Techie help needed

[worms]

Coming back to the broadband problem, it sounds very similar to the one time I hit the "fair use policy". Speeds automatically slow for the rest of the day but are reset at midnight. Since it all happens automatically, Bangalore has no way of knowing that this is the problem.

 

[Nigel Watts]

And on the rugs thing - what do you think about this one for your front room from John Lewis?

Colours are great but LadyA has rasied my sights to a city carpet. At JL in Oxford street and Liberty's these tend to be several thousand for a twelve footer, but auction prices - even at Christies - seem much lower.

 

[LadyArowana]

Colours are great but LadyA has rasied my sights to a city carpet.

Sorry, I usually attach a disclaimer to any shopping advice along the lines that I cannot be held responsible for any damage resulting to the bank account. To compensate I am very frugal in other areas of life, which you will understand if you read the comments one of my friends left in another place!

 

[AMc]

Certainly most ISP's will allow a contention ratio of up to 50, unless you have a special exclusive contract with them (which is considerably more costly). And as I said a couple of times above, the youngster's bandwidth hogging was almost certainly a factor.

BT wholesale ADSL provide most connections regardless of who you have on your contract. They used to offer a maximum contention of 50:1 for consumer lines and 20:1 for business lines (which were more expensive). It might have changed recently but I doubt it.

The fair use bandwidth limiting is usually applied to the downstream - to prevent people downloading movies etc. hogging bandwidth from everyone else and to limit the cost of data transfer to the ISP (which they care about much more). Upstream is generally much lower capacity to begin with and tends to be more resilient to changes in network speeds.

Even in places where the higher speeds of 8Mbps are available upstream is still massively slower, which has little impact on most people. The majority of the data coming from your computer to the internet consists of short requests for large amounts of data, it only becomes an issue when you're trying to send lots of data to the internet - for instance uploading large images.

(Perhaps slightly) interestingly today I got two totally different download speeds from 2 different speedcheckers but very similar upload
Think Broadband gave
Speed Down 476.89 Kbps ( 0.5 Mbps )
Speed Up 357.82 Kbps ( 0.3 Mbps )

http://www.broadbandspeedchecker.co.uk/gave me
Speed Down 5608 Kbps ( 5.6 Mbps )
Speed Up 363 Kbps ( 0.3 Mbps )

A factor of 10 between them so one of them isn't very accurate or my bandwidth is very, very variable minute to minute.

 

[Flyfisher]

Interesting point about the "fair use policy".

We're on a 20GB/month BT plan but have been regularly exceeding this for the past year or so. When we exceed 20Mb for the second consequtive month we receive an email confirming we've hit the 20GB limit for that month and that any excess will cost £1/GB for the remainder of that month, which is added to our next BT bill.

But we've never noticed the line speed being reduced.

 

[Pford75]

I could bore for England on the details, but will try not to. The challenge that BT (and other service providers face) is that video and data traffic has grown exponentially, but they don't see any additional revenue from this growth (the revenue generated by you tube for example is Google's and BT take no share). However, they (BT) have to build out their network with more and more capacity, which is in turn used by other company's free of charge. One example is that BBC's iPlayer was estimated to account for apx 12% of all broadband traffic in the UK in the first few weeks of launch.

Regulation varies from country to country, but many service providers are using deep packet inspection to identify which applications/websites traffic is coming from/to and then using 'traffic shaping' techniques to throttle the speed of those packets through the network. It's not good PR, so many don't like to talk about it (traffic shaping is unlawful in the US).

I'm working a global project for my company on this....it's important we solve the problem...because if the YouTube's of this world won't contribute towards the cost of the networks, eventually the SP's will either go bust or stop expanding their networks.

Zzzzzzz

 

[Flyfisher]

The network providers have done a pretty heroic job for very little acclaim ever since the internet/web started to really grow back in the early 90's. Building such services on top of a network essentially designed for voice traffic has involved massive changes, and not only the obvious speed-related ones. For example, the statistical models used to determine the optimum number of exchange connections and bandwidth were originally based on a voice-only network characterised by short-duration calls. When people started using dial-up modems to access the web, average call durations rapidly increased and caused call-routing problems, completely unrelated (well, almost) to the actual data speeds.

When I started work in the computer industry (cue violins . . . ) modem speeds of 9600 bits/sec were state-of-the art and widely believed to be the upper limit for ordinary POTS (plain old telephone system) voice lines. Most domestic users are still constrained by old wiring to their home though thankfully technology can now push around 8 million bits/sec along the better-quality and shorter cables between homes and exchanges. But our appetitle for bandwidth is, currently, insatiable.

One well-known technical solution for increasing bandwidth to the home is to replace the existing copper cables between exchanges and home with optical fibre. Unfortunately, this is hugely expensive, although it's starting to happen. Ironically, our well-established use of copper for these "last mile" connections shackles us to a low-bandwith network whereas developing countries installing new networks can go straight to optical fibre. And, as an aside, optical cables also have the advantage of being almost worthless to thieves, which is a big problem with valuable copper cables in many developing countries (and not unheard of in the UK!).

