Quote:
Originally Posted by red502
It appears that since NTL took over Blueyonder and has been thrown together with Virgin's ADSL service, they have reconfigured their peering to the U.S.A, in order to cut costs.
This would be why peak time speeds to some servers is far worse than 6 months ago, even before any official "traffic management" kicks-in.
This is an extremely sly method for cutting bandwidth usage. It particularly affects applications like bittorrent and connections to "smaller" US websites.
The end user assumes that a slowdown is due to overloading at the server end, i.e. too many global users trying to access Youtube, so Youtube's server cannot cope...
In fact, it is often because Virgin's link and that of their agents to a particular part of the web has been squeezed.
Virgin/NTL own very little transatlantic bandwidth (according to wiki). They buy the majority of this bandwidth from other suppliers.
Although there is almost unlimited transatlantic bandwidth available, Virgin doesn't like paying for it. This has a knock-on effect, cutting bandwidth use at all points on the network and is obviously a win-win for Virgin.
Please see this very informative post by a Newsgroup supplier (Megabitz) over at Slyck.com:
http://slyck.com/forums/viewtopic.ph...hilit=#p429597
quote: "the problems with Virgin revolve around a problem where they seem to have aggregated the inbound for several sub-ISP's onto an already busy connection to the US, which has caused it to become flooded during peak times" |
I didn't find it that informative, one poster in particular said that Virgin had sacked all UK technical support in favour of offshoring.
Obviously there are issues, but the thread lacked any credible evidence that VM were being tight with their bandwidth purchasing deals to the US.
Comments from megabitz point the finger towards VM's peering connections in London, but I felt that it stopped short of totally blaming them because they didn't have sufficient evidence to back up their claims, which I think was a very mature thing to do.
That is not to say that its not VN's problem. You also have to respect megabitz up-front and honest response.