Your broadband speed - post here

[Redroth]

Sat around waiting for the Virgin speed upgrade to hit me, Not enjoying the reliability of virgin at this time however understand that due to this upgrade its not going to be rock solid like it used to be!

[csgohan4]

Virgin now have very little in the way of traffic management; it only affects upload and it's nowhere near as draconian as it once was.

However, traffic management often serves a purpose to encourage people to do their bulk downloads at a time when the network will be less congested, and means people constantly saturating the network will have less of an impact on everyone else. Consequently, I've noticed some fairly severe peak-time congestion on Virgin that I hadn't noticed previously, so rather than just affecting the outliers, the congestion now affects everyone on the node.

What you're experiencing on BT may simply be congestion of some sort, not necessarily BT just trying to annoy you. I have friends on BT FTTC and they claim nothing of the sort. There are ways to get a rough idea which it may be: throttling will generally give you a fairly flat download speed when graphed, and ping time similar to off-peak. Congestion OTOH generally gives a more erratic download speed and often higher ping, although the latter is also related to how the ISP has QoS set up; ICMP may be prioritised or put at the back of the queue, so it's not a reliable way of testing.

News flash: ALL ISPs, or any large network for that matter, will have some form of QoS implemented to prevent catastrophic problems under conditions like link saturation. Some ISPs may be open about it (e.g. Plusnet), others may not mention it, but there's no getting away from it, whether or not you have an UNLIMITED*** plan. It's just the nature of providing residential broadband at a reasonable cost i.e. at some point along the line you will be sharing bandwidth with other users. If you want guaranteed bandwidth in the ISP's network, you pay about £1000 per month plus installation charges for a leased line. But then there's still no guarantee the network you're downloading from won't be congested.

Plusnet actually give a fairly good description of it, and why it is necessary. But don't kid yourself into thinking any residential ISP is free of it, just because they're not open about it. It's a combination of accepting you're not actually paying for a constant speed, and a bit of luck to find an ISP that might be less congested in your area.

Something else to bear in mind - one cause of speed issues on FTTC is crosstalk, which would affect any ISP using that infrastructure i.e. anyone providing FTTC, so it might be worth investigating before switching and tying yourself into another contract.

From my own research on the Sky user forums and a friend who works in the fibre broandband speciality, when the network gets busy or is peak time, Sky will send a command to their own SR102 router/modems to slow the speed residential side. This helps with congestion at the cost of user speed.

However alot of people can circumvent this by using their own Modem/ router and using specic software to get their username and password which Sky won't give to you and are adament you should use their own router.

BT for example has no such thing and you can use another router, however the BT open reach modem you cannot do without, I suspect this could be the same in terms of remote management.

This is of course all speculation and my sources could be wrong. Either way Sky's router is pants and I have every intention of replacing it when I get it.

[watercooled]

I'm not aware of that method of throttling with Sky, but it may be the case. On the Virgin DOCSIS network for example, your modem pulls connection information including traffic rates; everyone connected to a VM node will get the same RF signal at their modem (crypto is used to isolate clients and ensure authenticity of config stats), and in the case of the full 8 bonded downstream QAM-256 channels the VMDG480 (Superhub 1) is capable of, it's technically able to download at just over 400Mb/s (6.952megasymbols/sec x 8 bits per symbol for QAM256 x 8 channels). Of course it's not as simple as that when you consider congestion because of how many people will actually be sharing those channels and hence the bandwidth, but my point is, when you sign up for a package, it's just a case of sending a different config to the modem.

However, when it comes to peak time throttling (at least when they used to do it), that would happen on the CMTS end rather than the modem.

Technically when it comes to xDSL, for example FTTC (Infinity), sync speeds are also capped at 80/20, even though some shorter lines would be able to sync higher than that. Although of course the method by which this 'cap' works is quite different to cable. On top of this, ISPs may implement per-user QoS to ensure, for example, a file download doesn't cause VoIP or games to suffer.

You actually can use something other than the Openreach modem. Like replacing the Sky router, it's not openly acknowledged, but it's doable, and you can even get integrated VDSL2 modem-routers like were common with ADSL2.

Edit: This is another good explanation by Plusnet on why TM is used: http://community.plus.net/blog/2012/...affic-managed/

[glomper99]

BT Infinity 38Mb/s

[csgohan4]

I'm not aware of that method of throttling with Sky, but it may be the case. On the Virgin DOCSIS network for example, your modem pulls connection information including traffic rates; everyone connected to a VM node will get the same RF signal at their modem (crypto is used to isolate clients and ensure authenticity of config stats), and in the case of the full 8 bonded downstream QAM-256 channels the VMDG480 (Superhub 1) is capable of, it's technically able to download at just over 400Mb/s (6.952megasymbols/sec x 8 bits per symbol for QAM256 x 8 channels). Of course it's not as simple as that when you consider congestion because of how many people will actually be sharing those channels and hence the bandwidth, but my point is, when you sign up for a package, it's just a case of sending a different config to the modem.

