Originally Posted by Kushan (Post 35915737)

Not necessarily on your street. Think of your connection and where it goes - you have a coaxial cable coming from your house to the green box somewhere on your street, all your neighbours connect to that same green box. That green box will have it's own connection to a hub where other green boxes connect to. Depending on where you are, there might be an even bigger hub those hubs connect to and so on and so forth until you hit a backbone/link site that Virgin connects to the rest of the internet with.

If anywhere along those connections doesn't have the capacity to deal with everyone having faster speeds, it will need upgrading. So it might be that the green box on your street needs upgrading, or it might be the hub that green box connects to, or it might be somewhere further up the line.

Furthermore, the point isn't that you get full speed now, so what's the issue? The issue is if they open the floodgates and give everyone faster speeds, you won't get full speed, you'll get congestion. When enough people use enough bandwidth on your local node, they sometimes have to split it - akin to taking half the people connected to a green box and putting them on a new green box (or a new hub further up the line, etc.). Sometimes you'll even lose downstream channels as a result of this, but overall capacity is boosted all the same.

Virgin used to not care about this - they'd double everyone's speed and as a result, nobody would get that speed, everyone would just get congestion and it would get worse and worse. Never mind going from 200 to 350, your connection would drop to sub-10mbit if you were lucky. It made your connection almost unusable. Congestion is a bit like a dam busting, if you don't hit the capacity it's all gravy but as soon as you do then buffers start to bloat, packets start to drop and the whole thing falls apart.

You'd then have to wait months (or worse) for them to upgrade the area because it was all reactive and not proactive - and with everyone jumping the gun and getting mad speed boosts at once, it just crippled the network in huge areas for a long time.

As frustrating as it is waiting for the speed upgrades, it's by far the better option. It's better you get full-speed at 200Mbit now and have to wait 6 months to get boosted than to get "350Mbit" in name only but actually suffer serious congestion for 6 months.

Originally Posted by Mythica (Post 35915762)

That makes a lot of sense but it is very annoying VM offer 300Mb as standard on the VIP package yet can't deliver it to certain places. In my eyes, it shouldn't be standard until all areas can receive it.

To add to that how the heck is a paying customer supposed to know when they can upgrade to something they are paying for and how long this 'issue' will continue. It's not a very fair system in my view.

Originally Posted by General Maximus (Post 35917516)

Dude you are going to make your head explode. Give up! I can tell you now that any dates you pressure VM into giving you (and they will eventually make something up just to shut you up) aren't going to be stuck to. I have seen many other areas which have suffered serious congestion issues in the past and customers were given genuine fix times (between 3-6 months time) and the dates came and gone and when the users rang up again to say there was no improvement it is because the dates got pushed back again. Even if you do get a date out of them, I can guarantee they won't stick to it.

They will do it when they do it and it will be a nice surprise for you.

Originally Posted by Mythica (Post 35917519)

I do actually understand this but I will put as much pressure on them as I can. A date is a date which is more than I have now. I just dislike everything that is happening with this at the minute. It should be a straightforward answer and it's just turned into an argument or being ignored.

Originally Posted by vm_tech (Post 35917521)

Not quite as straightforward as you think. The fact the max you can get in your area is 200mb says to me you're running on an older CMTS. There are a lot of CMTS upgrades going on across the country. As an example in the area I work there are approx 8 headend/hubsites. To give an example of a couple, one of them was about a weeks work. New CMTS installed in spare rack space, old equipment cut over to new CMTS. Another site took not far off a year, multiple CMTS's, not enough room to house them so a complete headend rebuild. Various issues encountered on the way. I can't say for certain but I would imagine major issues at one site could have knock on effects for others. Obviously I know nothing about the area you are fed from, so I couldn't comment, but all I can say is it's not always a case of chuck a CMTS in job done unfortunately

Originally Posted by Tonydtiger (Post 35918518)

because 300 isn't available in my area

Originally Posted by Tonydtiger (Post 35918518)

it's put me down to 200

Originally Posted by vm_tech (Post 35917521)

Not quite as straightforward as you think. The fact the max you can get in your area is 200mb says to me you're running on an older CMTS. There are a lot of CMTS upgrades going on across the country. As an example in the area I work there are approx 8 headend/hubsites. To give an example of a couple, one of them was about a weeks work. New CMTS installed in spare rack space, old equipment cut over to new CMTS. Another site took not far off a year, multiple CMTS's, not enough room to house them so a complete headend rebuild. Various issues encountered on the way. I can't say for certain but I would imagine major issues at one site could have knock on effects for others. Obviously I know nothing about the area you are fed from, so I couldn't comment, but all I can say is it's not always a case of chuck a CMTS in job done unfortunately

Originally Posted by Ignitionnet (Post 35918542)

I'll pick up on this some more later but there have been some more extreme actions to get rid of older CMTS, and there are a number of areas that have other issues preventing release of >200. Now even having CCAP in place isn't enough, they want more than 16 channels available for quality reasons.

Originally Posted by ianch99 (Post 35918569)

Will these CMTS upgrades allow VM to change the down/up ratio in favour of better uploads? Most people can never max out their download speed and would trade this off for faster upload?

Originally Posted by ianch99 (Post 35918569)

Will these CMTS upgrades allow VM to change the down/up ratio in favour of better uploads? Most people can never max out their download speed and would trade this off for faster upload?

Originally Posted by vm_tech (Post 35918576)

Not instantly. But it lays the foundations. Other than stuff they've already got planned. So basically you're not gonna see a massive jump instantly. It's the just the CMTS's. It's the equipment in the field as well, bearing in mind VM is made up of many old cable companies. Each network built to different specs etc.