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[Bowdon]

I think if VM could find a way to not have to use traffic management i.e. restrictions of speeds and also have a proper upload speed, they could really be challenging fibre networks now, or in the near future.

It seems to be how VM cable technology operate that holds VM back from really dominating the market. It's like they are stuck back in the days of ADSL traffic management when it comes to user policy.

I would seriously consider VM if those 2 issues, traffic management (also network slow downs), and the upload speed issues were sorted. They would be my number 1 choice.

Hopefully with the new technology they are bringing in then perhaps those issues at leaat could be lessened?

I think people tend to go with fibre technology because at least we have an idea of what we might get. I think with cable its always been a seperate market and hasnt had rival cable competition to push the technology, so it lags behind in some areas.

I'm not knocking VM either. I'd love to see them competing against OR and other fibre companies as I think it makes the whole market stronger.

[niemand]

I entirely agree, unfortunately there is the expectation that services will never see visible contention from some quarters.

[Chrysalis]

VM when it works properly is a pretty good service, no DSL related issues to deal with, so no fragile lines, no distance related issues.  No DLM issues.  But do get occasional transit/peering issues still.

So sadly VM it really depends where you live, I think some areas like Leicester the original network that was built is very bad, and it needs a complete rehaul to be upgrade friendly which I assume is too expensive for VM to take on so the upgrades carried out are insufficient every time, whilst areas like ignition's are to get a upgrade friendly network layout so they may not have capacity issues.
Then you also get the areas where I suspect subscription levels are too low, which is good for contention but not so good for profit, which also means the area's with high take-up are under pressure to have over selling to make up for the under subscription areas.

[Bowdon]

That is the issue with VM. We don't know where the good or bad areas are.

I know we have called out BT / OR in the past for being secretive when it comes to network status information and also the technology they use. But compared to VM they are very open.

I don't think the areas that VM are struggling in would be all bad if they put in a proper network status screen for people so they can choose whether to buy or not.

As for network limitations - 'traffic management', VM need to get to a place like Fibre is at. The network should support a certain amount of people downloading at full speed. The network slowdowns sound like they are giving people access to higher speeds than the network can cope with. So a user either gets hit by being traffic managed or they get stuck with one kid downloading lots of pirated content for months.

VM need to be in a situation were it is them that is limiting speed down. Instead of advertising 200 and 300+ speeds, they should limit them to 100. That way it would reduce network congestion and hopefully be able to remove traffic management.

[niemand]

There is no traffic management on the downloads beyond P2P/Usenet throttling.

If/when BT start selling 1Gb on GPON they'll be at risk of a couple of people soaking up most of the capacity on the split.

In some areas VM do have a bunch of issues but, given the channel count they have, the speeds they sell aren't unreasonable there have just been some issues with capacity upgrades that have left them further behind the curve than they'd like.