However, when it comes to peak time throttling (at least when they used to do it), that would happen on the CMTS end rather than the modem.

Technically when it comes to xDSL, for example FTTC (Infinity), sync speeds are also capped at 80/20, even though some shorter lines would be able to sync higher than that. Although of course the method by which this 'cap' works is quite different to cable. On top of this, ISPs may implement per-user QoS to ensure, for example, a file download doesn't cause VoIP or games to suffer.

You actually can use something other than the Openreach modem. Like replacing the Sky router, it's not openly acknowledged, but it's doable, and you can even get integrated VDSL2 modem-routers like were common with ADSL2.

Edit: This is another good explanation by Plusnet on why TM is used: http://community.plus.net/blog/2012/...affic-managed/

In addition, I wonder why Sky are insistent on using their hardware on connecting to their Fibre network, they make it difficult that only medium users and above are able to set up their own 3rd party hardware. It makes what information I have slightly more plausible.

They are also falling behind on their rival in terms of router quality, Look at BT and their AC router, miles better.

[watercooled]

I know with ADSL2, Sky LLU switched to MER instead of PPPoA which pretty much everyone else used, and used the MAC address to authenticate. IIRC you would need a router which supported MER and could spoof the MAC address of the provided one, in order to authenticate successfully.

As for why they did it, I'm not sure. I'm not aware of any real advantages to using MER, but as you say it did have the effect of preventing third-party routers from working. Again, I don't know why they would do that besides speculation. One reason could be to allow some control over connections, but this should be possible on the BRAS anyway, regardless of which router is used. Another reason could be to ensure router firmware is kept up to date, to prevent stuff like this and this from happening with unpatched routers.

As for non-LLU connections, they still supported PPPoA AFAIK, since they were using the BTW infrastructure.

I'm not sure what the deal is with FTTC though; they probably still use MER and I think Sky only offer it in LLU locations so it would affect all users.

[csgohan4]

I know with ADSL2, Sky LLU switched to MER instead of PPPoA which pretty much everyone else used, and used the MAC address to authenticate. IIRC you would need a router which supported MER and could spoof the MAC address of the provided one, in order to authenticate successfully.

As for why they did it, I'm not sure. I'm not aware of any real advantages to using MER, but as you say it did have the effect of preventing third-party routers from working. Again, I don't know why they would do that besides speculation. One reason could be to allow some control over connections, but this should be possible on the BRAS anyway, regardless of which router is used. Another reason could be to ensure router firmware is kept up to date, to prevent stuff like this and this from happening with unpatched routers.

As for non-LLU connections, they still supported PPPoA AFAIK, since they were using the BTW infrastructure.

I'm not sure what the deal is with FTTC though; they probably still use MER and I think Sky only offer it in LLU locations so it would affect all users.

I think your right about the exploits and keeping a modem up to date. However they should have given the consumer the choice of whether to stick with their idiot proof Modem/router or for the more tech geeks to use their own which are far superior than Sky are peddling.

[SkullyJR]

Can't wait to get Fibre.

[watercooled]

I think your right about the exploits and keeping a modem up to date. However they should have given the consumer the choice of whether to stick with their idiot proof Modem/router or for the more tech geeks to use their own which are far superior than Sky are peddling.

Oh I totally agree, I'm was just speculating what their reasons might be.

[csgohan4]

Once I have gone fibre I can't go back

[TheDutyPaid]

I was quoted to get and pay for 75/19 I am happy as I can be :-D

[tfboy]

As I was having trouble with my home theatre receiver not being able to stream tonight, I did a test on my PC.


I'm on VM which should provide 60Mb/3Mb, so all is fine.

For giggles, I ran it on my Linode:

Cannot complain there either!

[Macadee]

Just upgraded to VM 152Mb

[sqwerty]

I'm on Virgin 152 but "only" ever get around 90-100mbps on various different test sites. Currently connected to the SuperHub in modem mode using a DIR-615 router (wired). Wondering what the problem may be...

[Macadee]

I'm on Virgin 152 but "only" ever get around 90-100mbps on various different test sites. Currently connected to the SuperHub in modem mode using a DIR-615 router (wired). Wondering what the problem may be...

Try connecting directly into the superhub, mine drops to high 90s going through a gigabit switch before the PC.

[Zhaix]

Getting around 20Mbs per second download speed from Virgin Media: