back to article We're not throttling you, says Vodafone, claiming slow vid streaming is down to the 'cards'

Vodafone has admitted that a "technical issue" is to blame for some broadband customers being unable to stream video from popular sites for months. A lengthy thread on Voda's own customer forum that started on 4 January and is still receiving posts today, revealed that some of the ISP's frustrated users were unable to watch …

  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Single thread download

    I assume they mean connection?

    1. john.jones.name

      idiots have no clue about speedtest

      this drives me nuts...

      you actually need to test without a VPN and then with using exactly the same traffic

      and check the links along the way... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Measuring_network_throughput

      basically go and download Wehe: Check Your ISP for Net Neutrality Violations http://bit.ly/2IAdbmD

      1. IneptAdept

        Re: idiots have no clue about speedtest

        Downvoted for the shortened Url mate

        Put the full url in and I will upvote

  2. AndrueC Silver badge
    FAIL

    Their technical support seems to be awful:

    "I'm getting some extremely low download speeds on my Vodafone 80/20 FTTC.

    So I complained and they requested I sent their Level 2 Tech Team some speed tests from my Windows 7 Desktop machine connected by Ethernet cable, with all other Ethernet cables removed and W-Fi disabled on the router.

    When I telephoned days later to talk to the Tech Team about my speed tests I had sent, they would not talk to me but told the customer services person to tell me the following:

    "This is not a fault sir. The Tech Team say, according to the data they have downloaded from your router, there are 41 wi-fi devices in you area which are causing interference to your broadband. So they have closed the ticket and will have nothing more to do with it!""

    Thankfully I'm with IDNet so I don't have to put up such a crap service and crap support.

    1. ridley

      Had pretty much the same thing from "technical" asking me to adjust the WiFi settings on a wired network. When I pointed this out they insisted on continuing with their script.

      1. eightiescalling

        Unfortunately ISP tech support is more and more tailored to the common calls - which includes a large number of Joe Public who use the terms WiFi and broadband interchangeably. And more likely than not don't have any network cables in the house.

        The number of posts in local facebook groups asking a whole community "Is anybody elses wifi down?" with no other detail never ceases to amaze me...

        As a plus point, at least in this case it was all network related - which is better than the time someone at VM tried to convince me the wifi on my non-VM router was making their TV box forget channels...

        1. Gene Cash Silver badge

          > Joe Public who use the terms WiFi and broadband interchangeably

          UGH. If I had a nickel for every time I've had that happen in a conversation with "technical" people working in software development where they should know better...

          I have another one that calls Firefox "Mozilla"...

      2. Rob Daglish

        I rang up, as I was getting 25-50% packet loss on all of my WIRED connections. I got told I had to change channel on my WiFi. As soon as the 12 months of ridiculously cheap BB is up, I'm moving away from VF...

        1. Andre Carneiro

          You pay peanuts...

          1. A.P. Veening Silver badge

            "You pay peanuts..."

            If only that were true. In the UK you pay more for slower internet than on the continent. Glad I live on the continent.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      I was with IDnet for a while and they were abysmal. Vodafone however has been fine once I came off their DNS.

  3. STOP_FORTH
    Boffin

    Bob the Builder

    Can we fix it? Yes we can. The sooner people stop sending high bandwidth unicasts to thousands or tens of thousands of grateful punters the better.

    Live telly is best sent as a multicast. If broadcasters, streaming sites and telcos got their respective acts together we could multicast video over IP6, reducing congestion near the source and further downstream.

    The BBC was boasting about how many Terabytes/sec of video they were serving up at the last Olympics.

    Of course the new 6G standard being drafted by Trump will fix all of these problems.

    1. ZJ

      Re: Bob the Builder

      To some extent this is already addressed by content delivery networks. How these networks are hosted within Vodafone itself was probably what was going wrong here.

      1. STOP_FORTH

        Re: Bob the Builder

        CDNs are really "papering over the cracks"! People seem to be chucking bandwidth at a problem that can be (should be?) solved more elegantly.

