News - Virgin trials 1.5Gb broadband at Silicon Roundabout

[HEXUS]

A cunning PR stunt with the added benefit of pleasing the government too.

Read more.

[scaryjim]

Wow! I must sign up to Virgin immediately!

...

What's that Virgin? You don't serve my street in a densely populated suburb of Manchester?

Ah well, copper wires it is.

[AlexKitch]

Wow! I must sign up to Virgin immediately!

...

What's that Virgin? You don't serve my street in a densely populated suburb of Manchester?

Ah well, copper wires it is.

+1. I can't get Virgin Broadband on Deansgate. DEANSGATE.

On a separate annoyance, why are all these super awesome broadband trials always in the South?

[Jay]

Now I know where the 19.5Mbps went from my "20Mbps" connection. Its like they want to rub peoples noses in the fact that they give some areas a really poor service.

+1. I can't get Virgin Broadband on Deansgate. DEANSGATE.

On a separate annoyance, why are all these super awesome broadband trials always in the South?

Do you really need to ask that question?

[Defiant]

Moved House

50mb cable down to crappy 6.7mb adsl2, I'm right in the middle of Edinburgh in a densely housed area in a new build flats that has at least 100 flats in the block.

Yet Virgin the bunch of tools they are only layed cable to the street next to mine and didnt even consider extending the cable to a possible 100 new clients. Pisses me off consider it would have been 50m of fible cable to make it possible.

What is the ultimate insult is the fact that I'm ADSL 2 and only getting 6.7mb. I'm less than 1300 meters from it via BT cable street routing. The flat is less than 5 years old and it was built with a central DP and cabling to ensure it was done right.

Sad state of affairs

Edit: I came home to find its now at 4mb on a ADSL2 line, BT should be ashamed of this level of service!

[Tunnah]

i live in old trafford and about 10 or so years ago a C&W van was stolen and torched, with an absolute fortune's worth of equipment in it
they've not been back since ha

on another note, yeah super fast broadband is great and all but what is the point in 1.5gps, anything over 100mbit is absolutely ridiculous for any sort of legal purpose

stop these stupid penis measuring stunts and just focus on spreading out the bandwidth - remember, it's not how hard you do the 1 woman, but how many women you do!

[Tpyo]

I moved less than 200 yards (effectively to the road just the other side of the main road from where I had been). My previous house had Virgin cable. My new house? Sorry not available.

I really like the actual cable servie I had (both at my previous address and the one before, going back several years now), with my speeds being relatively respectable at both previous locations. What consistently stinks is their customer service if you ever do have a problem.

[Andi-C]

If it's going to use the so called "Super Hub" don't touch it ! I moved from a stable 20mb to the 50mb & had to take the Super Hub & it does nothing but disco's twice a week, over heats, locks up & WIFI range is rubbish...

[mcmiller]

Is this some kind of sick joke?!? I spent 2 hrs on the phone today to their supposed "Virgin Media customer service team" arguing that there is more than 1 kind of router, that my local router in Reading is over subscribed (i have a fault ref confirming this) and then they tell me that there is another fault and ETA to fix is 10th August, BYE - not our problem.

I posted a angry, very frustrated and annoyed post on the Virgin Media community support forums (actually hoping that they would assist and resolve it, I'm stupid) and they deleted it (afterwards I told the mod that i pay for a service if they choose to have a forum as a place to put issues, do not to delete my post, I will be using that as evidence of their poor customer service and lodging a formal complaint about him). Another mod also told me not to contact their mods without their permission.

Eventually i got put through to the India Virgin Media customer support team who was very good and offered me £30!! but the call alone will have cost £12.

The whole attitude of Virgin Media today has been we don't care that you have an issue, that it is interfering with your work (I'm now behind thanks to them) go and bother someone else.

[Terbinator]

+1. I can't get Virgin Broadband on Deansgate. DEANSGATE.

On a separate annoyance, why are all these super awesome broadband trials always in the South?

