Re: Re: Cable modem

["Phil Harris" <phil@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

> --- In ukha_d@xxxxxxx, "Phil Harris" <phil@...>
wrote:
>>
>> > Actually on cable you should usually get the quoted speed. 
In the
>> > pastI've often downloaded large files at the full 10Mbps.
>>
>> Only in the same way that on ADSL you should get the quoted speed
> ... i.e.
>> under ideal circumstances such as minimal contention, good signal
> quality
>> etc.
>
> Signal quality is much less of a problem for VM's network, HFC is
> expensive cabling, but lovely.
>
>> You're still sharing bandwidth back from the cabinet to the ISPs
hub.
>
> Not really - no cables and very few UBRs are 'black' (at their limit
> at peak times), and these have their load 'split' (reseg'd) pretty
> quickly.
>
> No part of the VM network above the cable is ever more than 40% busy,
> (for redundancy) until it goes off to transit or peering provider(s),
> and/or the source of the content itself :-(
>
> Dom

I know I'm on one of the old C&W sections of the network and we're
definitely the poor relation where we are ... I don't know whether it has
changed since but for ages I was asking why I couldn't get caller ID on my
phoneline and it was because the old C&W telco switches didn't have
that
firmware on them and NTL wouldn't pay for the updates.

As for data rates, I can get my full 10mbits/sec down from places like
Microsoft at times (sometimes even a bit more) but I have to say that any
kind of bittorrent usage absolutely canes my connection and runs obscenely
slowly (100 - 120kbytes/sec tops usually) and is almost guaranteed to lock
up my cablemodem after maybe 12 hours or so requiring a power cycle to
unfreeze it. (Can't get my modem changed though as "It's not a modem
fault.")

I'm moving house at the moment so lets see if the next ISP is any better
or worse. ;-)

Phil