News - US cable group Liberty Global to buy Virgin Media

[Saracen]

Yup Saracen but it's nearly always internal wiring or something on the customers side that is out of the control of Sky or even BT for that matter that can make your speed rubbish. Virgin are lucky enough to be able to control this side far more easily because of their system (if you can call that) whereas ADSL is still tied to old infrastructure. Even so, that seems quite low. I was comparing Sky to other ADSL suppliers, not Virgin. I'm holding my breath too with Virgin now they're American owned...

BT installed the new master socket, as Sky were effectively a reseller. The service was provided to me by Sky, but to Sky by BT. In any event, the wiring from the master socket is under BT's control, not mine. Whatever the relationship between Sky and BT, though, it's none of my business, as I have a contract with Sky and none at all with BT. The router is connected directly to the master socket, which is under Sky/BT control, and the router is as supplied by Sky. This has all been tested for speed with nothing else connected to it, not even a phone. The speed problems are nothing to do with wiring on my side of the connection, and when I've pursued this with Sky, I've repeatedly been told that the problem is the distance from me to the equipment at the exchange, despite me having specifically queried that before signing up, which is when I was told to expect a minimum of 13Meg.

Needless to say, my house hasn't moved since then, and nor has the exchange.

As it happens, I'm not especially bothered about the speed, as I rarely do anything demanding high speed. But nonetheless, what I get compares extremely poorly compared to what I was promised. The speed provided to me by Sky's broadband is mediocre at best, and woefully inferior to what I get from Virgin.

But that's actually not what I consider to be the worst aspect of Sky. That is reserved for the quality of the TV service, or more specifically, the Sky + box, which is an unmitigated piece of junk, unreliable as hell, constantly causing sound drop-outs, regularly rebooting itself mid-program, and very regularly completely losing one of two inputs, which refuse to come back unless the box is physically turned off for at least 15 minutes.

In short, as you can probably infer, I'm very far from impressed with Sky's offering, and certainly not with their broadband supply to me.

[3dcandy]

Right, so a non LLU service, something that is reknowned to be pants by anybody who has researched it as BT effectively give you a worse service than their customers. I'm refering to LLU based services with equipment from Sky, much much better than BT in the same house from the same exchange. The wiring from the master box could be a wording misunderstanding, I mean the wiring from the master box to your phone etc. post it coming into your house is wholly up to you, not Sky or BT. If you have a rubbish filter (have known them to be faulty as supplied) or bad wiring to your phone, or even as shown to me certain brands of DECT phones with a high output (Panasonics especially) this can cause nearly ALL of the issues you are saying. Don't get me wrong, ADSL is old technology and has major limitations, but Sky aren't bad at all given the variability and things that they have no control over at all. Just as a quick test this week, changed from BT to Sky on 5th. My line used to sync at a tad over 19 meg with BT, 2 days in with Sky I'm at 14 meg and it should continue to rise and I reckon with a quick calculation it should sync at 21 meg. BT at my exchange tops out at 20 meg absolute maximum. Pings have come down from 25 m to 15 m. Websites are snappier and I get far less hangs whilst browsing. Not scientific at all really, but I'm pleased. In my old house, changing from BT to Sky meant pings went from 50m to 30m, sync rate went from 4 meg to 9 meg and things drastically improved. I've not lived in a Virgin cabled area for about 6 years now, but know many many people who do. Horses for courses I guess. I'd also like to point out that somebody else last week who was having problems asked me to take a look. Rerouted some cables, changed filter to a much better one, kept mains feeds away from telephone line and the result was an increase from 2 meg to 4.5 meg and much better service to boot...

Seriously your issues with your Sky box are bad, I'd be inclined to say it's a one off but I have heard some people who have horror stories. Myself however have heard worse stories from Virgin customers with superhubs and tivo boxes than Sky and I know more people who are going back to Sky after having Virgin than are jumping ship the opposite way

[Dareos]

People are always going to move from one to another to get a better deal. Some areas in Virgins network are in serious need of attention (trust me, i deal with this on a daily basis) and others are beyond compare. Sky have to rely on BT for a great deal of their customer base and distance from exchange and poor/old wiring leads to the kind of experience that Saracen has been having. No one company is about to satisfy all of the UK's needs in broadband and TV services, its pretty much an impossible task but as a consumer I am extremely grateful for the competition in the market, as it drives the technology onwards and upwards and our general internet experience is a far better one for it.

