Re: General advice needed on a brodband service provider
Just worth me asking this....though I'm sure it's not at issue...I'll still ask it as I've asked it before and got the answer I dreaded.
Is,it virgin cable? Or have you been sold virgin broadband abd it's justthat ADSL 2?
I ask because I'm still amazed that virgin post mailers offering their broadband to areas with none of their fibre installed abd then install BT broadband under their own,network in the way sky abd talk talk etc do.
Re: General advice needed on a brodband service provider
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Zak33
Just worth me asking this....though I'm sure it's not at issue...I'll still ask it as I've asked it before and got the answer I dreaded.
Is,it virgin cable? Or have you been sold virgin broadband abd it's justthat ADSL 2?
I ask because I'm still amazed that virgin post mailers offering their broadband to areas with none of their fibre installed abd then install BT broadband under their own,network in the way sky abd talk talk etc do.
It is fiber optic cable (thick white cable) and the people who lived here before had VM tv, the cable used for that was then used to put the router upstairs in my computer room.
Re: General advice needed on a brodband service provider
That's,good. I wad,worried you'd,been sold a puppy.
Not that,the dog you've bought will hunt...but at least it's full grown and,might get better
Re: General advice needed on a brodband service provider
Quote:
Originally Posted by
AledJ
It is fiber optic cable (thick white cable) and the people who lived here before had VM tv, the cable used for that was then used to put the router upstairs in my computer room.
It's actually coax cable that comes into your house. It makes me wonder how companies will market actual FTTH when it becomes widespread!
100GB really isn't much to be downloading in a month nowadays - a single game download can be upwards of 50GB! I'm on Virgin myself and don't experience throttling due to downloading. Last time I checked there's no cap on downloading for 50Mb+, but throttling does still apply on uploading.
There are some technical reasons Virgin's upload is currently much lower than download speed, there's less capacity on the upstream and it's technically quite different to the upstream, having less spectral efficiency, fewer channels and working on a partially collision-based system. That's not to say more bandwidth isn't possible on a DOCSIS network (other countries offer symmetrical services) but it's not a case of just flicking a switch for Virgin.
WRT the OP - probably obvious questions but are certain protocols/sites affected by the slowness or does it seem to be everything? Considering VM have implied it's a local (maybe fibre node) congestion issue, I'd guess the latter. And the other one - are you connecting wired or wireless?
You could also try posting on their forums. I've posted there more than a couple of times to get power level problems sorted and it tends to be much less hassle than overseas call centres. http://community.virginmedia.com/t5/Set-up/bd-p/Setup
Re: General advice needed on a brodband service provider
The obvious first step would seem to be to downgrade to a cheaper Virgin package - if you're only going to get 10 Mbps while you pay for the 150 package, why not switch to paying for the bottom package (50 Mbps?) instead?
Once you're out of contract, if I were you I'd try to switch to FTTC. I jumped from Virgin to FTTC nearly 3 years ago now (Vivaciti at first, then AAISP), and haven't regretted it at all. I still remember the first day: I'd already got Sky, and tried their on-demand services through the cable modem - result: buffering, before things would play. As soon as I switched the cables over to the FTTC link, I could select a title, and by the time I'd read "please wait" it was ready to play!
Virgin have been able to claim some impressive theoretical peak speeds, but I very rarely saw anything close - whether SCPing from a fast server of my own, or other high-end sites (like university systems with insane bandwidth available on their end and into LINX). The poor SCP throughput was one factor in leaving: they'd never admit whether they throttle it or not, but something was clearly slowing it down a lot.