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deed02392
26-11-2007, 23:24
I was just thinking that this would be a really good idea.
Virgin could have a page, similar to their service status page, that would let users know what the network load was in particular areas. What are your thoughts on this idea? Are there any VM insiders here that could slip it into the next meeting??

Thanks

Gary L
26-11-2007, 23:31
Commercial suicide.

deed02392
26-11-2007, 23:35
Commercial suicide.

If they actually pulled out their finger and sorted out the network congestion, maybe not :cool:

In fact, I'd even go as far to say that they would get many more customers, as they would be well assured that they would get good speeds from checking the avg net cong in the area first.

Gary L
26-11-2007, 23:38
They have no money. think of something else :D

deed02392
26-11-2007, 23:41
Have no money? They've just bought a bank XD. On the home page it says they intend on focusing on Broadband? I really hope this is true... I feel like going to bed and crying every night, just thinking about the impending nationwide network crash. It makes me sick whenever I see people not getting the network speed they're paying for...

IT Lemming
26-11-2007, 23:41
Commercial suicide.

cant agree with you more !!

Mon, 26 Nov 2007 22:37:53 UTC

1st 512K took 4562 ms = 112.2 KB/sec, approx 925 Kbps, 0.9 Mbps
2nd 512K took 5610 ms = 91.3 KB/sec, approx 752 Kbps, 0.73 Mbps
3rd 512K took 3250 ms = 157.5 KB/sec, approx 1298 Kbps, 1.27 Mbps
4th 512K took 4062 ms = 126 KB/sec, approx 1038 Kbps, 1.01 Mbps

Overall Average Speed = approx 1003 Kbps, 0.98 Mbps

I can see the headlines now! Here try our new 20Mb connection, guarenteed to run at 5% for most of the time!!:D

deed02392
26-11-2007, 23:43
Well as true as it is, it's not a good thing :'(

TraxData
26-11-2007, 23:44
They have no money. think of something else :D

VM have huge amounts of money :D

deed02392
26-11-2007, 23:47
VM have huge amounts of money :D


They do, let's see it put somewhere useful! If not I might just have to become MP and upgrade this entire constituent. In fact, that's not a bad idea.

Gary L
26-11-2007, 23:47
I thought Richard Branson just bought a bank?
I've just looked on their page.
"Will we all be broke by Christmas?"
:D:D:LOL::drunk::help:

TraxData
26-11-2007, 23:47
They do, let's see it put somewhere useful! If not I might just have to become MP and upgrade this entire constituent. In fact, that's not a bad idea.

They are, they are putting a huge amount of money to rollout docsis3, had you thought about that?

deed02392
26-11-2007, 23:51
What is docsis3, and where can we keep up to date on the goings on of the network maintenance?

TraxData
26-11-2007, 23:55
What is docsis3, and where can we keep up to date on the goings on of the network maintenance?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOCSIS

TrevorHannant
27-11-2007, 00:19
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOCSIS

Nice speeds in Singapore - 100Mbps down, 2,000kbps up for around £41.50pm (at today's rates):

http://www.starhub.com/portal/site/Online/menuitem.935dac8c897c3fb7eaaf3b608324a5a0/?vgnextoid=333928043c6ef010VgnVCM100000464114acRCR D

Bonglet
27-11-2007, 04:06
The Earliest virgin will throw any cash at the network is after april the end of the current financial year they have no money for upgrades or maintainance it all got blew on there advertising campaign for this year, if anyone has some spare change throw it vm's way or just keep phoning about slow speeds to pay for next years docsis3 upgrade sometime after april :P.

