Virgin Media Broadband Customer?

[Steve Marshall]

You might want to pay attention to their latest comical broadband limits they have put in place as of today!

Pay attention to the upload limits

If only I was closer to my local BT cab

http://my.virginmedia.com/traffic-manag ... holds.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

5790-new-virgin-media-traffic-management.jpg

So if you are a 60meg customer (3meg upload speed), and you upload 600meg between 4-11pm your upload will be cut by 60% (1.2meg), upload another 300meg in the following hour, your upload will be cut by 75% (0.75meg).
"Ultra Fast" .... not


Rant over, but if you are thinking of switching ISP be warned. BT & Sky FTTC are really unlimited

[midlandsfirst]

am thinking of changing to BT FTTC here. Cabinet is on next corner.

Currently with o2 who i am more than happy with (getting consistently approx 19meg on an up to 20meg unlimited contract) but they are selling their broadband customers to sky and have had probs with them before...

[Andy Hicks]

Got to say that in 3 years i've only had one bit of bother with Sky, can't remember what the problem was but i was talked through it quickly enough.

[midlandsfirst]

probs were with the company in general not the broadband - their billing department cocking up when i cancelled my tv and the hassle i encountered trying to get them to admit their mistake and correct it

Steve

[Steve Marshall]

Just sit tight and see what happens when sky take over your bb, after all you won't be under any contract so you can leave without any hassle.

Sky fibre and bt infinity run off the same bt cabs anyway so the service should be the same, although as you point out billing is a different matter.

Both sky and bt have removed all their caps and limits and virgin just seem to be making theirs worse all the tim joker's really

Sent from my HTC Desire using Tapatalk 2

[midlandsfirst]

the problem is the line rental has to be transferred to sky, and it appears i may be under a contract once the line is transferred...

[Albert H]

You might want to pay attention to their latest comical broadband limits they have put in place as of today!
Pay attention to the upload limits
If only I was closer to my local BT cab

Do they have the gall to charge you money for that "service"?

Where I live (top of North London) we had "Cable Camden" who installed a coax network back in the early 80s. The reception of Crystal Palace TV is notoriously bad over here, and Alexandra Palace repeater is a 10 Watt joke, so they got >95% of households to sign up. They provided (initially) 9 analogue TV channels (pretty good for the time), and when they decided to provide internet sevice, it was fine.

After a buy-out, they became "Cable London" and their network was extended. They lost a few viewers to Sky, but kept about 80% of the households connected. Their service remained about the same, though the prices went up a bit.

They then sold out to Telewest, and the rot began to set in. Prices rose rapidly, and service quality declined. They went digital and supplied new set-top boxes to all their subscribers. They had about 30 channels and a 1M internet service, but it was costly (about £60 per month for the full effort). Service was getting to the point of being a joke (it was off more than it was on) and then things went from bad to abysmal.....

Virgin took over. What a shower of incompetent morons! They tried to sell "20 Meg" internet connections that weren't actually capable of better than 1M, and they kept trying to add ever more channels. They then started this silly "fibre network" boast - it's bullshit. Their network is mostly ratty, old coax from the 70s and 80s (mostly rotted these days) and twisted pair cable. They do have some fibre to their street corner distribution cabinets - in a few areas - but there's no FTTH (fibre to the household) at all. Around here they now have less than 5% of households and can't understand why they can't sign up anybody, despite offering free installation and a pair of free Tivo boxes to new customers. They simply can't get their heads around the fact that the very best set-top box is just a lump of useless plastic unless it is receiving something useful...

I used BeThere ADSL2+ for the last few years (at a genuine, consistent 21Megs), but they've just been bought by Sky and the prices are going up. Remember too that if you ever phone Sky customer services you always get that annoying Scottish woman....

So.... I phoned BT (against my better judgement) and enquired about their VDSL service ("Infinity 2"). They installed three days later, and apart from having to run a slightly unsightly ethernet cable down my hallway, the installation was pretty good.

Their router is a piece of junk unfortunately, and you are forced to be a "Fon" base station - they claim it doesn't impinge on your bandwidth, but I can assure you that it does. The "Fon" signal also degrades your personal wireless signal.... I disabled the wireless on their router, used it as a wired switch, and connected a cheap TP-Link wireless router to it and the problem was solved. I get 90 - 100Megs on the wired connections (like the desktop machine I'm using right now) and 50 - 60 Megs over the wireless network (these are genuine measurements incidentally - I don't use Windoze with its inflated figures, I use Linux and have a high quality, worry-free computing experience and can do proper measurements!). Upload speeds are around 30 - 50 Megs!

So.... I'd recommend BT Infinity 2, with the slight proviso that you really want to cripple the wireless on their router and supply your own wireless router!

[Albert H]

the problem is the line rental has to be transferred to sky, and it appears i may be under a contract once the line is transferred...

You will be. They've gone with the "implied contract" - the first time you pay anything to them, they consider you to have signed up! After all - why would you pay them money if you didn't have a contract with them......

[Steve Marshall]

I guess i'm quite lucky to be in a reasonable area for Virgin Media, not over utilized, which is a big problem for them now as they have started to sell ever higher speeds.....

That said, I have looked at Infinity, but being about 700 meters from my cab, they estimate 35 down and 5 up for me, maybe this will improve when they roll out vectoring on their network to boost speeds at greater distances. They reckon that with vectoring you'll be able to get 100meg at 300-400 meters from the cab, so i'll keep an eye on it.

Being as the FTTC network is new they've thought ahead and have plenty of bandwidth there already, whereas cable networks were built in the 1990s. Cable also has a massive upstream contention problem compared to downstream, without a network rebuild costing millions, if not more, that's never gonna change. The only thing they can do, which is what they are being forced to do now in over utilized areas, is a Cat-C resegment of nodes, in effect cutting them in half or quarter depending on usage and getting more fibre out there. All that costs money, something they don't like spending, as you've already said.

So what do they do, to save money they introduce traffic management, why well because they want to willy wave and say they are the fastest ISP. The network being in the state it is at present is what happens when you under invest in it and let you PR man decide which route the company is gonna take, without bothering to ask the network bods if it possible