Not that these are the only 2 contenders in the UK on the broadband side, there are some fantastic services out there, working wonders with the UK's dated phone infrastructure to bring decent speeds to all sorts of areas, but until either a government run plan to lay fibre to every street or house in the UK is approved and carried out, or a new technology that negates the need for such an undertaking is discovered, then these 2 are going to be the major players as they supply phone, tv and internet access.

I can only hope that after this takeover 2 things happen

1: I still have a job

2: The network is improved upon and expanded

We'll wait and see tho

[Saracen]

Right, so a non LLU service, something that is reknowned to be pants by anybody who has researched it as BT effectively give you a worse service than their customers. I'm refering to LLU based services with equipment from Sky, ....

So am I. My service is LLU.

.... The wiring from the master box could be a wording misunderstanding, I mean the wiring from the master box to your phone etc. post it coming into your house is wholly up to you, not Sky or BT. If you have a rubbish filter (have known them to be faulty as supplied) or bad wiring to your phone, or even as shown to me certain brands of DECT phones with a high output (Panasonics especially) this can cause nearly ALL of the issues you are saying. ...

As I said, this has been tested with NOTHING other than the Sky-supplied router (Netgear 934 IIRC) connected to the line. On top of that, I still have the basic phone the Sky engineer left here. I have tried replacing filters, and so did the Sky engineer. So, three different sets have been used. It made no perceptible difference. I even had the area manager here, and the bloke lives a mile or two from me. He was one of those assuring me what speed I should get .... and his explanation was that it's the distance, and noise ratios, between me and the local exchange, which surprised him because, in his own words, I'm not that far from the exchange. And, as I understand it, this is a 21CN exchange.

What the situation is in general, I've no idea, so I make no generalisations. I can only relate my experience. All I can tell you is that having gone from NTL/Virgin to Sky. both in terms of TV and Broadband, I wish I hadn't, and am about to move back, because Sky are dire in comparison to Virgin. Sky's CS, on the other hand, has been pretty good, and NTL/Virgin's was abysmal.

Note: My Virgin experience has not been within the last couple of years. It could have changed. But when I moved away, the major reason was rank incompetence by admin, especially on the billing side, and an utter inability to get it sorted out.

[1stRaven]

I wouldn't even consider going near Virgin Media with the amount of speed limitations. Better off with an unlimited provider.

The speed limitations are really not an issue as long as you can schedule your downloads etc. Playing games, Iplayer etc wont normally push you over the limits anyway (unless you are the very bottom package).

I have the 100mb service and I pushed the limits with microsoft windows 8 downloads. Even when the service became limited, I was still faster than what I would have been on BT or any of the other providers.

[ik9000]

The speed limitations are really not an issue as long as you can schedule your downloads etc. Playing games, Iplayer etc wont normally push you over the limits anyway (unless you are the very bottom package).

I have the 100mb service and I pushed the limits with microsoft windows 8 downloads. Even when the service became limited, I was still faster than what I would have been on BT or any of the other providers.

That's my experience too. When I had it. Tip - always check when moving house if your ISP can provide at your new address....

[Smudger]

Saracen, it could be the LNB on your dish is knacked. My parents had this happen, Sky keep getting you to go into the hidden menu to reset the LNB, it works for a bit, then stops. In the end, we requested a new box or a new dish, they wanted £65, we threatened to leave, magically, they got an engineer out for free. One advantage with Virgin is that they retain ownership of the box, so if it goes wrong, they fix it.

[Spud1]

When I talk about broadband in this thread I was referring to FTTC/FTTP/Cable rather than traditional ADSL

I put BT on top because their top end services are up to 3x the theortical maximum speed that Virgin offer, and even on their lower end product that I have (approx 80mb, which connects at 67 for me) they are consistently faster than my friends/colleagues on the 100mbit Virgin service - especially at peak times, which is when Virgin connections do seem to just fall over in a big heap (4-10pm).

Never been throttled/shaped noticeably on BT - although note that I never use Bit Torrent so couldn't comment on that side of things..but I really hope that they DO shape/throttle torrents - it's probably why I get the speeds I expect! There are also no hard download limits - like any provider if you go crazy you will have your speed capped - but when the limits on BT are around 300gb..if you download that much without pirating or without running a commercial venture I would seriously be impressed!