        IP networks are very good at what they do, but they don't really scale for video if they are used naively. Video is not a text document on a web-page.

        Alternatively, we could use ASCII-cam everywhere!

        1. a pressbutton

          Elegant Solution

          One example of an elegant solution to bandwidth issues caused by millions watching live tv over the internet

          ... would be to turn the TV on - if they have one.

          The trouble is that I suspect most people do not actually watch live TV live - they willl pause it to write a text (if you are over 30) or a snapbook post (if under) etc and also rewind to the good bits.

          The definition of 'live' is more like 'what I am seeing'- a 'smear' of time

          Actually I propose a 'smear' of time as a new el reg measurement unit

          On audio

          1 audio smear = the lag between live FM radio and the same radio over a broadband connection

          On TV

          1 video smear = the lag between live TV and the same TV over a broadband connection

          Queue comments on 'how many smears before you need to wipe'

          1. John Brown (no body) Silver badge

            Re: Elegant Solution

            "Queue comments on 'how many smears before you need to wipe'"

            Oh, you were doing so well until you cued up that last line and let it loose.

        2. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Bob the Builder

          "CDNs are really "papering over the cracks"! People seem to be chucking bandwidth at a problem that can be (should be?) solved more elegantly."

          Are CDN's really papering over the cracks or do they match actual usage better than multicastings theoretical advantages for ISP customer traffic?

          One of the biggest shifts in broadcasting in recent years has been how viewers watch programs, with on-demand/time shifting meaning live audiences so the bandwidth peaks are significantly less for most content outside live events.

          given how cost sensitive ISP's are (with International bandwidth demands increasing, local access speeds increasing while consumer charges per Mbps have decreased).

          Multicasting is practically network communism....

          1. STOP_FORTH
            Stop

            Re: Bob the Builder

            "From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs" seems like an excellent mantra to have in mind when designing IP delivery for video to me.

            I specified "live telly" as this has the highest instantaneous viewing figures, so this is the type of programming that stresses a network the most.

            It doesn't really matter how viewers consume digital television. Memory is cheap and easily available compared with the early days of digital (albeit not IP delivered) TV. You can shove as much RAM in your Set Top Box, PC, tablet, 'phone as you like. (Best of luck balancing your STB on a modern, skinny TV.)

            If you decide to take a short break from live TV or rewind back to see the goal again, this can easily be accomplished with buffering in local storage. Interactivity does not have to be end-to-end, it can be spoofed most effectively for most consumers - who neither know, nor care, about the intricacies of delivery architectures.

            There are also well-established techniques (or tricks) so that a viewer can join a live multicast almost instantly without having to wait for the local buffer to fill up. I have only seen this implemented on local networks because "the Internet doesn't do multicast".

            If you want to wind back by more than a few minutes, this can either be locally buffered or end-to-end.

            Whilst I am sure that the financials associated with running an ISP are complicated, I don't actually care. I am paying them for a service not a list of excuses about how difficult it is to be an ISP. If video is going to be the dominant traffic on the Internet, then broadcasters, telcos and ISPs need to start doing things properly rather than providing an occasionally excellent but sometimes downright lamentable experience.

            I have seen technical proposals from companies for IP TV systems. M's solution required buying lots of servers and OS licenses (look, that's how they spell it, not me), C's solution required buying lots of switches/routers, E's solution required buying lots of fast RAIDed arrays, T's solution required buying lots of hardware-based real-time encoders. Guess what kind of products M, C, E and T made? Maybe some form of properly designed, hybrid solution would have been better for the customer and the viewers?

            Oh, and get off my lawn.

            1. Anonymous Coward
              Anonymous Coward

              Re: Bob the Builder

              The problem with the tricks you suggest is that they cater for a relatively small number of streams and delays of minutes. The reality is Internet video is billions of streams where the delays can be anywhere from minutes to months and the methods for caching/managing multicast streams are not as efficient as HTTP streaming/caching.

              I raised the ISP economics issue as they have the greatest reason to implement multicast because they stand to benefit the most. Only I'm not aware of any large, mainstream ISP's doing BUT almost all have local Netflix/Amazon/Hulu/Google CDN's inspite of having the skills to deploy multicast.