Why do people say virgin media are buying a bank got nothing to do with them all they are doing is licensing the name Virgin from main shareholder richard *im an ass in the pocket of american money men* branson, the company is the same old people with the same old rip off ideas (i.e capping and price increases for less service)

Sirius
27-11-2007, 07:53
VM have huge amounts of money :D

And then we all woke up and smelt the coffee :rolleyes:

progers
27-11-2007, 09:18
Whenever I have a problem, it never appears on the status page, so perhaps I can compose the page for Virgin:

"NETWORK CONGESTION STATUS"

NO CONGESTION

Shouldn't cost more that 5p to set up LOL :)

xspeedyx
27-11-2007, 09:51
The Earliest virgin will throw any cash at the network is after april the end of the current financial year they have no money for upgrades or maintainance it all got blew on there advertising campaign for this year, if anyone has some spare change throw it vm's way or just keep phoning about slow speeds to pay for next years docsis3 upgrade sometime after april :P.

Why do people say virgin media are buying a bank got nothing to do with them all they are doing is licensing the name Virgin from main shareholder richard *im an ass in the pocket of american money men* branson, the company is the same old people with the same old rip off ideas (i.e capping and price increases for less service)

correction he is isnt vm biggest shareholder

ultimate
27-11-2007, 10:05
The question I want to ask is, will we have enough speed to load the congestion page in the first place !!!

Stuart
27-11-2007, 10:55
Have no money? They've just bought a bank XD.


That's Virgin, not Virgin Media.

NTL/Telewest merged and then using shares in the merged company, bought Virgin Mobile and a licence to use the Virgin name.

Richard Branson is a shareholder in the merged company, but he is not the owner.

PeteTheMusicGuy
27-11-2007, 16:49
It's a great idea but I can't see them doing it

TimIgoe
27-11-2007, 17:22
they will already have masses of network monitoring internally (somewhere) - some ISPs like to publish it - htis is all well and good if the network as a whole works perfectly. If there are pockets of it helps users to see this, but if there is a network wide problem it only leads to bad publicity.

A while back, I wrote a monitoring system for a network I used to help manage, made diagnosing problems much easier. From a users point of view, it'd certainly be interesting to see.

I can't see them doing it myself.

deed02392
27-11-2007, 19:12
What did your monitoring system monitor? Sorry I'm curious :P

TimIgoe
27-11-2007, 19:52
It monitored the entire network I was managing - switching hardware, servers, cpu / memory usage, printers - the works :)

Sirius
27-11-2007, 19:55
I was just thinking that this would be a really good idea.
Virgin could have a page, similar to their service status page, that would let users know what the network load was in particular areas. What are your thoughts on this idea? Are there any VM insiders here that could slip it into the next meeting??

Thanks

Must admit you have made me :rofl::rofl: with this suggestion, For them to be able to offer this they would have to spend money :shocked:

TimIgoe
27-11-2007, 19:56
tbh, it'd require very little spending - i bet the monitoring systems are already in place

it'd just need somewhere to bring it all together into a useful report :)

deed02392
27-11-2007, 23:08
tbh, it'd require very little spending - i bet the monitoring systems are already in place

it'd just need somewhere to bring it all together into a useful report :)

Exactly :p:

I do suppose though, that he means it would require spending, in that they're so congested the publicity would be terrible. So they would need to pay to fully upgrade so it never reported it was bad...

slowcoach
28-11-2007, 00:17
Congested sounds more polite but I think constipated is more apt.

Hugh
28-11-2007, 18:19
It monitored the entire network I was managing - switching hardware, servers, cpu / memory usage, printers - the works :)
I have just bought my Comms team SolarWinds (http://www.solarwinds.co.uk/products/) - cheap as chips and very useful (well, they like it).

TimIgoe
28-11-2007, 18:30
I've tried using MRTG (very basic SNMP graphing) - basic and a bit awkward to set up
Cacti (http://www.cacti.net/) which si a more advanced one - easy to use, has a few problems with certain devices
Nagios (http://www.nagios.org/) - powerful, but complex to configure.

So instead, I made my own solution using SNMP monitoring what I wanted and wrote a PHP Graphing system for the data that I recorded.

BBKing
28-11-2007, 18:33
So instead, I made my own solution using SNMP monitoring what I wanted and wrote a PHP Graphing system for the data that I recorded.

You'd be surprised how close this is to what we use. Don't knock it, it's cheap and it works and you can tinker with it (vital since the network changes so often).

deed02392
28-11-2007, 18:37
Hopefully I'll be able to do similar things... when I grow up!

