News - Virgin Media pilots 200MB broadband

[Grey M@a]

Thats what confuses me... NTL hasnt been taken over, they owned part of virgin mobile or something and decided to use the Virgin brand as its more well known(this is a fact btw, was on their website ).

My service has gone poor from them now, i get throttled from downloading at night aswell now which they dont mention so its ghost throttling which im sure is illegal since no mention in the t&c. I wanted to move to o2 but no bt line and dont want to move to find i have a bad connection there to.

I've been on them since the early days of Telewest when they first hit our area in 2000 so everytime a name change has come or a new owner the service has gradually got worse as a result :/ I used to swear by them but now I am paying for a service I get no where near what I am paying for. Also the fact their support is now off shored and they can't understand a single word you are saying and they are reading from a script that has nothing to do with what you are asking.

[Hicks12]

Oh thats the exact same story for me , been a customer for ages(since the days dial up was good!). The off shored call centres pee me off as they really are bad, the guy i spoke to kept contradicting himself as he was saying that im throttled since i have been downloading after 12am(off peak) and then later on he says either stop downloading for a few days or just download off peak, like WTF? You told me im getting throttled cause i downloaded off peak....

[Agent]

Nah I double checked that and also had checks done pays to have a few friends who work there.

VM can't even stop cloners joining their network, so anything they say in regards to it is a guess at best. They simply don't have the equipment in place to stop cloning on their older network segment (yet).

[Jay]

What router has over 100Mbps WAN port?

[pipTheGeek]

I have just had VM 50Mb broadband installed. So far so good, well, with the broadband performance anyway. To those of you complaining that the VM network is over-subscribed. ASFAIK ALL domestic broadband suppliers over sell their bandwidth. Most have a contention ratio of around 50:1. It would be nice if this was something that was included in the sales material though. Does anyone know what contention ratio VM run at?
Now time for my complaint. Has anyone here run into VM £150 cap? Prior to our move to 50Mb we had the VIP package, along with phone calls this meant our bill was usually £90 a month. Add to that the installation fee for 50Mb and we ended up owing over £150. I need to stress at this point that we have never missed a payment to VM in the 6 years we have been a customer, nor have we yet had the bill for this amount. Anyway, they cut us off! My wife tried to use broadband, nothing, tried the phone, also nothing. Contacted VM (thankfully the phone did allow this) and they explained that we had been cut off because we owed more than £150. We paid over the phone and are now back on. I don't know how long it took to re-connect us because we were both out, but I am not impressed.

[JackaL]

I have just had VM 50Mb broadband installed. So far so good, well, with the broadband performance anyway. To those of you complaining that the VM network is over-subscribed. ASFAIK ALL domestic broadband suppliers over sell their bandwidth. Most have a contention ratio of around 50:1. It would be nice if this was something that was included in the sales material though. Does anyone know what contention ratio VM run at?
Now time for my complaint. Has anyone here run into VM £150 cap? Prior to our move to 50Mb we had the VIP package, along with phone calls this meant our bill was usually £90 a month. Add to that the installation fee for 50Mb and we ended up owing over £150. I need to stress at this point that we have never missed a payment to VM in the 6 years we have been a customer, nor have we yet had the bill for this amount. Anyway, they cut us off! My wife tried to use broadband, nothing, tried the phone, also nothing. Contacted VM (thankfully the phone did allow this) and they explained that we had been cut off because we owed more than £150. We paid over the phone and are now back on. I don't know how long it took to re-connect us because we were both out, but I am not impressed.

iv heard of this it spawns from days gone by where ppl bills were ran up to £400-500 never paid them then moved house i think its set to that so it cuts you of as soon as your second months bill kicks in

[crossy]

Oh thats the exact same story for me , been a customer for ages(since the days dial up was good!). The off shored call centres pee me off as they really are bad, the guy i spoke to kept contradicting himself as he was saying that im throttled since i have been downloading after 12am(off peak) and then later on he says either stop downloading for a few days or just download off peak, like WTF? You told me im getting throttled cause i downloaded off peak....