If you live on Deansgate can't you afford some sort of business/enterprise companies BB offerings, anyway?

[crossy]

If it's going to use the so called "Super Hub" don't touch it ! I moved from a stable 20mb to the 50mb & had to take the Super Hub & it does nothing but disco's twice a week, over heats, locks up & WIFI range is rubbish...

I couldn't agree more - the damned SH I've got has an in-house range of about 5m. Heck, it's so bad that I can get a better signal from my neighbour's router next-door, and I've had to put in a Devolo wireless extender just to be able to use my wireless internet in all the rooms of the house!

mcmiller: if you think the virginmedia forum moderators are useless, you want to try petforums - they're such a bunch of c**ts that they make the VM ones look like a model of help and sense, (but still nowhere as good as the Hexus one's of course!)

Back to the article - 1.5g gig is nice from a theoretical, tackle-waving point of view - but I can't really see the point for real-life domestic customers (business customers are, of course, a whole different kettle of fish). Of course, if VM want some real achievement, then they could always improve the customer service and do something about the discrepancies in the service quality (where some areas get a fraction of the speed that their neighbours get), although my speed is okay.

[Dareos]

Just a bit of derailing going on there, a company tries to break the usual bandwidth barriers in a very small area and gets slammed for not providing it to the rest of the country.

I kinda agree on the shub tho, dont like it much at all. My advice on it tho, is to change the wireless channel to 7 or 11 after a factory reset, usually solves most issues. If the range doesnt increase, they will replace it.

As far as expansion to new streets etc goes, as far as I understand it, Virgin are currently more focused on increasing bandwidth to high utilisation areas, loads of work going on atm across the country. Personally I agree with this move, Virgin have a customer base, lets have more of them completely satisfied before bringing new areas on board.

Also please bear in mind that Virgin did not create the network, it was created by several other companies who have in turn sold on to bigger companies, resulting in NTL :Telewest with several different maintenance solutions from different providers, different backbones and headends to deal with. Virgin are in the process of merging as many of these processes as possible to make them simpler and more straightforward (doesn't always work that way as unforeseen complications arise).

anyways, i would love a gigabit connection, i'll suffer along with 50 meg till my area gets upgraded to the 100 tho, and will still pass on a shub

[mcmiller]

Just a bit of derailing going on there, a company tries to break the usual bandwidth barriers in a very small area and gets slammed for not providing it to the rest of the country.

I'm not slamming them for not providing it to the rest of the country, I'm slamming them for their attitude 'Its not our problem, you'll just have to wait till its fixed!' and 'Offcom, trading standards, consumer rights who cares about them'

[mcmiller]

mcmiller: if you think the virginmedia forum moderators are useless, you want to try petforums - they're such a bunch of c**ts that they make the VM ones look like a model of help and sense, (but still nowhere as good as the Hexus one's of course!)

Yeah it does make me appreciate the mods on here and also Scans customer service when I have had issues with them. I'm going to use the screen caps of what the mods did on my letters to them.

[spraint]

anyways, i would love a gigabit connection, i'll suffer along with 50 meg till my area gets upgraded to the 100 tho, and will still pass on a shub

Not had a problem with the shub. Mind you, I only use it for its proper purpose, which is a cable modem and pass on the routing work to a real router.

As for Gb cable. Not for years or for affordable. I doubt there is much infrastructure ready for 100Mb/s yet. Hope I'm wrong, though.

[Dareos]

I think about 40-50% of VM's network can take 100 Mb atm, its kinda expensive atm tho, unfortunately the uddingston headend aint been upgraded yet


http://shop.virginmedia.com/content/...t_12_07_11.pdf

link to whats available where

Bear in mind tho, that this uses the same system as 30/50 meg services, so if theres a utilisation issue in the area, or something similar, its not going to be any better.

Been a couple of cases I have seen where downgrading to 10/20 gets a better connection due to less utilisation of those services in an area, rare tho.