Anyone still awake out there? :wink:

zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

 

[Nigel Watts]

Fibre optic cables seem the obvious way to go, but cable providers seem not to have made much headway. Is that becasue of cheaper competion from satellite? Our street in central London has never had cable laid. I guess being a road of semidetatched villas occupied by middle class professionals we arent as good a market as the nearlby dwellers of high density Council flats.

 

[skier-hughes]

talking of slowing down of broadband and telephony, how many people try to make a call at midnight on new years eve/day and can't because the network is overloaded, then just shrug their shoulders adn try again later.
If you trier to do that with a land line telephone and couldn't there would be uproar

 

[Flyfisher]

Fibre optic cables seem the obvious way to go, but cable providers seem not to have made much headway. Is that becasue of cheaper competion from satellite? Our street in central London has never had cable laid.

I don't really know about satellite costs but I believe they're pretty expensive. I believe the optical cable issue is mainly to do with the physical installation costs; it's expensive to dig up the roads and/or re-cable overhead poles. The termination equipment at each end of the fibre may also be more expensive than copper equipment - I'm not up to date on the lastest technology prices. Even in cities where there was a burst of 'cable' installation some years ago, most of the installed cable was coaxial copper. This can be better than twisted-pair copper but is still nowhere near the capacity of optical cable.

I've read about "DIY" schemes where people living close to an exchange do the work of installing optical cables from their home to the exchange, but I imagine this would only be suitable for a small percentage of homes. I also imagine it would be complicated by health & safety issues.

I've not read about it recently, but BT had a "Century 21" project plan to completely revamp the 'telephone' network. [Edit: just looked it up and "21CN" is still going strong - lots of info here: http://www.btplc.com/21cn/].

Basically, the current network was designed for voice traffic and has been adapted to carry data traffic. The C21 project concept was to completely remodel the network to one specifically designed for data with telephone traffic being carried digitally. Again, it's only really the connections to the home that have to change. All traffic between exchanges is already fully digital, only "the last mile" is analogue. The BT concept is (was?) to replace the home telephone socket with a data network socket (essentially an Ethernet port) and to replace existing analogue telephone with digital phones - sometimes known as "IP phones". Such phones are already available and widely used in business and for applications such as Skype. Again, it's only that "last mile" of analogue copper cabling that's the bottleneck.

 

[Flyfisher]

talking of slowing down of broadband and telephony, how many people try to make a call at midnight on new years eve/day and can't because the network is overloaded, then just shrug their shoulders adn try again later.
If you trier to do that with a land line telephone and couldn't there would be uproar

Absolutely, and that was the thing that BT was really worried about in the early days of the web when the massive increase of long-duration modem-calls threatened to clog up the existing network. Fortunately they sorted the problem by massively increasing the capacity between their exchanges (largely using optical cables). The probem for mobile phones, and other wireless networks, is that the radio spectrum bandwidth is rather more limited than an optical cable network.

 

[worms]

The challenge that BT ... is that video and data traffic has grown exponentially, but they don't see any additional revenue from this growth...

Yes, but remember that many of us only continue to pay BT line rental for broadband purposes. Without the expansion of broadband, the switch from landline to mobile calls would have been much more problematic for them in terms of revenue.

 

[LadyArowana]

For example, the statistical models used to determine the optimum number of exchange connections and bandwidth were originally based on a voice-only network characterised by short-duration calls

These statistical models were presumably created by people of the male persuasion based on their own experience :lol:

 

[Flyfisher]

:lol: :lol: :lol:
Except statistics never lie, well not 'un-spun' ones anyway.

Fortunately, peak traffic loads would be during working days and the vast majority of business calls are of short duration, leaving the evenings and weekends for long chats between, ahem, girlie friends. There's a reason why such off-peak times are cheaper, despite your attempts to monopolise the telephone lines. :wink:

 

[Pford75]

Yes, but remember that many of us only continue to pay BT line rental for broadband purposes. Without the expansion of broadband, the switch from landline to mobile calls would have been much more problematic for them in terms of revenue.

Not true i'm afraid. Since BB has accelerated the use of Skype etc, which in turn has canabalised the most profitable revenue stream (international voice calls). Furthermore, the legacy TDM networks were almost all entirely depreciated, meaning that they didn't 'cost' much to keep running (even if the revenue was declining)...whereas the IP networks require rapid capacity expansion (and it is that capex which really hurts the SP)

 

[Nigel Watts]

I am going to write to Santa immediately and ask for a chaise.

http://www.the-saleroom.com/catalogues/Item.aspx?itemId=8540123

 

[LadyArowana]

I am going to write to Santa immediately and ask for a chaise.

http://www.the-saleroom.com/catalogues/Item.aspx?itemId=8540123

That's rather nice, it is almost Christmas isn't it ?

 

[JoceAndChris]

If that was a left handed one it would be perfect for the hall.