              If multicast was the solution, cable networks which were built to stream one-to-many content would have had a huge advantage over other ISP networks - instead they have been pushing for more bandwidth.

              And this only touches on the client-to-ISP side of the network where most of the benefit lies - transit multicast has no economic incentive and content provider multicast hasn't been pushed at all because the majority of providers don't require significant content streaming and the video content providers focus on improving caching solutions.

              There's also the question of reliability - HTTP does a great job of hiding the quirks and foibles of the global Internet, something that multicast streaming doesn't handle as well (at least in my experience where message delivery was paramount, but I accept my use of multicast may not match yours).

              "From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs"

              Which is why we have CDN's/caching instead of multicast.

              "Oh, and get off my lawn."

              Typical communist, it's not your lawn, it's "our" lawn but I still have to get off it...

              1. Anonymous Coward
                Anonymous Coward

                Re: Bob the Builder

                From the POV of a very small ISP, I can tell you it's a hellish experience in practice.

                Multicast seems entirely untested in all routers and switches, having multicast traffic seems to turn otherwise solid equipment into moody, volatile and undecipherable entities.

                1. DaveHan

                  Re: Bob the Builder

                  Now 7 years back but have seen some very strange things on switches from well respected vendors when using multicast for audio.

                  One had a fault where when a device on a port lets say port 3 subscribes to a stream - it shut off the data on port 3 and sent it out of port 2.

                  In another installation the owner of the sight would insist that nothing had been changed but multicast all of a sudden stopped working on there network. Turned out the network engineer had saved the configuration of the switch - tested a change and then re-instated the original configuration. Transpired there was a bug in the upload/download of the configuration on the switch that would disable multicast. I hope things have improved by now but considering the vendors reluctance to fix the problem can understand why multicast is not used more.

              2. STOP_FORTH

                Re: Bob the Builder

                I didn't say multicast was a panacea for all video over IP, I specifically mentioned "live telly".

                There are some cable installations using multicast, but they tend to have IT departments infested with be-sandalled, bearded UNIX gurus rather than the more common or garden variety of network engineers.

                I don't know why the big, household name cable companies don't use multicast. It's possible that shouting at and bullying regulators for more bandwidth has worked in the past and is cheaper than ripping out legacy infrastructure and doing things properly.

                I also don't know why many switches implement multicasting so badly and unreliably. Poorly performing hardware and software is foisted upon the IT community with impunity, and nobody objects.

                5G is offering the promise of much higher speeds between consumers and telcos. I don't know how many more towers/transmitters/access points the telcos will have to build, but if everyone starts streaming video to their 'phones on day one the telco backbones will have to be enormous.

                I haven't seen the detailed stats for popular programmes from streaming media companies, I'm pretty sure these would be commercially confidential. It may well be that every single person on the planet is watching a different cat video and they all need unicast connections all the way back to the source.

                When video rental shops were still a thing the stats for the top ten or top twenty rentals were quite interesting. The vast majority of rentals (in excess of 70% I believe, I can't remember the exact figure) were for the top twenty films. When you have this sort of lumpiness you can start to think of interesting distribution methods. There's nothing you can do about the one person watching "Bambi Meets Godzilla", they have to be unicast. There was at least one experimental system over satellite that carouselled the top five (or more) films every fifteen minutes. The first fifteen minutes of the chosen films was dumped into viewers STBs overnight at low bitrate. If a viewer wanted to watch one of the specially chosen films, they saw the first few minutes of their local cache until they were able to join the next "live" broadcast. I don't think this really worked over satellite because of the cost of transponders, but it could certainly be tried over IP.

                Mark my words, video over IP is rubbish and it is only going to get worse.

                1. Anonymous Coward
                  Anonymous Coward

                  Re: Bob the Builder

                  There's something amiss here - you say this is your lawn, but you do not understand why by every measure, according to you, multicast infrastructure investment by ISPs and vendors makes sense.

