Thread: 350M Upstream congestion
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Old 12-12-2017, 13:18   #20
Kushan
FORMER Virgin Media Staff
 
Join Date: Dec 2010
Location: Warrington
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Re: Upstream congestion

Quote:
Originally Posted by kalleh View Post
I was told by the pretty well educated guy on VM Business that my area was 96% utilised and that wasn't quite hitting the target.
That's not quite how they measure utilisation. I can almost guarantee that no area is 96% utilised because % utilised by itself is almost meaningless.

96% of the total capacity being used would either be completely unusable as that remaining 4% would be whatever's left over out of hours and at peak times congestion would be abysmal OR 96% peak capacity would be absolutely fine because everyone's getting full speed and there's still 4% of capacity left for growth.

Rather, "96%" needs to be qualified with another stat - the time it's at 96% for. Hitting 96% for 5hours+ might be cause for concern, but hitting 96% peak for a few mins is fine. There's always going to be times when all bandwidth is being used - think peak times when a major event is happening, like the world cup. It's generally accepted that you cannot expect Virgin to provision enough capacity for 100% of customers to get 100% of their speed at all times - that's just far too expensive to do. Instead, virgin (And other ISP's) allocate enough capacity so that the majority of the time, people get the speeds they pay for. It's hitting that balance between cost (to you and Virgin) and availability that's tricky.

Years ago, in the bad old days, it was something like 98% capacity used for greater than 90% of the time before Virgin would upgrade the area. When I worked there, it was something like >95% usage for >10% of the time in a 7 day period was when it got logged. Over time, they got more and more proactive with the stats but I don't know what they are today.

It's also worth pointing out that just because an area hit those thresholds doesn't mean it would get scheduled in, just that the ticket would get raised. Areas were prioritised based on budgets and need, i.e. the worst areas got fixed first or the most customers got fixed for the best bang/buck.
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