View Full Version : NTL/Telewest - Business Broadband questions
Hi,
I currently have a 20mb residential line which I use for working from home fairly frequently. The problems I have had in my area (Manchester 28) is due I think to the 'shaping' software the Virgin run. I can't host Skype conversations with more than one person as the call slowly degrades until they cant hear me or each other. If I am part of a group call hosted by another person it all works fine. I am guessing that this is due to Skype working in a similar fashion to file sharing programs, and the Virgin software throttling it.
Anyhow, I contacted NTL:Telewest and asked about the differences on their Business packages. I was told that there was no shaping software on Business Broadband, and that contention ratios were kept lower, other than that you get a fixed IP. I made the mistake of saying I had a fixed IP on my residential for the last 7 years, sure enough the day after the call that changed, should have kept my mouth shut.
When the engineer came to do a survey this morning he told me there was no difference in the connections of Business and Commercial at the switch box on my road. This left me wondering, what are the differences? Am I taking a 10mb speed hit just for the fixed IP? or are there some other differences there? Can anyone let me know if its worth going ahead with this?
Thanks and sorry for the ramble.
I had residential for a few months before I went with the business line..
I will admit to no STM (but I only ever download early in the morning or late at night and only ever got STM'd once on residential)
The sticky IP's have been OK apart from one change when the modem decided to lock itself up on the DHCP side and the TS reset the account)
Ping times are better and have dropped from 20ms to 11 ms for most UK sites (probably due to the contention)
No congestion but I do live in a small village
Remember that Business 20Mb currently has no fixed IP's and is quoted to have STM
10Mb/4Mb is again quoted to get STM by the end of the year (my contract is up then so will decide what to do at that point in time)
The price does come with a free phone line BUT there is no call package on this line
The IP's are not fixed but sticky, they can change due to a fault or reseg.
The contract is 2 years not 1 year
And the install fee's are a lot/lot higher (also a one off £10 for the fixed IP's (either 1 or 5))
I mainly got it for the sticky Ip and better upload (769Kb instead of 512Kb) as I run a web/mail server at home..
Thanks for your reply :) I feel a little more comfortable, though I still don't understand how the local contention ratios are better when they are routed though the same switches at the Cable exchange box (or so I was told by the engineer).
weesteev
17-02-2009, 11:44
Remember Kymmy, the residential service and business have the same upload speed. Business will benefit from lower contention and better STM rules compared to residential.
As for how its connected, your local connections in the cabinet are all the same as residential, its all the same technology, the difference is when your signal gets to the headend. Instead of being on a residential broadband downstream channel you will have a dedicated business channel so there will be a lot less saturation and better ping times (theoretically).
Business also has a better faults SLA (on paper) than residential, but ironically its the same Virgin Media engineers who attend Small/Medium business faults and installs.
Hope this helps.
Remember Kymmy, the residential service and business have the same upload speed.
Business also has a better faults SLA (on paper) than residential, but ironically its the same Virgin Media engineers who attend Small/Medium business faults and installs.
The SLA on business BB is the same as residential, it's only the phone that has the better SLA..
As for UPLOAD SPEED...residential 10Mb is 512Kb but Business is 769Kb..How is that the same??
Ignitionnet
17-02-2009, 11:53
Remember Kymmy, the residential service and business have the same upload speed. Business will benefit from lower contention and better STM rules compared to residential.
Business have higher upload than residential, 769kbps on 10Mbit (typo on the DOCSIS configurator I wonder :) ) and 1Mbit on 20Mbit compared with 512k and 768k respectively on residential.
The lower contention is a total misnomer as all the visible contention on the VM network is at the access / cable level, so a business customer in a congested area will suffer every bit as much as residential customers the bonus being that they tend to be about in the day time so don't see the times when the networks are saturated apart from in extremely bad cases.
If you use a 20Mbit business service on a downstream where there's 38Mbit of bandwidth and residential customers are only leaving 10Mbit available they won't be pushed aside to supply the business customer. The whole contention thing is more of a selling point.. kinda like the static IP address thing :angel:
As for how its connected, your local connections in the cabinet are all the same as residential, its all the same technology, the difference is when your signal gets to the headend. Instead of being on a residential broadband downstream channel you will have a dedicated business channel so there will be a lot less saturation and better ping times (theoretically).
How exactly does the headend know which are residential and business broadband connections when both use the same IP scopes? There is certainly no dedicated business downstream / upstream nor is there any guarantee of better service on the business broadband service at the cable level. If business used different IP addressing from residential you could certainly play with QoS after the CMTS but at very least on ex-ntl that doesn't happen and certainly neither network guarantees business bandwidth from the CMTS to the modem, business services degrade in the same manner as residential on an overloaded MAC domain.
weesteev
17-02-2009, 12:06
Business have higher upload than residential, 769kbps on 10Mbit (typo on the DOCSIS configurator I wonder :) ) and 1Mbit on 20Mbit compared with 512k and 768k respectively on residential.
The lower contention is a total misnomer as all the visible contention on the VM network is at the access / cable level, so a business customer in a congested area will suffer every bit as much as residential customers the bonus being that they tend to be about in the day time so don't see the times when the networks are saturated apart from in extremely bad cases.