                  It's lower capex, better user experience (claimed), and profit boosting. A classic case requiring no regulator intervention.

                  All the vendors mentioned came with topologies that work for them, but multicast isn't there. It isn't like lower cost isn't a working RFQ criteria, Huawei competes heavily on cost.

                  At the heart of the claim is that "live telly" is the most dominant use case. If so a DTV USB dongle free with a broadband subscription could dramatically mitigate this - they are quite cheap especially compared to a router. Maybe a DTV based multicast broadcast on the router/STB with a subscriber discount if connected up!

                  But outside of "live telly", multicast makes no sense. It has rather impractical for VOD. Also multicast typically does not have retransmit and for ISPs to guarantee would require very active management and control of all branches of the multicast stream from source.

                  I think the reality is that multicast is a restricted use-case, temporary at best (if indeed the most dominant BW consumer as claimed), and little avenues for correction and diagnosis at scale. It requires very specific handling at the end device (isn't browser compatible). An ISP investing in this would be silly.

                  So either "live telly" is a restricted geo-specific claim of yours, or there is another gopher in your lawn that you don't know.

                  Video over IP is fundamentally about enabling P2P video *on demand*. Multicast is definitely not the panacea claimed. Multicast has had its heyday, and that was before youtube. Even is ViOIP is going to get worse, multicast is not the answer.

                  Propose something else to mow your lawn.

                  1. STOP_FORTH
                    Happy

                    Re: Bob the Builder

                    The original article mentioned live streaming of sport.

                    Nobody is asking for regulator intervention as far as I know.

                    Two of the four vendors used multicasting. (Possibly three, I didn't examine all of the proposals in detail.)

                    The four proposals seemed to be optimised for vendor profitability. I have no problem with that. I have no problem with decent technical proposals either.

                    There is no reason why you couldn't put the top three to five live channels in a given geographical region on one multicast. You can filter them out in the receiving device stack by putting each channel on a different port.

                    I never claimed multicasting was a panacea, it is a useful technology and is currently in use in many broadcast systems. Sometimes it is used just in the studio/technical areas. Sometimes it is used for distribution of content. Admittedly, most of my experience has been with systems in Europe, Asia and Australasia. Is that too geo-specific?

                    The problem as I see it is that the broadcasters, telcos and ISPs are all chucking the problem over the fence and hoping somebody else sorts things out. There is no real point in ISPs doing this by themselves.

                    1. Anonymous Coward
                      Anonymous Coward

                      Re: Bob the Builder

                      "The problem as I see it is that the broadcasters, telcos and ISPs are all chucking the problem over the fence and hoping somebody else sorts things out. There is no real point in ISPs doing this by themselves."

                      The problems are:

                      - clients generally do not stream the same content concurrently so the benefit of multicast is not fully

                      - multicast doesn't deal with unreliable networks like the Internet very well. When I say unreliable, consider mobile devices roaming in and out of coverage areas or poor wifi

                      - multicast requires end-to-end support for this to work and the Internet is made up of multiple parties, many of whom benefit from the increased traffic (i.e. IX's/transit providers)

                      - for Internet traffic, the reality is that the majority of bandwidth constraints (>75%) are last mile issues (at least in Europe with relatively short distances and cheap IX access) which multicast can only address as well as a CDN solution for the majority of customers

                      Multicast can be a great solution, but requires largely homogeneous control of the networks involved and presents challenges in shared media environments (i.e. wifi) or non-broadcast media. While the challenges can be overcome, they often result in performance compromises worse than the savings realized by carrying a small percentage of multicast traffic.

                      For the issues noted CDN's with HTTP streaming/proxying handles all of the issues raised by streaming traffic and supports other cachable content at the same time, outweighing the benefit of deploying multicast.

        3. sijones

          Re: Bob the Builder

          CDN's aren't papering over a crack, they provide a useful purpose and service done correctly.

          Unicast streams have to be used in most cases as people watching different things at different times, you can't multicast a film and expect everyone to tune in like normal broadcast telly.

          Therefore the only use for multicast streams is for live video, everything else is unicast because it HAS to be.