My experience with Sky was that their support team on the phone were very good, but their network fell over constantly and they were clearly hampered by Openreach - with BT I have never had a real fault with the service..up 24/7 and it "just works". I dread the day I have to call them (I know their CS reputation) but as it stands, I have not had to right now

[Saracen]

Saracen, it could be the LNB on your dish is knacked. My parents had this happen, Sky keep getting you to go into the hidden menu to reset the LNB, it works for a bit, then stops. In the end, we requested a new box or a new dish, they wanted £65, we threatened to leave, magically, they got an engineer out for free. One advantage with Virgin is that they retain ownership of the box, so if it goes wrong, they fix it.

I appreciate the thought, Smudger, but no, it's not the LNB. Or the shotgun cable. They've both been eliminated. First, seeing as LNB's are so cheap, I changed it, and for a lower noise version. Same effect.

But secondly, one of the first things I did was to switch the twin "shotgun" cable round, so that the LNB output that was going to receiver input 1 now went to 2, and the one that was going to input 2 now goes to input 1. The receiver continued to show no signal on the same input, despute the LNB output having been changed. Doing my 15-min "cold start" routine restored the box to both LNB's showing a signal (though neither have ever done much better than 70-80% signal strength), and next time it died (the next day, as it happened), it was the same input showing no signal originally, despite having a different LNB output connected to it.

Next, the LNB being a quad, I connected the cable to 3 & 4, instead of the 1 & 2 as it had been. It made no difference. So, I tried the spare LNB, and it made no difference. So, as I have about 50m of spareshotgun cable, I put connectors on both wires of both ends, and next time the receiver showed one LNB having no signal, I ran that cable straight through the house, up the stairs, out the window and connected it to the LNB. It made no difference.

In short, I've used basic troubleshooting logic to, step by step, eliminate each stage of the installation, other than the actual receiver.

As for getting a new box by threatening to leave, that may well work, and I may well try it, BUT .... two things :-

- I can be bloody-minded, and
- there are other aspects of the service I don't much like.

On the bloody-minded side, I'm not going to jump through hoops trying to coax them to replace the box. If I decide to give Sky a chance to replace it, they'll get a chance, but they'll only get it once. I'm emphatically not going to go through a run-around explaining the problem to them multiple times in the hope that someone with the authority will eventually condescend to a "goodwill" replacement.

If they offer it quickly enough, fine. Even then though, I have conditions. I'm not willing to accept an extension of the minimum term as a result. I'm out of the minimum term, can leave whenever I wish, and am not prepared to give that up. If any replacement box does not resolve the problems, like regular (by which I mean a second or two at a time, sometimes five or six times an hour) sound drop-outs, then they can have the replacement box back and I'm still off.

See, I doubt they'll care very much about whether they keep my custom or not, but I certainly don't care very much if I keep their service. I will only put up with so much faff from them before I just tell them "cancel", and if they do jerk me around enough to tell them that, then once that decision is made my bloody-mindedness well and truly kicks in and nothing they offer will change it. I have a very healthy hassle-avoidance gland and a very low tolerance for being mucked about, which is why, for instance, I rarely mail-order stuff - I'd rather pay more and buy locally. And that same attitude applies to premium TV, because I'm not really that bothered about either Sky or Virgin pay TV, and if getting them becomes to much hassle, I'll just dump the lot and make do with Freeview and FreeSat, both of which I already have installed and working perfectly.

My experience of companies like Sky and Virgin, and many others, is that they really want you to pay up every month and otherwise keep quiet. That's fine while things work, but they can be a right pain when something else is needed, and aren't geared towards minimising hassle to customers, instead having systems that may allow you to get a resolution but only if you jump through enough hoops. I'm simply not prepared to jump through many hoops. So if resolution needs hoop-jumping, they'll rapidly be told to just cancel, dammit. They probably won't much care, but frankly, nor do I.

