BT Infinity 2

EVH said:
Who the hell legally downloads >100GB a month?
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Depends on the number of people using the connection surely. A family of 5 would mean that its 20GB per person. That's nothing when you consider 1 hour TV episodes on iplayer are 700mb each and HD streams are even more. What about online gaming platforms? Download one game a month and that could be 10GB gone already.

Don't underestimate how much normal streaming uses either. Use image heavy sites and it racks up very quickly.

Imagine this month if you watched all 3 football games each day. That is a 1500kbps stream for 6 hours which could be multiplied if not watching together.
 
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fluff said:
It's a BT product. It will never be any good. ;)

Check out the IDNet & Zen packages. You will have to be willing to spend ££. It may be best to stick with LLU for the time being.
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Good shout with IDNet, didn't know it was available with anyone else.

As soon as I have a job I will probably switch to them.
 
I am in a student house 4 of us in total, and we all easily hit 100GB between us all using BBC Iplayer and 4OD it adds up pretty quick

Luckily we are in a Virgin area and have 20mb
 
bigredshark said:
It's so easy that last month 2.31% of our tens of thousands of ADSL customers did so - it's still an unusually high amount of usage however you wish to dress it up.
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Ah but what kind of packages do you provide? if your main products are sold as say 5gig a month then the percentage of users hitting 100gig is going to be a lot less than an ISP with "unlimited" or high useage packages.

Yes right now 100gig is still high useage but its not hard to hit it completely legally if you have 2+ users who make health use of steam, itunes, iplayer, youtube, etc.

Last 2 weekends I've been streaming (in HD) an eve online tournament (AT8) for several hours sat and sunday - by a rough calculation its approx 3gig for each session - so thats 12gig alone so far and the tournament isn't over yet.
 
Rroff said:
Ah but what kind of packages do you provide? if your main products are sold as say 5gig a month then the percentage of users hitting 100gig is going to be a lot less than an ISP with "unlimited" or high useage packages.

Yes right now 100gig is still high useage but its not hard to hit it completely legally if you have 2+ users who make health use of steam, itunes, iplayer, youtube, etc.

Last 2 weekends I've been streaming (in HD) an eve online tournament (AT8) for several hours sat and sunday - by a rough calculation its approx 3gig for each session - so thats 12gig alone so far and the tournament isn't over yet.
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Our users are typically high end and technically astute examples, our cheapest package is £25+VAT so we're not catering to the budget market in any form. It tallies with what industry friends say as well, users downloading over 100GB month typically make up <5% of the user-base but those that do tend to do way more than 100GB (200-300 not uncommon) - which means the other 95% are subsidizing them heavily, which makes it remarkable we haven't gone through a phase of telling them to sod off all told.
 
bigredshark said:
To be honest I think that's rubbish until it's confirmed by someone credible, sync speed has nothing to do with contention in any form, the only way sync speed would change with contention is if BT are being very cheap about their DSLAMs, their cabling or were artificially limiting to avoid contention.

That's before moving onto the fact that people need to get used to contention, it's the only way you're getting decent speed connections without paying hundreds for them, you can't have a dedicated 40Mb path to transit through their core network, it costs too much!
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The post refered to in that link is by a Plusnet tech who looks after their service trials, I'd say he's pretty well placed to know what's up.

The issue here is a different kind of contention than we are used too, since it affects Sync speed - so even at off-peak times your speeds will be limited. The problem is with the DSLAM's not being capable enough rather than the fibre backhaul (I'd hope at least that they are putting down way more fibre to the cab than they need and just leaving it dark)
 
bigredshark said:
Our users are typically high end and technically astute examples, our cheapest package is £25+VAT so we're not catering to the budget market in any form. It tallies with what industry friends say as well, users downloading over 100GB month typically make up <5% of the user-base but those that do tend to do way more than 100GB (200-300 not uncommon) - which means the other 95% are subsidizing them heavily, which makes it remarkable we haven't gone through a phase of telling them to sod off all told.
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If you consider a 720p h264 stream to be around 7Mb/s, 100GB only gets you about an hour a day.
As people get more and more used to on-demand streaming and start wanting to watch more stuff in HD (and god forbid they want 1080p!) I can see usage rocketing and even the average Joes consuming hundreds of GB. It's only a matter of time before we get something like Hulu for the UK, and before too long every TV is going to have Google TV (or equivilent) and ordinary people will be watching from their couch - Bandwidth demands are going to skyrocket then ... especially at peak times.

BT just seem to be incredible cheap and short-sighted, They need FTTP or they are going to be crushed by Virgin Media in the towns. Heavily contended FTTC isn't going to meet the demands and expectations of consumers in a couple of years, cable is in a much better position.
 