    2. mark l 2 Silver badge

      Re: Bob the Builder

      Unfortunately I don't think that may people use streaming to watch live TV, certainly for website such as Netflix, Iplayer, Youtube etc these are all video on demand so these Multicast wouldn't be suitable.

    3. Andre Carneiro

      Re: Bob the Builder

      The days when people all sit on front of the telly watching the same thing at the same time are over.

      People consume content intermittently and at whatever time is convenient for them. Multicast doesn’t fix the problem in that model.

      In Portugal at least, multicast is used for “live” IPTV already.

  4. Fading
    Facepalm

    This takes me back....

    And for a change it isn't Virgin media:

    https://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/09/09/virgin_media_youtube_buffering_woes/

  5. The Dogs Meevonks Silver badge

    I signed up to vodafone last March on their top tier service... Biggest mistake I've ever made choosing an ISP.

    The start date was delayed by 5 days leaving me without service for almost 2 weeks

    My number wasn't transferred by the time my broadband was active

    I found out they never even requested my number be transferred

    I was repeatedly lied to about my number being transferred, told it was requested (my old provider never got a single request)

    I was then told it was impossible to transfer my number as it was a non BT one... Erm.. it originated from BT and was then transferred to Virgin... and CAN simply be transferred back (because that's what happened with my next provider)

    In the end after almost 30 days of ineptitude and lies, I sent an official complaint terminating my service within the 30 day limit... it was ignored. So I got the CEO email address from those lovely people over at the consumer action group and fired of an email.

    Within 24hrs.. a response, with 48hrs an apology, promises to cancel and terminate my service and a complete refund.

    However.. my broadband was terminated almost immediately, but the phone took almost a further week before they disconnected it... and I couldn't sign up with a new provider until it was; as any new provider would have then transferred over the 'temp' number assigned to it that vodafony wanted to make permanent.

    Their customer service is useless to the point of utter incompetence and incapable of doing the simplest of tasks.

    Do not give them your business under any circumstances.

    1. Tom Chiverton 1

      And that's why Zen keeps getting better... Sure, it's not cheap. But it works and when it doesn't the techies know their stuff.

      1. Danny 14

        +1 for zen. more expensive than sky and far more reliable.

        1. bakerwe

          +1 again for Zen. Not cheap but worth it. Only ever had one problem, engineer that I got through to in minutes helped track down the issue to a mistake on my config on my equipment, I'd made. Took a couple of mins where I'd just missed one issue. Frankly everyone else I've used has been useless...are you listening BT, TalkTalk, etc.

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    El Reg has asked Vodafone why a line card, a piece of street cabinet-level connectivity equipment, would affect download speeds based purely on the site accessed by a customer.

    Perhaps the card was set to "send to GCHQ in case of sedition" mode.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      "Perhaps the card was set to "send to GCHQ in case of sedition" mode."

      GCHQ may want to re-think their plans then - practically forcing users to use VPN services to get content into and out of their ISP probably makes GCHQ's life harder.

      Unless the VPN services are actually run by GCHQ in a truly inspired solution to austerity driven budget cuts and international information gathering.

      Was I trying to debunk a conspiracy theory or create a bigger one? I can't recall...

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Sounds like a MTU issue and that would tie in with the line card setting story. If you are using a VPN your packets are fragmented anyway, perhaps to a size that fits with the low MTU setting, so thats why it works over a VPN but not directly.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Virgin media is crap with MTU problems. Expect all UDP traffic to fail.

          I expect it's the same problem. Lying about MTU and blocking all the feedback that let's you see the problem.

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Lets take easynews as an example, single thread download 20-40Kb/sec

    10 thread download 2.3Mb/sec

    30 thread download 6.7Mb/sec

    Fire up a VPN.

    Single thread 7Mb/sec

    10 thread 8.9Mb/sec (full line speed).

  8. Anonymal coward

    "Our 70Mbs are better than VM's 300Mbs!"

    Really, that's what a Vodafone sales droid tried for 5 minutes to convince me was true. I don't know, perhaps I'm just getting old and even more cynical but is number recognition no longer taught?

