Demon's says that their Business Broadband accounts will receive
"Prioritised traffic during busy periods".

http://www.demon.net/demon/products/...s8000/Benefits

Does anyone know exactly what this means?

Busy periods presumably means when line congestion is approaching or at
100% but what does prioritised traffic mean?

Will other traffic be subject to QoS delays while all mine is allowed
through?

When I asked Demon Customer Service about it they gave a meaninglessly
vague responce.

philphil wrote:
that's because they use BT's MaxDSL Premium product which gets more
bandwidth when the exchange link or BT network is congested.


Phil

"philphil" <philip456@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:1161462116.294736.33460@m7g2000cwm.googlegrou ps.com...
It means their system can't cope with the demands being placed on it -
possibly because they are not coughing up enough for bandwidth or have not
invested enough to keep up with other ISPs. They know businesses are more
likely to sue for breach of contract so put everyone else to one side in
busy peak times by the sound of it.

maybe time to change to a decent ISP that doesn't restrict home users during
peak times! I have no idea why Demon couldn't tell you that themselves, was
it a UK based call centre you spoke to?

"PhilT" <newsnet@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:1161466669.999096.105660@h48g2000cwc.googlegr oups.com...
congested. That's why the ISP further restricts home users in favour of
business users. Business users are guaranteed a certain bandwidth during a
restricted or congested time and home users get the remainder up to the
supposed full capacity.

On 21 Oct 2006, "Jim" <jimjohnston244@freemail.co.uk> wrote:

Is this from someone extremely 'miffed' about Demon? If you check on some
web sites you'll see that IPStream Max Premium (ie the business service)
is described as getting priority over IPStream Max users (by BTW) so a
business customer will get priority at any time of day, if there's so
much traffic as to be filling a link to capacity.

....snip...

FWIW, I used to be with Demon and was 100% satisfied with their
professionalism and the quality of their service. I moved to another ISP
purely because this ISP was doing a combined internet/phone/cheap calls to
the US package and my wife is American so we were racking up some hefty US
call bills. But you get what you pay for of course ;-).

My experience of other ISPs who deal purely with "the public" is that their
support is <expletive deleted> and their servers simply cannot handle even
"getting towards peak" loads never mind full peak. Typical problems are
e-mails getting bounced because the e-mail servers are congested, failure to
reach websites because their DNS servers can't handle the load etc.

I write software and can rebuild a PC from the motherboard up (both hardware
and software) so I live with these problems and find ways around them. If
Joe Public asked me "who's a good ISP", Demon would be at the top of my list
because my experiences of them have been so good and the average user needs
it to "just work".

Paul DS

Hi Phil,

It all comes down to economics.

If "unlimited" broadband was ever a viable business model then it's no
longer viable. ISP's costs for bandwidth are just too high to allow that and
make a profit.

Many ISP's now use traffic shaping and bandwidth prioritisation to ensure
that the core services such as web surfing and e-mail remain fast while
other services see reduced throughput.

This may happen all the or at peek hours or depend on the pricing plan you
are on e.g. Home User or Business User.

Kind Regards

Simon
--

"philphil" <philip456@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:1161462116.294736.33460@m7g2000cwm.googlegrou ps.com...

"Simon Zerafa" <simon@pc-technical.co*no-spam*.uk> writes:

I can understand web surfing, but why email? Email is a bulk service,
not an interactive one, so should not need priority. Especially as a
large proportion of email nowadays is spam and therefore unwanted.

"Graham Murray" <newspost@gmurray.org.uk> wrote in message
news:871wozw481.fsf@newton.gmurray.org.uk...
But it's seen as such by the majority of punters, including me.
I do more emailing and ng browsing than anything else, so it's high on my
list.

George

"Graham Murray" <newspost@gmurray.org.uk> wrote in message
news:871wozw481.fsf@newton.gmurray.org.uk...
Commercial users (e.g. printers) send large files by email (50 to 500 Mbytes
is not unusual). The transfer time is obviously manageable (even 500M at
1Mbits/sec is only a little over an hour). Yet such large emails are often
delayed by a day or more - thereby rendering the advantage of ADSL
worthless. I know of printers who continue to use point-to-point ISDN
because they achieve better throughput !!

Clearly, commercial users need to be very careful in their choice of ISP

--
Graham

"Graham" <graham@nospam.demon.co.uk> writes:

Email is not really the optimal mechanism for exchanging such large
files. Ftp would be a much better choice. Unless the files are all
ASCII[1] then they will have to be encoded using for example
base64. To take some figures, assuming 100% efficiency[0], on an ADSL
Max line with 800k uplink a 500 Mbyte file will take approximately 90
mins to send. The overhead of using email and base64 will add an extra
45 mins to that. With slower lines or with lower (ie real life)
efficiency the extra time taken to send as email rather than using ftp
will be even greater.

[0] Which in practice is unobtainable

[1] In which case it would be quicker to compress them before sending.

"Graham Murray" <newspost@gmurray.org.uk> wrote in message
news:87hcxukdaa.fsf@newton.gmurray.org.uk...
Most of them don't think to ask for such advice. They read that ADSL is
cheaper and faster than ISDN, and have worked out that email is the solution
to their problems. When it appears to perform poorly, they stick with ISDN
....

--
Graham

On 2006-10-23, Simon Zerafa <simon@pc-technical.co*no-spam*.uk> wrote:
If the price ISPs paid for the facilities reflected the cost of
providing them I'm not sure I would believe that. It takes several
tens of thousands of ADSL connections to consume the bandwidth of
just one wavelength (out of 16 or 64?) on a fibre pair added to
a very well provisioned core and backhaul network. The cost of
terminating and powering all that copper just has to far exceed
the cost of lighting a new channel on a few fibres. Like the
voice network, in a data network the cost is concentrated at the
edges.

My guess is that what you are describing may be the result of
ISPs which don't own their own infrastructure and instead need
to buy internal bandwidth from a monopoly (or duopoly or cartel?)
which is charging what the market will bear. There are places
where there are no such thing as usage limits, and purposely
throttling traffic is so reviled as to have been the subject
of class-action lawsuits, yet the cost of provisioning internal
bandwidth is far from the first thing the ISPs complain about. If
internal bandwidth is a problem it is probably an artificial one.

Dennis Ferguson

Paul D.Smith wrote:

Interested to read this. I last used Demon back in the dial-up days
when they only offered SMTP as a mail delivery mechanism. I had thought
about switching back to them, but wondered if only the name was the
same, and it was no longer a company run by and for technically
demanding enthusiasts.

By the way, what is "peak time" for an ADSL connection in a residential
location? I run a business from home using a normal consumer broadband
connection and have never experienced serious problems. I would expect
it to get busy at evenings and weekends, which I'm not bothered about
because as I use computers all day for work I have little interest in
using them for leisure.

Julian

Jim wrote:
but more than Home users, which I was failing to put over clearly.

its a BT thing on the exchange backhaul.

Phil