Must be something to do with living on a peninsula
I hope they announce the service comes with a 5GB per month limit
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Virgin to launch fastest web connection in UK
- Thread starter Blue Velvet
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I hope they announce the service comes with a 5GB per month limit
Virgin have always been very open about their traffic shaping and limits, unlike pretty much every other isp.
Apart from sky (not that I've used it), I'd say their fair use policy is infinitely better than anyone else.
I can't get cable at my current address, our national telephone network makes me cry myself to sleep every night.
Apart from sky (not that I've used it), I'd say their fair use policy is infinitely better than anyone else.
I can't get cable at my current address, our national telephone network makes me cry myself to sleep every night.
Virgin gives with one hand and takes away with the other:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/12/16/virgin_bittorrent/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/12/16/virgin_bittorrent/
Why don't they work on making broadband average speed better, or work at obtaining the speeds they advertise.
I suppose its partly the government not investing in high-speed internet. Add that to the list of "things the government should have done when they had money"
I suppose its partly the government not investing in high-speed internet. Add that to the list of "things the government should have done when they had money"
We have whats called a Fair usage policy.
With Virgin, you have unlimited downloads, but if you download more than 5gb between 4pm and 11pm, they will cap your speed to about 4mb, and then continue capping if it carries on, until 11pm.
They also will block torrents if you're excessively using them.
The fair usage policy is basically a way for ISP's to claim unlimited downloads, when they don't mean that at all.
Yeah. Virgin is ****. My friend on the 24Meg plan says he's lucky to get 50Kbytes a sec. I had them before too. 200Kbytes I considered blazingly fast, until I tried other ISPs.
I'm on Sky now, and while I appear to only be getting 8 of the advertised 16Meg, at least it's stable and I actually get decent speeds.
Like with any broadband provider in the uk, your connection is luck of the draw.
Virgin have never had a 24mbit package, did you mean 20? Or was he in a non-cabled area and getting virgin's adsl offering?
I've had three addresses round the country with ntl/virgin and have always got the advertised speeds - I had a bad ubr in leeds that took 4 months of complaining to get sorted (was a crazy ping issue more than anything) but it was fixed eventually and they always paid me back my rental after fighting on the phone - if you're unlucky with your connection on a bt wholesale based adsl isp you don't really have any chance of a fix. Have you seen some of the transit links that these isps have and share with others? Have you heard what some of them have been doing with respect to 'new' bandwidth hogs like iplayer?
Sky are one of the best llu providers but like with anything here, it's luck. If loads of new subscribers saturate their hardware in the exchange you have to pray to the sun gods it'll be upgraded, and they're still stuck with our national infastructure anyway. A working 50mbit connection with like 6.25MBs download is pretty decent compared to your 1MB/s sky connection (do they have a tiered pricing structure, are you paying double what you should be?)
BT are rolling out fibre (I'll believe it when they offer me a product), but it looks like the usual incompetant accounting decisions - looking at the books for the next couple of years instead of the bigger picture, bodging our comms slowly and expensively forward.
Virgin have never had a 24mbit package, did you mean 20? Or was he in a non-cabled area and getting virgin's adsl offering?
I've had three addresses round the country with ntl/virgin and have always got the advertised speeds - I had a bad ubr in leeds that took 4 months of complaining to get sorted (was a crazy ping issue more than anything) but it was fixed eventually and they always paid me back my rental after fighting on the phone - if you're unlucky with your connection on a bt wholesale based adsl isp you don't really have any chance of a fix. Have you seen some of the transit links that these isps have and share with others? Have you heard what some of them have been doing with respect to 'new' bandwidth hogs like iplayer?
Sky are one of the best llu providers but like with anything here, it's luck. If loads of new subscribers saturate their hardware in the exchange you have to pray to the sun gods it'll be upgraded, and they're still stuck with our national infastructure anyway. A working 50mbit connection with like 6.25MBs download is pretty decent compared to your 1MB/s sky connection (do they have a tiered pricing structure, are you paying double what you should be?)
BT are rolling out fibre (I'll believe it when they offer me a product), but it looks like the usual incompetant accounting decisions - looking at the books for the next couple of years instead of the bigger picture, bodging our comms slowly and expensively forward.
Yep, as well as being slow anyway (100k on a 1mb plan) at peak times our bandwidth is cut dramatically, often I can't watch any kind of streaming video such as iPlayer.
I don't any of those problems with my Virgin cable broadband. I'm on the 10Mb package and always get between 8 and 10Mb download speed.
Attachments
I guess the rest of the users on the network and the location can vary your connection. I don't think suppliers should be able to advertise so ambiguously though.
Could our wireless be the bottleneck?
I get similar speeds on wireless and ethernet.
I'm in one of the first areas eligible for the 50Mb upgrade so I don't know if that means we have a higher quality set-up where I live.
Virgin Media postcode check said:
Oh my. I just came online as I'm fed up with there service. I used to use BT and life was could and constant at 6Mb (I tested it). Then I tried virgin as they had a special offer for £10. It looked the same deal along the same line but it isn't. My speed dropped to 3Mb. I shrugged it off as being cheaper. Then they hit me with fair use which doesn't slow me down, it's more like I don't have internet. Speed tests don't even work. The Iplayer in my experience is blocked at any time of day and torrents itunes or any downloading if it takes more than 5 minutes entirely locks up the internet. They seem to be making plans to offer your details to copyright people to see if your illegal and I presume this downloading prblem is part of this policing. It cost me £15 phonecall just to find out information. The final kicker (I think) was my service has gone £10, £15 and this month £18 so I have to make another phonecall that costs that to sort it.