    1. Nick Kew
      FAIL

      Re: "Our 70Mbs are better than VM's 300Mbs!"

      Well, this article tells us Vodafone was down to 16Mbps.

      Contrast VM going down to below 0.5Mbps for months on end, and being uncontactable.

      1. sijones

        Re: "Our 70Mbs are better than VM's 300Mbs!"

        One person on the forum was down to 16Mb, but the majority is anything between 3 and 6Mb for single connections.

  9. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    This is probably not as sinister as it may seem.

    I work as a network engineer for an ISP (in a different country but still AC) and we recently ran into a similar problem. The issue in our case was that one core router line card (containing an interface which was one port in an aggregated bundle) on our upstream provider's side had encountered a software error and because of this suffered severe packet-loss (but not enough to drop the circuit completely). Since load balancing across ports in a bundle is usually done per flow (source/destination IPs/ports) and those values are hashed, it is definitely possible that certain combos of (customers && web services) are impacted worse than others. Finding and rebooting the misbehaving line card immediately restored service.

    So this is probably that, since I know that Vodafone uses equipment from that same vendor.

    1. Ben1892

      As a VF customer experiencing this problem (and an IT professional who knows how difficult it is to track down issues like this) this seems the most realistic diagnosis, but getting them to analyse the problem in the correct way is very frustrating - no I don't want to unscrew my wall socket and plug directly in. I'm syncing fine at 63-odd mbps - but that's how they measure their commitment to the broadband guarantee - because they can't control "the internets" if you sync at 60-70 then not their problem guv...

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Except VP are blaming the cards in the users local box; something already disproved by the fact effacted customers can get full speed on the services being throttled by using a VPN.

      VP are trying to

      Have their cake

      Eat their cake

      Deny their cake exists.

      This is all shades of PlusNet; another ISP known for throttling speeds to 1/3rd the sync speed.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        (@Ian Emery - I'm the person you were replying to.)

        Actually - Vodafone ISN'T blaming the users' local boxes. According to the article (disclaimer: I haven't looked into the forum posts), they're saying that they had "problems with some line cards". A line card isn't necessarily, as assumed by The Reg at the end of the article, "a piece of street-level connectivity equpiment", it's more likely in this case to be a 100GE line card in a core router in the Vodafone backbone.

        Because whether your connectivity to the internet is via mobile, fibre, cable or ADSL-over-wet-string - it's all IP in the end; and it'll need to cross regular Internet routers to get to your favourite services.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Originally they were blaming local kit; it wasnt until MUCH later they blamed internal kit; this topic has been discussed over on ISPR, along with the SupaNet scam, for weeks before El Reg picked it up.

  10. SImon Hobson Bronze badge
    FAIL

    At my last place they went with several FTTC lines from Vodamoan when we were decommissioning services that rellied on an old legacy circuit we'd had for years - started off with Yourcomms, then Thus, Then Clueless and Witless, and finally Vodamoan. With each acquisition and merger, knowledge would get lost, and service level would go down - and eventually Vodamoan announced that they were shutting down that legacy network.

    To say the task of getting 5 FTTC lines installed and working "didn't go well" would be a massive understatement. By the time I left, one of the lines still didn't work - after something like 9 months ! In the meantime, as a "plan B" we got a FTTC line in from another provider we used - and despite several problems requiring 2 "cease and reprovide"s to fix, had a working line in about 2 weeks from ordering.

    Add in some of the completely bogus carp they didn't tell us about - like "you can only use our router" (it's a pile of sh1t and many businesses have their own requirements) and "you can't have a single fixed IP, you have to pay extra for a block of 5", and "you have to phone the residentiall helpline and ask to be transferred to business" - and no, I couldn't recommend them for anything.

    Oh, and don't get me started on their nationwide outage on business services which was caused by a catalogue of failures that could have been foreseen by anyone who'd skimmed through "networking and systems monitoring for dummies".

    Icon says what I think of them.

  11. Andre Carneiro

    Good to see their business and broadband “customer service” emulates my experience with their mobile phone products.

