New line cards ?????

[alexatkin]

You can definitely see that the bigger bundles of yellow are during peak hours, which suggests its just general latency on web.

It is of course the blue that is most important as it represents the general performance and the spikes in mine generally just mean I fired off a download or watched Netflix.

Its worth considering that with an ISP like Origin which current has no traffic management, the ping graph will probably always look worse than someone like PlusNet who could choose to prioritise ICMP packets and thus produce a very clean looking ping graph even if in reality their network was over capacity (I'm not saying it is, I think they manage it pretty well these days).

Its why I am not entirely against traffic management, as prioritising gaming and VoIP traffic above all else and keeping general downloads at the lowest priority, is actually what I already try to do on my router but it only really works for outgoing traffic, incoming has to be managed at the ISP.

The problem of course is once the ISP does management there is nothing to stop them abusing that facility, which PlusNet actually were doing when they first implemented it as they capped my Usenet traffic 24/7 even though I hadn't gone over their fair-usage limit. Its why many of us just don't trust an ISP using traffic management as historically its been used to avoid having to maintain a contention free network or block websites.

Sorry, I went on a bit of a rant there.

[SPritchard]

(06-04-2013 03:30 PM)alexatkin Wrote:  You can definitely see that the bigger bundles of yellow are during peak hours, which suggests its just general latency on web.

It is of course the blue that is most important as it represents the general performance and the spikes in mine generally just mean I fired off a download or watched Netflix.

Its worth considering that with an ISP like Origin which current has no traffic management, the ping graph will probably always look worse than someone like PlusNet who could choose to prioritise ICMP packets and thus produce a very clean looking ping graph even if in reality their network was over capacity (I'm not saying it is, I think they manage it pretty well these days).

Its why I am not entirely against traffic management, as prioritising gaming and VoIP traffic above all else and keeping general downloads at the lowest priority, is actually what I already try to do on my router but it only really works for outgoing traffic, incoming has to be managed at the ISP.

The problem of course is once the ISP does management there is nothing to stop them abusing that facility, which PlusNet actually were doing when they first implemented it as they capped my Usenet traffic 24/7 even though I hadn't gone over their fair-usage limit. Its why many of us just don't trust an ISP using traffic management as historically its been used to avoid having to maintain a contention free network or block websites.

Sorry, I went on a bit of a rant there.

I think you said what a lot of us think about traffic management. I understand the need to keep everyone balanced on speeds but too often it feels like the mainstream ISP's squash as many as they can onto their network then limit people to speeds we'd expect if this was 2005.

I live in a home where I'm the main user of the system. On my old Demon package, I'd get 9Mb/s out of 20Mb/s (until the prefiltered faceplate was fitted which brought me up to 15Mb/s). Those speeds were average, but the problem was that management didn't seem to work as intended. If I wanted to game, I couldn't download or the game would choke up. Moving to DR, I can game and download and the performance of both is admirable. Right now I'm going through the motions of trying to get my connection stabilized again (several line drops per day until I opened a ticket with Origin this week) but the protection and profile changes have brought me down to 13Mb/s. Even with that, I'd still feel comfortable gaming AND downloading at the same time. I'm hoping to get back up to better speeds very soon but the point is that not having management on the line is beneficial.

YouTube has been slow for the past few months but I'm certainly not alone in that (apparently migration from YouTube's old centers to Google's new ones is what's causing the issues). Sometimes it'd push up to the 25Mb/s speeds I had previously and other times it'd struggle to break 2Mb/s. Even if it was pushing all hell out of my line, I'd still feel comfortable gaming, even on something 'heavy' like 64-player BF3. It might only eat up 128Kb/s (sidenote: I did actually monitor this a few months ago) but it obviously requires great latency. Without management on the line, I don't have to worry that my ISP is misunderstanding the type of traffic. More importantly, I don't have to worry about P2P speeds being absolutely terrible when patching something like World of Warcraft (which make use of P2P by default -- turn it off and you'll probably be capped to 2MB/s [16Mb/s] from their servers).

Right now, I'd love to be away from DR due to the stability and forced speed reductions to try and stabilize it, but on the same note I can't fault Origin when it comes to how traffic is handled.

[freedomUser]

Is there any info as to what line cards have been updated? or when there likely to be updated?

[Origin_Pete]

I can't give out the full list, but it's growing quite fast.

I'm thinking about having someone outbound customers with upgraded cabinets, but this approach isn't always appreciated.

Best course for now is to fire a PM or e-mail my way and I'll have a look case by case.

[owlse]

pm your way pete and thank you

[owlse]

cheers for the reply

[alexatkin]

This is very good to hear.

[Origin_Pete]

Please could any Origin customer who wants a line card upgrade please get in touch asap. You can PM me on here or call the office. Thank you.

[john22rob]

i was wondering if anyone has been told of a card upgrade since Origins post? i pm'd origin with no reply to mine about a week ago and was wondering of anyone else's luck

[Chalky]

The mention of Line Card Upgrades was back at the end of April so if you only PM'd them last week then it is unlikely that you will get one.

I jumped straight on when @Origin_Pete mentioned it and my Line Card was upgraded about a week or so ago.