Posted: 15th Dec, 2003 By: MarkJ
It appears as if some areas of the UK are beginning to feel the pinch of congestion after a number of people complained that speeds were dropping. The issue is related to both the design of BTs 'HOME' ADSL service and the effect of its new 1Mbps offer.
Home1000 users could in some cases be no better off than their Home500 counterparts who may also encounter speed problems (but to a smaller degree) as these are both uplinked through the same virtual path through BT's ATM network.
It seems that the root cause of these problems has been the unexpectedly high take-up of Home1000 services as providers including Pipex and Plusnet heavily promoted these, taking BT Wholesale by surprise. Usually, BT would upgrade the Virtual Paths (VPs) from exchanges to the RAS servers around the country when the users on a particular exchange reach a certain level but it has been unable to keep up with the volume of sign-ups recently.The
ADSLGuide item notes that just 800 ADSL users are being troubled by the problems, which is out of almost two million connections. Thankfully it should be resolved soon; by the end of January at the latest, we hope.