Blueyonder/Telewest speed upgrades

[Big Kev]

If you want people to stop posting, Gilly. Lock it. Simple. The forum is for people to chat, not for you to tell them to get lost.

After a while, telling people to stop bickering becomes very, very tiresome and it seems like we're talking to ourselves, so a more direct approach is required.

If people don't like this attitude, stop bickering like school kids in the first place and there won't be any need, it's as simple as that.

 

[Priapus]

I think that a few arguments here and there won't hurt anyone, as long as personal insults arn't throwen about. And the language keeps low. After all this is a forum for duscusion.

 

[Priapus]

There's a difference between conversation/debate, and taking things too far.

Read my post above.

 

[tolien]

as long as personal insults arn't throwen about. And the language keeps low.

They were, and it wasn't, despite warnings being given.
See the problem now?

 

[bitboy]

I would really like this thread to remain open. With upgrade release dates, news and general bragging it would be very handy having it in one place. There's no doubt people have overstepped the mark in this thread. A grownup debate over the merits of different ISPs and their strategies is one thing, petty bickering is another. Pwetty pweeeese keep this thread open and just give a swift kick in the crown jewels to any troublemakers

I'm still in two minds what I'm going to do about the speed increase. 4MB would be nice, but it's like a halfway house. Either save more pennies by 'downgrading' to the 2MB service, or go the full whack 10Mb superawesomemega service. Either is a bonus, save and get more or go for the premium offering for an additional tenner.

The release date should coincide (roughly) with Telewest's 'Teleport' service, which is also looking quite interesting. Despite than rambling complaint email I send to them the other day, Telewests services are looking better than ever.

 

[ThE-NiNjA]

I would really like this thread to remain open. With upgrade release dates, news and general bragging it would be very handy having it in one place. There's no doubt people have overstepped the mark in this thread. A grownup debate over the merits of different ISPs and their strategies is one thing, petty bickering is another. Pwetty pweeeese keep this thread open and just give a swift kick in the crown jewels to any troublemakers

I'm still in two minds what I'm going to do about the speed increase. 4MB would be nice, but it's like a halfway house. Either save more pennies by 'downgrading' to the 2MB service, or go the full whack 10Mb superawesomemega service. Either is a bonus, save and get more or go for the premium offering for an additional tenner.

The release date should coincide (roughly) with Telewest's 'Teleport' service, which is also looking quite interesting. Despite than rambling complaint email I send to them the other day, Telewests services are looking better than ever.

Depends if you think your going to really utilise that 10 meg line?, i think intill some real good internet tv etc comes out 10meg would be abit wasited, ad as the 4 meg has the same upload id say 4 was the best bet for you untill more broadband intesive services come out either way i dont think you can go wrong.

 

[bitboy]

Depends if you think your going to really utilise that 10 meg line?, i think intill some real good internet tv etc comes out 10meg would be abit wasited, ad as the 4 meg has the same upload id say 4 was the best bet for you untill more broadband intesive services come out either way i dont think you can go wrong.

Meh, it's all down to the e-penis isn't it? I'd just like to say I have a big fat connection at home, and when I want something it is there, super quick. To be honest I think (well, I know) 2Mb is ample for my needs, but I'd like to sample the best BY can offer just for the sake of it.

We'll see how it goes. Perhaps the mega service for a few months, then drop down when I finally admit to myself that I don't really need it

 

[FordPrefect]

hence 10 down will take the 40 upload before you even start upping anything.

then your upload gets saturated and makes the dowmload suffer.
a lot of people cant seem to understand this.

Just increase your TCP window size and this will lower the overhead of TCP acks. TCP was designed back when connections were nowhere near as reliable as now. You could have course increase your MTU but thats likely to cause problems due to fragmentation possibly making the problem worse, also you would likely get packet loss as some firewalls will drop any fragmented IP traffic.

 

[FordPrefect]

America
Sweden
Germany
France
Korea
Pakistan
China
Japan
poland
finland

Theres a few Shall i add the congo? YAY we are way ahead of those.

The quoted top speeds might be higher than ours but they also have contention that is actually noticeable on the line. A few years ago now but if I remember correctly the cost of a 512/256k 1:1 contention ADSL line was figured out to cost approx 700 quid a month.

If I was with BY I'd be stoked, huge amount for bandwidth for nothing. I really cannot see how anyone could complain apart from the fact they cant get it in there area like me!

BT have concentrated on getting a higher area covered with ADSL availability but hopefully now we will start to see a push for ADSL2 and the possible higher speeds available. Also ADSL2 can work on longer lines so that will also increase ADSL availability.

I really think that as speeds increase all providers are gonna be forced to consider capped services as the cost of high bandwidth users is gonna go through the roof, and unfortunetly there are always those that will take the mickey and ruin a good thing for all.

The other thing to consider is that BY and NTL are probably gonna merge so what effect will that have on BY? It is obviously gonna make more sense to standardize packages, does that mean upcapped like BY or capped like NTL? They may also increase upload speed.

 

[Gilly]

I'm not closing this thread because some people are acting like adults and are wanting to respond in an appropriate manner. Childish people aren't going to ruin this for people, they're going to get themselves suspended. This is not open for discussion and I don't expect a response. I expect people to heed what I've said.

 

[sargatanas]

I dont know why some people take it so personally, and any upgrade that gives you MORE and for LESS cost isn't bad in my book.

 

[Vertigo]

BT have concentrated on getting a higher area covered with ADSL availability but hopefully now we will start to see a push for ADSL2 and the possible higher speeds available. Also ADSL2 can work on longer lines so that will also increase ADSL availability.

