Where is the congestion really?

[TayUK]

Could somebody tell me where exactly is the choke point that requires VM to have STM in place?

Is it at the street level?
Is it at the Exchange (or whatever the VM equiv is) ?
Is it at the breakout points to the net ?

The reason I ask is that I still get crap speeds in the evening even with all this STM in place, wheres the benefits of it? Or are they simply using STM to get more punters on the same wire?.

If the issue is at the street level how is applying STM to the whole network fixing the problem? are they over subscribed everywhere?

If the issue is at the breakout points why do they run a mirror for Ubuntu still (Plus god knows what else) ? Surely that gets hammered chewing up "our" valuable bandwidth?

I'm really interested in the answers cuz I'm fed up with reading about unlimited, unmetered and fair use policies. VM with their Fibre, ADSL2+ speeds blah blah. Its ISP's are hard done by this and that, users are bad m'kay...etc

As far as I am concerned ISP's have to balance heavy users against average and low users..

Do hospitals discriminate against bigger than average patients? Do airlines stop short of destinations because they have a bunch of Fijians on board instead of Joe average?

I'm honestly curious.

[xspeedyx]

The problem is at UBR level and too many users are on the same card/port and as I understand each cards port have certain bandwidth and once there is too much bandwidth been transmitted then you get ****ed speeds

[TayUK]

The problem is at UBR level and too many users are on the same card/port and as I understand each cards port have certain bandwidth and once there is too much bandwidth been transmitted then you get ****ed speeds

Thanks for that.

I presume thats the cable equiv of an exchange then?.

So its a combination of contention (Which we'll never be told) and downloaders (This is the easy way out for VM).

Anybody on a lower level of cable service upgrading to a higher level will:

1. Make the service worse in effect
2. Not improve their own speed issues

50Mb service will presumably involve the upgrading of UBR's.

thanks