Same for me - I was a content Telewest customer for ages (total loss of service = 30 minutes in 3 years - I was happy). Then NTL took over and the speeds dropped, the branding changed and the helldesks got sent to India. And worst of all, the service became less reliable, (I work from home, so this is a big deal for me).

As to the throttling - if I download between 6am and 10.30am then I've seen measured download speeds (real downloads, not tests) of 1150 - 1190KB/s which is near as dammit full tilt on my L grade 10Mb/s service. Then the throttle cuts in and it goes down to 300-400KB/s, then in the afternoon we're down to <100KB/s. Argh! Weekends tend to be less predicable - some times the 'golden time' lasts longer, sometimes it's shorter.

In which case surely the new service is going to be along the lines of:
Oh look at my fancy new service, isn't it really, really quick, much better than ... oh damn rate caps - I'm back to 1Mb/s!

Tip by the way - I've found that if I can phone during business hours (especially in the morning) I don't get the folks in India, instead it's UK based (or at least seems to be). And the folks there are old-school Telewest levels of service.

Oh last gripe for any fellow VM "L" customers - I'm paying &#163;25pm, and according to the website "L" is now &#163;20. Figured I could get my bill reduced, only to be told that I was getting lots of freebies (none of which I use) which accounts for the price difference - so no refund!

Roll on 21CN when I can finally get a VM alternative that's going to be faster than 2Mb/s...

Bob

[crossy]

What router has over 100Mbps WAN port?

Oh easy one - DLink DIR-655 - which according to the spec sheet has:

o IEEE 802.11n (Draft) wireless LAN specification
o Compatible with 11g and 11b wireless networks
o 10/100/1000 Mbps WAN port
o Built-in 4-port 10/100/1000 Mbps switch

All Gigabit ports - nice. Likewise, there's the Belkin N1 Vision which also claims "5xRJ45 10/100/1000 Mbps (4xLAN, 1xWAN)". The DLink looks nicer (to me at least) but I'll bet the Belkin is cheaper.

Not sure if Netgear or Linksys have something similar because both of these companies don't seem to want to quote proper specs.

Bob

[Hicks12]

I pay &#163;12.50 for my Large package, it was from haggling though as we got upgraded to XL tv and this loyalty package which is &#163;25 discount(makes tv/bb &#163;12.50 each) since they had lost sky channels along with sky offering cheaper broadband.

[Whiternoise]

What they SHOULD be working on is:

1. Improving their network infrastructure so that people don't have to worry about throttling or contention. 200 is overkill in my opinion, university connections that hit around 80-100mbs tops are more than fast enough. Even my "24" (read 16)mbs connection from Be is more than suitable for streaming HD - first thing i did when i got my 22" monitor was try out some trailers from Apple, lag wasn't an issue.

2. Give everyone decent upload speeds - in a world that is dominated by video streaming websites, people posting 8mb Jpegs onto Flickr from their new billion megapixel cameras and so forth - it is ironic that you can get a 24mb connection, but be limited by 1mb upload speed. Really frustrating when you're doing some web design, you want to put a video up, but it takes half an hour to FTP it!

3. Concentrate on keeping download speeds stable to begin with!

I'd much rather pay a little extra to guarantee that i always get XXmbs than pay a little extra for loads of extra speed that drops in the evening because everyone is watching superduper HD and all the light is getting gridlocked!

I somehow doubt they'll throttle people. It would be more than useless to advertise a broadband line capable of streaming a HD film in an instant - but then throttles you because you've downloaded 8 gigs in 5 minutes (almost possible at 25MB/s). As i mentioned, 200mbs is overkill even for the most ardent pirates. You could buffer an entire double layer DVD in 8 minutes, a full HD Blu Ray stream could easily be done in 20 - heh Sony are going to have a field day if internet speeds come into play that are actually usable for pirating Blu Ray content!

