Anyone on virgin media cable?

[8igdave]

Hey did anyone get lots of drop outs last night? I found out today they will be upgrading all the 4mb cable people to 10mb which is good news. but last time they upgraded the 10mb to 20mb, they servers couldn't cope and everyones speeds really suffered.

Good news none the less. If i get 7mb instead of 4mb ill still be happy :)

[Duty]

I've found that line speed isn't usually what makes internet "faster" so much as line quality. If you're losing 15% of packets somewhere, that hurts a lot. I'm on Suddenlink cable in Oklahoma, and they have probably the poorest line quality in the country.

Technically line speed = your internet speed, but I highly doubt you're going to be using 4mb to play an online game, let alone 10mb. What you will notice is when you're getting 400ms ping times and high packet loss.

The 10mb is of course nice when you're using torrents or downloading something with a download manager though. Most companies don't mind increasing the line speed for customers because 95% of those customers won't ever use that much line speed for a sustained amount of time. It looks like you're getting a great favor from the company but it really isn't costing them much.

Now, if companies would go to improve line quality, that means they're going to have to upgrade their servers/peering connections especially if they're hitting capacity. Another way they could do it is by cutting the number of hops it takes customers to actually reach the internet (less hops = less chances to run into errors). This obviously is going to be much more expensive as they may have to rework a good portion of their network.


I'm not trying to insult you, I'm trying to basically tell you that the company isn't doing you THAT much of a favor. It's nice if you download a lot of things or use a lot of torrents (and only then if you're using a healthy torrent with a big swarm, as most torrents probably won't use your entire line capacity).

[8igdave]

I've found that line speed isn't usually what makes internet "faster" so much as line quality. If you're losing 15% of packets somewhere, that hurts a lot. I'm on Suddenlink cable in Oklahoma, and they have probably the poorest line quality in the country.

Technically line speed = your internet speed, but I highly doubt you're going to be using 4mb to play an online game, let alone 10mb. What you will notice is when you're getting 400ms ping times and high packet loss.

The 10mb is of course nice when you're using torrents or downloading something with a download manager though. Most companies don't mind increasing the line speed for customers because 95% of those customers won't ever use that much line speed for a sustained amount of time. It looks like you're getting a great favor from the company but it really isn't costing them much.

Now, if companies would go to improve line quality, that means they're going to have to upgrade their servers/peering connections especially if they're hitting capacity. Another way they could do it is by cutting the number of hops it takes customers to actually reach the internet (less hops = less chances to run into errors). This obviously is going to be much more expensive as they may have to rework a good portion of their network.


I'm not trying to insult you, I'm trying to basically tell you that the company isn't doing you THAT much of a favor. It's nice if you download a lot of things or use a lot of torrents (and only then if you're using a healthy torrent with a big swarm, as most torrents probably won't use your entire line capacity).

What do you mean i cant play games on 4mb? i have been for the last 8 months lol. I always load the games first and have the lowest ping, its great :D

Now im getting freely upgraded. But i think with all these 4mb people being upgraded to 10mb, we goting to see some serious slow downs. Some of the 20mb people still dont have good connectyions, although alot do. Some areas have it bad due to to many of them having it.

They are bringing in 50mb as well but on a separate new tech line so they will get alot better quality connection then us.

Im hoping to be able to host bigger games now with 10mb, but that all depends on the upload speed.

[Duty]

What do you mean i cant play games on 4mb? i have been for the last 8 months lol. I always load the games first and have the lowest ping, its great :D

Now im getting freely upgraded. But i think with all these 4mb people being upgraded to 10mb, we goting to see some serious slow downs. Some of the 20mb people still dont have good connectyions, although alot do. Some areas have it bad due to to many of them having it.

They are bringing in 50mb as well but on a separate new tech line so they will get alot better quality connection then us.

Im hoping to be able to host bigger games now with 10mb, but that all depends on the upload speed.

You misunderstood. I meant that you probably won't be using the full capacity of a 4mb connection on a game, and certainly not a 10mb connection.

Those 50mb people aren't going to get much better connections if the line quality isn't any good. Speed =/= good quality. More speed is always better of course, but there's more that goes into your internet then just how fast it is.

[8igdave]

You misunderstood. I meant that you probably won't be using the full capacity of a 4mb connection on a game, and certainly not a 10mb connection.

Those 50mb people aren't going to get much better connections if the line quality isn't any good. Speed =/= good quality. More speed is always better of course, but there's more that goes into your internet then just how fast it is.

O yeah i knows that. What im using is the upload speed, which isn't very high on virgin media. But with 10mb i should be able to host more people.

On games my ping is usualy between 5-20 on a dedicated server and between 30-50 on a hosted server. Tis very good :) I know the download speed doesn't effect that but virgin media are good in my area. Besides i download alot of mods for games which can be 500-1000mb a time. And i am parshal to a bit of bittornneting :p