    I have never experienced such incompetence in my life (and having had a brief contract with BT, that’s saying something) and I was pleased I managed to get the hell out within the 14 day cooling off period.

    Still, at least their CS experience is consistent across all their products...

    1. sijones

      Spot on, I wouldn't use their mobile products but decided to give the broadband a go, it started out fine but now the support is awful, and the arrogance of nothing is wrong is the same as their mobile.

      As soon as i can get out the contract am gone and will never return.

  12. Da Weezil

    Must do better!

    Line cards in street cabs? Seriously?

    In common with many other ISPs Voda use the Openreach GEA-FTTC line service, Simply put, the "line cards* in FTTC street cabs (Both ECI and Huawei) are shared between customers connected to the cab of all ISPs, so an issue equipment at street cab level would be seen across MANY ISPs - not just one.

    Why would you ever accept the weasle words of an ISP without fact checking any excuses they offered? Havent years of reporting issues from ISPs running networks at red hot loadings taught you anything? where is the cynicism we have come to know and love from the Vulture Central scribes?

    If Unsure - might I direct the author of this piece to Mr Saffron @ the excellent Thinkbroadband site to check before publication - or even before writing!

    Disappointed el reg - hoped for better technical knowledge from your scribes! or at least a healthy dose of mocking disbelief!

    * Is the guy in the Voda ad asking "What is wrong with you people?" on a train full of Voda CS reps?

    1. Anonymous Coward Silver badge
      Facepalm

      Re: Must do better!

      El Reg asked Voda what the problem was. Voda replied saying "line cards". El Reg said "Nope. That doesn't make sense. Try again". Voda haven't replied (yet).

      How does that become El Reg not understanding line cards? Perhaps you need to RTFA again?

  13. Anonymous Coward
    Big Brother

    Technical issue to blame for streaming video jitter?

    ‘"technical issue" is to blame for some broadband customers being unable to stream video’

    Maybe the NSA hooks are causing the slowdown, I mean rerouting everything through Utah and back again ref.

  14. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Margins

    Part of the problem is margin. The pile it high and sell it low mentality of "product" directors means there's less room for users on ISP networks. They still believe that traffic management is a panacea for all this, but really its just massaging the problem not solving it. But hey, if your churn isn't so high and you're making those waffffer theeen margins then I guess its profitable, just not great service. The truth is, when you netflix and chill in glorious super HD you're getting the bang for buck that you pay for.

    The multicast conversation, whilst interesting, isn't going anywhere fast. Its fine for live TV within an ASN such as a cable TV network and its customers, but not over the internet and not for people downloading content on demand at a variety of times.

    It might be good if users could "book" something they intend to watch and its delivered to a local box in advance of its use during say off peak periods. Then guarantees about its quality and delivery would be more believable, maybe offer rebates for booking things that you actually watch. It's still on demand, just requires some thought on the part of users...oh crap

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Margins

      Ah. My personal pet hate.

      The marketing person who decided that "bandwidth" could be shared by 50 customers because they wouldn't all be using it at the same time.

  15. Jim Whitaker

    Vodafone!

    Interesting. My ISP has just recently stopped selling new connections using Vodafone supplied links and is in the process of migrating existing service users (like me) to another provider. I don't expect much improvement since the copper to my house is too long but good to see Uno taking action.

  16. Big_Boomer Silver badge
    Holmes

    Vodafone performance?

    VODAFONE? PERFORMANCE? <snigger> <lol> <rotflol> <rotflmao> <rotfpmsl> oh gawd, please stop,.... it hurts......

  17. Matt Major

    LAAAAAAAAAGGGGGGGGGGGG

    I had been with vodafone for quite sometime, mainly due to the price.

    but since i got my "your bill will be increasing" email, i noticed the service fell through the floor.

    it killed my on-line gaming with pings going from 30ms to 5 seconds, which made it pointless.

    moved to Sky, and not had a problem since, and downloading files (and speed tests) are much better.

    Couldn't recommend Vodafone less to anyone

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