services seemed to get more and more asymmetrical over time. In 2000 one of Virgin Media's component companies, ntl, were selling 512k/128k. 4:1 ratio. This became 1Mbit/256k, 4:1. That was about the best that they offered, following that they went to 10:1 with 3Mbit/300k then it just went worse until today's worse than 26:1. According to a Virgin Media Product Manager we don't want those upstream speeds and to offer increased upstream speeds isn't viable, while apparently it is to a variety of other ISPs using networks poorer than Virgin Media's. As an example UPC / Liberty Media bought the network that was formerly ntl's in Ireland. This network was for the most part in a diabolical state, however they upgraded it and now offer better upstream on their 20Mbit product than Virgin Media do.

It's my view that no ISP should be able to call what they sell broadband unless as a bare minimum the upload rate is 1/10th the download rate and preferably higher.

The Internet is a global community. One which we can all have some interest in. That upload pipe is our route to expressing ourselves, interacting with the world, sharing our thoughts and experiences. ISPs should be providing us an Internet Service that is more than just a one way street.

Virgin: it's time for some road works, it's time to widen the other lane.