Bandwidth management teething problems
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Our existing bandwidth management appliance is getting a little long in the tooth and whilst it can cope at the moment, it isn't able to scale to match our needs for the future. So we're replacing it, and over the last couple of days we've been trialing the new system.
Initial reports are mixed. Some users of services such as Skype have reported improvements, others have seen things get noticably worse. Eg at peak times last night, the latency on the network increased substatially compared to our previous solution.
One side effect is that the new system allows people much more "upload" bandwidth during off-peak times than we had anticipated. This seems to have caught out a few people who had left their P2P applications running, and caused them to go over their weekly bandwidth quota.
As this was unexpected, we have taken the decision not to transfer anyone to the restricted network on Monday. However, you do still need to keep an eye on your bandwidth usage as we are likely to go back to using the restricted network on the 12th Feb. Don't forget that even if you're not downloading anything, your P2P software may be uploading to other people. The best thing to do is to shut it off if you're not using it!
We're still learning about the new system, working closely with the suppliers to tweak it so that we get the best possible performance out of it for our environment. We think last nights latency problems were caused by a configuration oversight, which we will look into as soon as possible next week.
For the moment though, we have moved the network back to our previous bandwidth management appliance and we intend to leave it that way over the weekend.
We're sorry for any inconvenience caused while we're finding our feet with the new appliance. We hope that any problems will be short lived, and in the longer term you should notice an improvement in the quality of your network connection.