Reducing network congestion

As we have previously advised, we are aware that some times of day on some of the links we have to BT we are seeing slight packet loss showing on our line monitoring (dripping red from the top of the graph). This is largely our rather sensitive monitoring, but it can cause some noticable effect on file transfers from time to time. This is mostly noticable on days like today when there are windows updates.

We constantly monitor levels on the links to BT and re-balance them as necessary to ensure the highest quality service available. We are well aware that the service we provide is much better than many large ISPs. However, we know it is not quite the quality of service we aim for or that customers quite reasonably expect. Our aim is never to be the bottleneck in any data transfer.

Our pricing policy (maintaining current prices and even increasing install prices) has maintained customer levels reasonably statically for many months now so as to ensure no degradation of service. We would rather turn away new customers than offer a poor quality service.

However, there is finally light at the end of the tunnel. The new gigabit links in to BT are wating for the ADSL2+ trial to start any day now (BT say middle of this week!). Our new core routers are well under way, and we fully expect to be moving some existing customers to the new BT links from the end of July. This is now only a few weeks away.

For the customers that are moved this means faster services using ADSL2+, and for those not yet able to be moved it means the existing links will be less loaded and so should stop showing packet loss.

Based on BT estimates we believe we can then move all remaining customers to the new BT links some time around November, with customers on existing ADSL1 (not more than 8Mb/s) and new ADSL2+ (not more than 24Mb/s) services both on the new links. This will give us massive increases in network capacity and the ability to increase capacity quickly in future. We plan to continue to regrade people to ADSL2+ after this date as available.

We thank you all for your patience and understanding. I am happy to discuss in more detail on irc.