TimIgoe
28-11-2007, 18:43
You'd be surprised how close this is to what we use. Don't knock it, it's cheap and it works and you can tinker with it (vital since the network changes so often).

By 'We' are you referring to VM?

---------- Post added at 17:43 ---------- Previous post was at 17:43 ----------

And I wasn't knocking it - i know how powerful it can be (having been there, seen it, done it, got the t-shirt etc)

BBKing
28-11-2007, 19:24
By 'We' are you referring to VM?

Yes.

And I wasn't knocking it - i know how powerful it can be (having been there, seen it, done it, got the t-shirt etc)

Quite, but in a corporate IT department used to forking over large sums to reputable private companies (for a given definition of 'reputable' - using acronyms with the word 'Enterprise' in them seems to count), trying to convince them that what you've lashed up out of Perl, PHP, MySQL and a few Unix boxes is actually *better* is, um, challenging. The proof, as ever, is in the eating, there are legitimate concerns around support and stuff - the classic vital-server-under-a-desk-guy-left-three-months-ago scenario needs to be avoided.

TimIgoe
28-11-2007, 19:29
lol - yeah - server under a desk issue can be a problem.

Personally, I'm a fan of 'self made' solutions that are tailored to the requirements and usage that they are to be for rather than going for a generic off the shelf solution that 'does ok' but not great. Look how many screwups the big 'enterprises' have made when it comes to government related IT solutions - and the overall cost to the tax payer, prime example of enterprise isn't always best.

Stuart
28-11-2007, 19:51
Quite, but in a corporate IT department used to forking over large sums to reputable private companies (for a given definition of 'reputable' - using acronyms with the word 'Enterprise' in them seems to count)

True. In my experience if a company manages to make a sentence using the words "Enterprise", "Intranet","NAS" (well, acronym) and "virtualization" (with the American spelling), most IT managers would be salivating..


, trying to convince them that what you've lashed up out of Perl, PHP, MySQL and a few Unix boxes is actually *better* is, um, challenging. The proof, as ever, is in the eating, there are legitimate concerns around support and stuff - the classic vital-server-under-a-desk-guy-left-three-months-ago scenario needs to be avoided.

That's actually a problem we have. We design most of our own systems, but also use a lot of short term employees (< 1 year). As such, from time to time, we end up with a situation where someone has designed a brilliant app or system, then they leave and someone needs something changed, so some poor sap gets the job of wading through reams of code that he/she may or may not understand just to bolt on an extra feature. Because, of course, we never seem to document any of our code or designs.

More often than not, we have ended up waiting until we need to add/change more than one thing and redesigining/rewriting the App or system in question.

Thankfully now, we are in a position where most of the stuff we use is written by people who are on permanent contracts, so are less likely to leave.

Apart from one website, which needs redesigning.

BBKing
28-11-2007, 20:02
May I suggest subversion and using common modular stuff like SOAP calls (rather than, say, embedding database access code in everything)? Document your interfaces and the rest is OK, IMHO.

Stuart
28-11-2007, 20:06
May I suggest subversion and using common modular stuff like SOAP calls (rather than, say, embedding database access code in everything)? Document your interfaces and the rest is OK, IMHO.

Where we do redesign systems, we do try and keep things modular.

386
28-11-2007, 22:31
I get 20 per cent packet loss, any time of the day.

I dont understand how these thieves can get away with this, they promised me a 20mb connection and i get like 400 kb/s on the testyourspeed website.

Surely they are like breaking some law, i mean, its corrupt. They sell us something-and we dont receive it. Any contract is meant to be fair, why do we put up for this crap...everyone on this forum seems to be having similiar problems due to network congestion. Maybe VM should put their hands in their pocket and actually install/purchase the bandwidth which they have designated to each customer instead of cutting corners. I spoke to a sales agent just the other day on a main street in the town centre, just to see if I could catch him out, I gave him my postcode and he said "Yes! you can have 20mb net in your area, its the best you will find". Professional Con men tbh.