>> From my experience in Leicester things can go pear-shaped (in terms of congestion) VERY VERY fast indeed.
Hence concerns over the effects a few heavies could have.. then when you mentioned WAN loadbalancers why I went eeeeek.
I'm pretty certain that BTw perform some form of low level QoS on their DSLAMs - (I'm talking their newer models here - cause I know rizla was on one of the earlier BT enabled exchanges).
But if you notice even when the exchange comes under heavy congestion, no-one complains about the latency. They specifically installed a pile of Juniper ERX's in 2003/2004 because of their ability "to distribute bandwidth more fairly" which wasnt happening on some of the older dslams.
ERX's have the ability to do the Bronze/Silver/Gold prioritisation and were the model that BT chose for the vast amount of exchange DSLAMs from 2003 onwards until they started using the Huawei MSANs.
>> in fact Be inflicted more downtime on me in 2 months than BT did in 6 years.
Again one of my concerns over LLU - I think theyve all been through it - Tiscali, TalkTalk/AOL etc. From what I had observed Be seemed to be one of the better ones.
Easynet do seem to have got it right, I dont ever recall seeing much complaints about their LLU. Although I have seen high packet loss and very probable signs of contention on the sky connections, I was told by UKO that sky and UKO have their own separate VPs. This would appear to be true from observations elsewhere.
>> The backhaul isn't like an IPStream backhaul.
Indeed. Some people think that BT give little away about their network, but information on the LLU Networks is even less.
I have spoken to Be in the past about other things, and they offered to give me a feed which is the same that Sam has.
Talking of which - the dates for Be around here:-
RFS date set: 30/04/2008 (originally 31/07/2007)
Blackpool Central 31/12/2006
North Shore 31/03/2007
Layton 31/3/07
Poulton 31/3/07
St Annes 31/03/2007
South Shore 31/07/2007
Cleveleys 31/07/07
Lytham RFS date set: 30/04/2008 (originally 31/05/2007)
Kirkham RFS date set: 31/03/2008
Weeton - Not available
Great Eccleston - Not available