[explicit4u]

In my experience you'll never see max speeds & if you do, it'll be between 2 and 6am. The rest of the time it'll be crawling along at 512k/s owing to 'network issues'.

It's laughable isn't it. They can barely get their 20MB lines sorted let alone 200MB. They just need to give up and fix what they have now.

Maybe for you, i always receive 2.5MB/s and around 150KB/s no matter what time of day.

How many seconds of downloads can they do before the connection will be crippled by a cap?

50MB currently has no CAP, if Virgin do see the LIGHT i would hope that they see that this package is for the hardcore users and that it shouldn't fall victim to restrictions.

200MB Down / 768Kb up knowing this bunch of monkeys, I would rather have a decent upload, instead of all these speed increases they keep putting in.

Lee

+1, they should dedicate more of their resources for better upload speeds, i want 50MB/10MB at the minimum, countries like Sweden get to enjoy a full 100MB symmetrical line!!!

[Biscuit]

Nah I double checked that and also had checks done pays to have a few friends who work there. If I do most the surfing after 2am the line is fast then 6am hits and the throttle kicks in. So does everyone elses in the few streets surround me and we are all showing the same throttling at the same times. Virgin know of it and I have had out of them they are looking into so new cable that was put in place but nothing since then. So now I make em pay, between 2am - 4am I download like no tomorrow.

Tbh since virgin took over the service took a nose dive even more. I can also get Be 24mb adsl for almost &#163;15 cheaper than the 20MB cable line.

I think what you might find is it isnt throttling at all its simply the switchers and servers in the exchange are totally overloaded as thats what was happening to me. As im living in a heavily populated student area on a 2mb line with no extra phone line, you can imagine everyone bought into it and between 7am and 3am the servers where at 100&#37; load. Took me a while and a lot of phone calls to get told this due to the offshore customer services but eventually you can get through to a few ok guys.

They eventually upgraded it all and it was a bit better but not much. Switched to 10mb now and im pretty sure it runs of totally different circuits so the only time i ever have issues is 4-9 but thats totally understandable.

I would keep bugging them and threaten to leave, we managed to get all the costs of the phone calls back and some free line rental

With regards to the 200mb line, good to see the test are going out there but there is just nooooo chance in hell its gunna work with these stupid limits they impose on us.

[pipTheGeek]

iv heard of this it spawns from days gone by where ppl bills were ran up to £400-500 never paid them then moved house i think its set to that so it cuts you of as soon as your second months bill kicks in

Except we hadn't even had the FIRST bill that was over £150. It was almost instant, as soon as the install charge went on our account, they cut us off. I don't mind being cut off if I don't pay, but I would like to have a CHANCE to pay first.

I heard that the 50Mb trial had 5Mb upstream on some of the modems that were being trialled. But the modem that has been picked can only deliver 1.5Mb up. Which sucks. I would prefer 20Mb each way instead of 50Mb down and 1.5Mb up. A neighbour is looking at ADSL broadband and most of the suppliers seem to quote 1.2Mb up. But isn't VM 10Mb down only 512Kb up? Why are they so far ahead on downstream and so far behind on up? Am I being cynical to think it is because the downstream is the one that marketing get to use?

I haven't had 50Mb long enough to comment on its performance, but I rarely had down stream of less than 15Mb while I was on the 20Mb service. I think that is a reasonable speed, especially given that the drop could have been caused by the server that was running the speedtest not by VM at my end.

[JackaL]

VM 10Mb down only 512Kb up?

thats about right but uk ISPs upstream has always sucked basicly because they dont want ppl hosting game servers / files servers from home and sucking all of the bandwidth out of there network.

[Biscuit]

i agree though some more upload bandwidth would be greatly appreciated and i would happily sacrifice a bit of download for it. Im sure if a few companies used the fact all other companies offer their deals based on download speeds creatively it would stir up a bit of fuss.

[explicit4u]

Anyone else think there should be a minimum 5:1 Download:Upload Ratio?