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Zarf said:
If you consider a 720p h264 stream to be around 7Mb/s, 100GB only gets you about an hour a day.
As people get more and more used to on-demand streaming and start wanting to watch more stuff in HD (and god forbid they want 1080p!) I can see usage rocketing and even the average Joes consuming hundreds of GB. It's only a matter of time before we get something like Hulu for the UK.
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That's a completely separate question though, the stats say most users don't stream much video as yet (and even less at anything like that bit rate) and if that uses up their usage allowance then I don't have a great deal of sympathy for them as it's expensive bandwidth for several reasons.

Some have said that people can watch most of this stuff on TV, if you choose to watch it online you've got to be aware there's a cost associated with it.

Either multicast has to properly take off and be implemented (which very few UK ISPs are showing an interest in) or the cost of that bandwidth has to be accounted for. It won't be cheap and people will need to get over paying £15 a month and complaining about a 100GB cap, we're bottlenecked against 10Gb/s links right now with 40 and 100Gb modules still prohibitively expensive.

Multiples of 10Gbit either require DWDM and expensive coloured optics or big bundles of fibre. I'm putting in another 4x10Gb bundle next month between a pair of our core routers and it's costing about £100k all told - until that starts to cost less or people pay more for their broadband, caps are here to stay.
 
Zarf said:
The post refered to in that link is by a Plusnet tech who looks after their service trials, I'd say he's pretty well placed to know what's up.
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I'm not entirely sure anybody at plusnet knows which way is up any more, they've become something of a joke both to their customers and the industry in the last few years...
 
bigredshark said:
Our users are typically high end and technically astute examples, our cheapest package is £25+VAT so we're not catering to the budget market in any form. It tallies with what industry friends say as well, users downloading over 100GB month typically make up <5% of the user-base but those that do tend to do way more than 100GB (200-300 not uncommon) - which means the other 95% are subsidizing them heavily, which makes it remarkable we haven't gone through a phase of telling them to sod off all told.
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Someone sitting running torrents all day long really isn't acceptable useage for a home connection - I don't have a problem with traffic management in those cases infact they should be throttled at peak times or given the option to pay for the bandwidth. I don't know why more ISPs don't do this.

Personally I consider ~120gig the upper end of reasonable usage for a family/multiple students, etc. with the expectation that average useage would be below that. On the basis that residential connections should be designed for a few hours of usage every day - say 6pm til 11pm as a "typical" period and that I'd expect to be able to get broadband (2MBit/s minimum) speeds at any point during that time. I wouldn't be expecting someone to use 2MBit/s average during that time but I wouldn't call it unreasonable at the upper end of the scale.

bigredshark said:
Some have said that people can watch most of this stuff on TV, if you choose to watch it online you've got to be aware there's a cost associated with it.
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Not everyone has that option - and an ISP really shouldn't be trying to make a distinction on this kinda choice for their users.
 
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Rroff said:
Not everyone has that option - and an ISP really shouldn't be trying to make a distinction on this kinda choice for their users.
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I don't think we're really making a distinction, I'm just saying that the 'oh I can't watch a hundred hours of HD video a month without exceeding my usage limit therefore my provider is evil and cheating me' argument is disingenuous. You can have a gold plated unlimited connection just as soon as you pay enough to cover the costs...
 
bigredshark said:
I don't think we're really making a distinction, I'm just saying that the 'oh I can't watch a hundred hours of HD video a month without exceeding my usage limit therefore my provider is evil and cheating me' argument is disingenuous. You can have a gold plated unlimited connection just as soon as you pay enough to cover the costs...
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The problem with BT (or one of them at least) is that just isn't an option, 100GB is the best you can get.

I kinda like the way AAISP has set things up - you make your own tariff by selecting exactly how much on or off-peak you want, as a nice touch it carrys over unused allowances and they don't clobber you if you go a bit over.

BigRed - what are your thoughts on multicasting with IPV6? Think that anything will change once we start moving over properly?
 
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Yeah, AAISP are a good example of how it can be done, but while BT/Plusnet/etc offer 'unlimited' at £15/month people won't go to them in numbers and even if they did the offering is fairly complex and best suited to a technical audience.

IPv6 is part of the problem to an extent, if we weren't busy worrying about IPv6 and masterminding implementation and migration strategy we might have had some time to look at multicast. It'll have to happen I think, however the content providers incentive has gone down as they've outsourced delivery to the big CDNs, it's the ISPs who want multicast now.

It's next on my list to seriously look at multicast and whether we can implement it in a worthwhile way. Part of the issue is so few technical people understand it and how it works (beyond the basic concept) so only big knowledgeable content houses are in a position to provide feeds, which doesn't help...

It's also only useful for so many things, it's less useful for iplayer, which needs caching closer to the edge if core usage is going to be reduced...
 
Zillio said:
now increased to 300GBs per month on the top BT packages apparently
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If that's true I might consider in in future. The extra upload could be quite a big help for work stuff. Even 2.5mbit on Be feels horribly slow compared to JANET at work (as you'd expect).
 
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