

Why you'll never see 200Mbps from a 200Mbps 'Net connection - pert
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/05/why-your-cable-internet-connection-gets-slow.ars

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CalmQuiet
Seems to be just a marketingn ploy by Virgin... like a manufacturer of auto
tires saying, "tested to 400 mph." :/

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ZeroGravitas
Not really, most of that post is FUD from cable competitors in the US (ADSL
and fibre-to-the-home providers). I'm not sure how much of it even applies to
Virgin Media as their network has a great deal of fibre-optics in it, though
not the last mile.

The part about home equipment, where the falling standards of Ars journalism
really shows, is just restating "640K is enough for anyone" repeatedly, to the
point of absurdity. It appears that to actually have a computer connected
physically to the internet via ethernet is some wacky use case and the very
thought of providing internet access faster than an 11b wireless router is
crazy talk.

In the UK it is the ADSL providers that market misleadingly, they all use
weaselly "up to X Mbp/s" language, and for maximum speed you need to be
physically located near to the exchange, it drops the further away you are.

Virgin Media have consistently provided whatever you pay for, even as it has
increased from less than 1Mbps to 2, 5, 10, 20 and now as we speak 50Mbp/s is
in the middle of deployment. I see no reason for their talked about 100 and
200 Mbp/s rollouts to be any different.

A bigger issues is when can they roll them out to the whole country as they
always talk about the next big step publicly before having to deal with the
very real problem of bringing the whole network up to the level neeeded. By
the time it arrives there will be some who can take advantage of it, those who
can't or don't want to will be able to pay less for lower tiers of service,
generally the stick to three tiers and users on the bottom tier gets bumped up
for free, which probably has a big impact on usage too depending on the ratio
of users on different plans.

That's not to say Virgin don't have various other things you could complain
about but it seems unfair to complain about misleading speed numbers when that
is something that (at least from a UK perspective) they are on the right side
of.

~~~
pert
I think you're very lucky if you're not seeing any contention at peak times.
In highly populated areas (central Edinburgh and Livingston in my personal
experience), there is huge congestion on the local loop at peak times.

I've not got any bandwidth test results to show this but a friend of mine in
Edinburgh does log ping times:

<http://cress.dom0.org/cgi-bin/smokeping.cgi?target=DSL>

The contention at evenings and weekends is very obvious from these graphs.

------
pert
This also has some relevance to this post:

The Internet sky really is falling (networkworld.com)

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=597699>