There is nothing that virgin do well. Every sector they buy into, they do badly in (apart from financially of course). The odd good story isn't good enough and I urge everyone to get another provider as this speed increase will benefit very few but it will convince a lot to take up another contract with this god awful company.
The phonecall will involve me canceling as I can't justify such an expensive phonecall without leaving them.
The throttling of my internet with or without any download happens every single evening and weekend without fail. They never allow me full speed at these times. I guess they give it to you guys who get decent speeds.
There is nothing that virgin do well. Every sector they buy into, they do badly in (apart from financially of course). The odd good story isn't good enough and I urge everyone to get another provider as this speed increase will benefit very few but it will convince a lot to take up another contract with this god awful company.
The phonecall will involve me canceling as I can't justify such an expensive phonecall without leaving them.
The throttling of my internet with or without any download happens every single evening and weekend without fail. They never allow me full speed at these times. I guess they give it to you guys who get decent speeds.
Well, that's a big ol' fat load of crapola. Firstly, they don't do a 24MB plan. Secondly, 50kbps is slow as hell and would never get that low on a cable service. Big ol' load of ****.
Why did the phone call cost £15. It's free to call customer care from a Virgin phone line?
Why did the phone call cost £15. It's free to call customer care from a Virgin phone line?
Not for broadband.
If it's VW's fault though they refund you.
Customer support for broadband has been free for about a year, they had a massive amount of criticism when they started charging and eventually backtracked. You still have to pay for dial up support though.
http://www.virginmedia.com/help/broadband/broadband-helpline-faqs.php
They charged me (and refunded) about 6 months ago when I needed my modem replaced. Those bastards!
They charged me (and refunded) about 6 months ago when I needed my modem replaced. Those bastards!
My mistake, it's only been free since the 1st of June.
Sorry if I seemed a bit, insane at the time of posting or whatever, but WTF? OK, it's 20Mbit, but still. And yes, 50KB is possible on cable. The 20mbit speed is the maximum possible, not what you will get.
I don't want to start a flamewar, but seriously.
...
Back on topic: It seems to me that people in different areas get different speeds. That, or some of us use our internet too much so we're getting throttled down like mad...
My net connection is 1.5Mb at best. I wish Virgin had decided to expand their cable coverage rather than just boosting speeds for people who already get amongst the fastest connections. Can't really blame them though, it's about population density I guess. What should happen is the government forcing BT to upgrade their network for everyone, or part nationalise it for the same result.
At least I'm never going to hit my monthly data cap(!)
Anyone who uses BT as an ISP shouldn't do so btw, because of Phorm/Webwise, which is horrible.
At least I'm never going to hit my monthly data cap(!)
Anyone who uses BT as an ISP shouldn't do so btw, because of Phorm/Webwise, which is horrible.
When they were Blueyonder they were great, I was an advocate of their service so much so I got a few of mates to sign up. Then (literally) the day they became Virgin (probably coincidence) I had no end of problems and they just didn't want to know. I had been with them since 1996 (i Think) when they first launched in Sheffield as Telewest, my modem was the same one as the day we signed up and I thought maybe it had given up but they refused to replace it, even though they give out free ones to new customers.
Yup. I signed up when it was CableLondon (incompetent shower). Things look up when Telewest took it over and improved no end when it became Blueyonder. Any hint of a problem and I could get through on a freephone number to a real engineer, not a call centre drone, who would sort any issue out on the spot.
I moved one mile up the road in London to a former NTL area and had to re-sign with that shower. What a contrast. Botched set up left me ringing India and enduring 10 minutes of their reading from a prepared script before I was allowed to explain the problem. Then I was charged for the call at premium rates. When I called up another to complain about this, they refunded me the money but then charged me for that call.
I endured frequent dropouts before I gladly dropped the service at the end of the yearly contract. Despite terminating, Virgin, as NTL had become, carried on direct debiting my account for another two months before I got the bank to stop that. I kissed that overcharge goodbye. Could not stomach dealing with Customer Disservice again. No surprise that there was an online community NTL:Hell dedicated to trying to sort out problems that NTL couldn't/wouldn't deal with.
To be fair, I always got the advertised speeds. Even now, my brother is still with Virgin (ex Blueyonder) in the Midlands and gets the full 20Mbs speed on download.
Unlike BT, Virgin has some incentive to increase FTTwherever, since it wants to peddle media as well as broadband. It just needs to make the financial case. BT won't because there is no money in telecommunications any more, so ADSL is looking like a dead end in the UK at the moment.
50kb on a 20mb fiber optic cable connection. It's patently balls to anybody that uses the service. If it was 15 - or even throttled to 2mb for a very short time due to unbelievably heavy usage, then maybe. However, complaining that somebody got slower than dial-up speed out of a super fast 20mb cable connection is just crapola.
Fibre optic cable isn't like phone line, they don't advertise a 20mb service and provide 4mb. You might lose a little through contention, you might be capped at certain periods but you won't get a 50kb connection from a 20mb cable service.
I was on Virgin's 20MB service until last week when I moved house into the countryside where there is no cable service. I was always very, very impressed with Virgin - I consistently got the full throughput and was consistently able to download at 2.2 megabytes per second. I'm currently waiting for my ADSL connection to be activated which will give me a pretty pathetic connection speed of 3Mb/s which is less than 10% of the speed of the new Virgin service Fortunately, living in the country does have other advantages to make up for the loss of super fast cable
Fortunately, living in the country does have other advantages to make up for the loss of super fast cable