If you use a 20Mbit business service on a downstream where there's 38Mbit of bandwidth and residential customers are only leaving 10Mbit available they won't be pushed aside to supply the business customer. The whole contention thing is more of a selling point.. kinda like the static IP address thing :angel:
How exactly does the headend know which are residential and business broadband connections when both use the same IP scopes? There is certainly no dedicated business downstream / upstream nor is there any guarantee of better service on the business broadband service at the cable level. If business used different IP addressing from residential you could certainly play with QoS after the CMTS but at very least on ex-ntl that doesn't happen and certainly neither network guarantees business bandwidth from the CMTS to the modem, business services degrade in the same manner as residential on an overloaded MAC domain.
But modems arent addressed on the CMTS by IP address its by MAC address, the IP is assigned by the CMTS to an active modem and leased for a set period of time. Modems can then be seperated into channels depending upon the business contract. If there are no "dedicated" channels then business customers tend to be placed in the quietest downstream channel available (although in some areas there can still be issues I would imagine).
Didnt realise that the 20mb is now 1mb upstream, nice one! Still the difference from 768Kb on the residential service... is it worth £50 per month when you can now get 50Mb ? Makes for an interesting discussion!
Ignitionnet
17-02-2009, 12:17
But modems arent addressed on the CMTS by IP address its by MAC address, the IP is assigned by the CMTS to an active modem and leased for a set period of time. Modems can then be seperated into channels depending upon the business contract. If there are no "dedicated" channels then business customers tend to be placed in the quietest downstream channel available (although in some areas there can still be issues I would imagine).
Didnt realise that the 20mb is now 1mb upstream, nice one! Still the difference from 768Kb on the residential service... is it worth £50 per month when you can now get 50Mb ? Makes for an interesting discussion!
How are business customers placed in the quietest downstream channel available when it's statically mapped according to which physical port or pair of ports on a dual DOCSIS node they are connected to via their fibre optic node? Dual DOCSIS downstreams are balanced dynamically by the CMTS so no chance of a business modem being on the quietest one.
Modems are addressed by MAC address, however customer PCs, which would be the things requiring the QoS, are not. QoS outside of the DOCSIS layer does not work on MAC address it works on IP so you cannot guarantee service based on MAC address unless you use some of the advanced QoS / CoS functionality of DOCSIS for traffic marking, which VM can't as they still use DOCSIS 1.0.
Business use the same IP scopes as residential so it would not be possible to differentiate based on IP address. The IP leases are, as you know, requested and come from the same pool as residential just placed on an extremely long lease time, and no further changes are made beyond the DHCP parameters being changed. No per-CMTS configuration is present for each business customer on there.
Have a look at the config of a VXR that BADGER confirms has business customers on it, you'll see nothing of any interest. Also check out the DOCSIS config files, you should see that all the business config contains that's different from the residential ones is a higher max-cpe value and higher upstream rate cap.
I can confirm that both residential and business customers are sharing same UBRs although contention ratio tends to be 12:1 for business customers. Theres 40 hour SLA - 5 working days and thats for business customers!!! "Fixed" IP is not really fixed, its bound to your CPE MAC address therefore if you swap your router/ nic IP will change.
CMTS does not assign IPs, Linux box bihind it does.
"Fixed" IP is not really fixed, its bound to your CPE MAC address therefore if you swap your router/ nic IP will change.
But as you can release/rebind the macs it means that even if you do swap PC's you can still reclaim the IP
Yes you can, but then you'd have to call through to business faults and as i previously said wait 5 working days for this to be resolved, it doesnt always take that long (btw cable bb is lowest priority)... Good thing about business bb is that you will get a callback withing 2 hours of raising the fault :P
Ignitionnet
17-02-2009, 20:17
I can confirm that both residential and business customers are sharing same UBRs although contention ratio tends to be 12:1 for business customers. Theres 40 hour SLA - 5 working days and thats for business customers!!! "Fixed" IP is not really fixed, its bound to your CPE MAC address therefore if you swap your router/ nic IP will change.
CMTS does not assign IPs, Linux box bihind it does.
Solaris box sir, and I think you missed a zero out of the 12:1. ;)
lool, well ok it might actually be solaris, last time i spoke to inmc they said it was freebsd ;) when i say 12:1 i mean the green cab.
Yes you can, but then you'd have to call through to business faults and as i previously said wait 5 working days for this to be resolved, it doesnt always take that long (btw cable bb is lowest priority)... Good thing about business bb is that you will get a callback withing 2 hours of raising the fault :P
If this was in response to the bind/rebind of IP's to Mac then why the hell would we have to call business faults??
Ignitionnet
17-02-2009, 21:48
lool, well ok it might actually be solaris, last time i spoke to inmc they said it was freebsd ;) when i say 12:1 i mean the green cab.
What are the green cabs to do with contention ratios sir, there's no intelligence in the cabinets at all just RF / optical kit?
Have the boys come to visit after you pasted your own client IP address earlier, and how's ntl:Telewest Peterborough Business treating you? ;)
heh i did not pass any private information if thats what you mean(my ip must of changed 100 times by now ;) :P its been fairly quite, touch wood :D
If this was in response to the bind/rebind of IP's to Mac then why the hell would we have to call business faults??
For reference:
A business account holder (on an NTL connection, not sure about Telewest) does not need business faults to bind/release a sticky IP to a MAC address. This can be done via the members services website.
ccarmock
21-02-2009, 19:10
I am a business customer in an ex-Telewest area. In ex-Telewest areas you can only have a sigle fixed IP address, and have to pay a £10 monthly charge for it.
However another difference is the fixed IP addresses int his case *do* come from a different DHCP scope, reflected by a differing reverse DNS entry format for these scopes.
In my case this is of the form: host-xx-xx-xx-xx.static.telewest.net
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