There was an article I read recently which claimed that, as BT had focused on the availability of broadband, speeds for those in urban areas had suffered as a result. There's no doubt that some other countries have focused on ramping up speeds for those in urban areas and not given any thought at all to provisioning in more rural locations, but when it comes to determining our place in the global broadband landscape I'd contend that availability levels are as important as outright speed.

I'm also getting the impression that the marketers are being a bit cheeky with all the guff about ADSL2. Yes it will reach further, yes it provides more speed, but it won't do both at the same time.

 

[ThE-NiNjA]

Meh, it's all down to the e-penis isn't it? I'd just like to say I have a big fat connection at home, and when I want something it is there, super quick. To be honest I think (well, I know) 2Mb is ample for my needs, but I'd like to sample the best BY can offer just for the sake of it.

We'll see how it goes. Perhaps the mega service for a few months, then drop down when I finally admit to myself that I don't really need it

Agreed 10 megs for will wavers lol. No seriously, would be ncie to sample 10, if i had something to really use it on lol.

As i said earlier tho, the biggest thign here is not the 10 meg line but the fact the pricing has come down to compete with adsl, this si always a good thing nd will really drive the competition between the different isps now

 

[doozer]

I've had 4 meg for ages now and I think 10 would be too much even for me hehe, but it's a free upgrade and a price downgrade so I'm happy.

I think prices aren't too bad anyway I remember paying 20 quid a month years back with aol yuck. Then when I first got my 512k connection with telewest that was about 40 notes a month.

If only we could have nice fast upload speeds though so I don't get horrible latency in online games when people are uploading on my network.

 

[MAllen]

Who remembers when the only digital choice for home was ISDN or BT's Home Highway with it's expensive hire charge and per minute billing. All for a 64k line!! Or you could pay twice as much for a 128k line (or two 64k's added together...)

 

[ThE-NiNjA]

Who remembers when the only digital choice for home was ISDN or BT's Home Highway with it's expensive hire charge and per minute billing. All for a 64k line!! Or you could pay twice as much for a 128k line (or two 64k's added together...)

Me and a friend paired a couple isdn lines, or was it 56k lines, i rmember you could pair two 56k lines if you had 2 seperate phone lines and use some software to get 2x56k lol.

Also i can remeber waiting days for a 100 meg demo of some star trek fps

 

[Robert]

Depends if you think your going to really utilise that 10 meg line?, i think intill some real good internet tv etc comes out 10meg would be abit wasited, ad as the 4 meg has the same upload id say 4 was the best bet for you untill more broadband intesive services come out either way i dont think you can go wrong.

I really cannot understand you. Who CARES if it's the same upload. It's a whole 6mbit QUICKER. 4/10 are both obviously quick, but 6 mbit is a fair chunk.

Hopefully I'll be staying with 4 meg for some uber fast downloadage. Again though, this is a FREE update. I can't believe people have the cheek to complain.

 

[Vertigo]

Who remembers when the only digital choice for home was ISDN or BT's Home Highway with it's expensive hire charge and per minute billing. All for a 64k line!! Or you could pay twice as much for a 128k line (or two 64k's added together...)

Oh yes. I was on HH a little under four years ago before I moved house, as back then there was no cable and ADSL was still too expensive to justify and BT wanted nearly 300 quid to migrate me!

Once I've been upgraded by Telewest, my speed (download at least) will have increased 160 fold in four years and will be costing me about half as much, which is staggering when you think about it.

 

[squawkBOX]

The following is slightly on and off topic. I decided to post as I think some users might be interested.

On the blueyonder newsgroups Telewest Broadband's Principle Engineer posted the following in relation to upload speed:

[start]
The noise caused by the modems is one issue, and one we take seriously,
but it isn't the fundamental reason why cable modem networks are
asymmetric by nature (more download than upload).

To understand this, you have to know the history of cable. The return
path, which is the path for the upstream/upload path, has a much smaller
frequency spectrum than the downstream.This is because of the way the
network equipment is manufactured-the only reason we can come up with is
that in the early days, the return path was a bit of an afterthought,
and all focus was on the downstreasm/forward path, because that's where
the money was (analogue broadcast).

Then came along DOCSIS, and cable modem broadband. Cable companies
didn't fancy ripping out their new'ish networks so we had to find the
best way of leveraging what we had.

So in the downstream, we have a modulation technique called QAM64 or
now, as we are rolling out, QAM256.This can give you between 31 and
38Mb/sec theoretical throughput, shared over the users on that
"segment".The return path, uses QPSK (QAM4).This gives about 2Mb/sec or
5Mb/sec, depending on the carrier width.Again this is shared over the
"segment".A segment is a group of customers, grouped together logically
by their cable node ID's.

So you can now see that we have to manage that imbalance.We are in the
process of testing a new upstream modulation type called QAM16 which can
be driven up to 10Mb/sec over the segment, so we are increasing all the
time.You can do 2 things with the extra bandwidth-increase upstream
bandwidth on a per-user basis to existing customers or increase the
number of customers per segment, whilst retaining the incumbent upstream
bandwidth per user.

We are doing a bit of both
Hopefully this gives an idea of what it is all about-if you want o get
really technical, I highly recommend the following website
http://www.ct-magazine.com/
The archives section is a fantastic source of information and it written
by the leaders in their field

Hope this helps


Stewart Dunn
Principal Engineer
Central Operations Support Group
Telewest Broadband

[end]

 

[ThE-NiNjA]

Thats a good article thanks mate