[3dcandy]

Hey Saracen, well in that case something sucks. I'd lay the blame for your speed at the line from exchange to you, but getting it changed, as I'm sure you've seen, is a royal pita. As I've said, you'll have much better luck with Virgin as they will come and change the line as it effectively only goes from the cab to your property. Boxes, yup some are crap. Again design choices made years ago (LNB's are supplied voltage by the Sky box through the coax) eans that all sorts of things CAN and will happen. Perhaps Sky just have too many issues at your place to get it right this time, and I can see your frustration. My sister however has had exactly what you are saying with her tivo box, it don't work properly, never has worked properly and I seriously doubt it ever will work properly. Factor in that her broadband is pants like you're suffering and yup, I can imagine you're as fed up as her...

Hope all gets sorted, as I personally think Sky are trying to offer a good service, and Virgin were struggling due to the massive investment needed for fibre to be laid everywhere...

[Saracen]

....

My sister however has had exactly what you are saying with her tivo box, it don't work properly, never has worked properly and I seriously doubt it ever will work properly. Factor in that her broadband is pants like you're suffering and yup, I can imagine you're as fed up as her...

...

And therein lies our problem. I only have my personal experience, and limited anecdotal evidence from friends. You have your sister and a few others. But neither are rigorous enough to draw broad or general conclusions.

I can only conclude that whether one or the other company are generally better/faster, any individual customer can find themselves on the receiving end of one of the exceptions that prove the rule.

[3dcandy]

Oh I wholeheartedly agree - it's a minefield full of hopes, fears and desperation! Oh and gotta love a latin sig!

[Hicks12]

Its far to unpredictable to know what broadband service everyone will receive but company estimates should be relatively spot on (give or take 10%) I cannot believe how bad an estimate you got Saracen, I would be furious and swiftly leave them since even the TV isnt all its cracked up to be. I know VM in Plymouth (specifically plymstock)is rock solid, since upgrading to 60Mb/s I can swear that VM is brilliant , I get 63Mb/s 99% of the time and the other small occasions its been just below 55Mb/s I havent been throttled at all since upgrading ( over 7 months now...), usage hasnt changed it may have even increased with the constant netflix usage .

Pings are always <25 in speed test and in games depending on location can also be this low. Now the TV side I think is solid but the TiVo box really needs improving its slow and the search function is terrible, predictive search on a stupidly slow unit was an idiots decision, should have made it so you type whatever you want then press OK and it searches which would reduce so much lag!.

Now that is pretty much my experience with virgin, CS is terrible but my service has been reliable only 1 day out of 7 months was virgins fault. Comparing my experience to 3 mates on sky I would say for the money my experience is far superior, they pay a fair few bob more get pretty much the same channels but their internet is terrible, slow (<8Mb/s alot of the times ends up at 4Mb/s) high pings and their throttling is way worse than Virgin, my own preference but as much as I dont like the idea of throttling I much prefer Virgins implementation where they give an extensive list with times and usage so you can avoid it rather than just being told Oh your internet is now halved haha.

If sky or whatever works in your area stick with it, no one is preference 100% . Hopefully this buyout means more speed just for kicks really .

[pipTheGeek]

Yup Saracen but it's nearly always internal wiring or something on the customers side that is out of the control of Sky or even BT for that matter that can make your speed rubbish. Virgin are lucky enough to be able to control this side far more easily because of their system (if you can call that) whereas ADSL is still tied to old infrastructure. Even so, that seems quite low. I was comparing Sky to other ADSL suppliers, not Virgin. I'm holding my breath too with Virgin now they're American owned...

Not always outside their control. I've now seen two cases where sky have failed to a filter on the phone connection to their sky+ box. Left my in-laws with .1meg broadband for ages. I am ashamed to admit that I only noticed after the third call to sky customer services where they got the in-laws to connect direct to the master socket without any extensions connected.

Back on topic, I'm hoping that the new owners are going to do some much needed investment / improvements in a few areas. Especially customer service and billing.

[crossy]

Got to wonder what's going to happen to the channel line up with the TV offering - or are Liberty going to decide that they don't want the TV biz and try and sell/outsource it. Just thinking that if the "Crocodile" and Digger are in a mutual-hatred session then perhaps Sky might try and wheedle out of their channel provision 'obligations' - in which case are VM's customers going to get a mail in about six months that, for example, the Sky Movie channels are either going to be discontinued or are reclassed as "premium" channels on an individual basis.

Now the TV side I think is solid but the TiVo box really needs improving its slow and the search function is terrible, predictive search on a stupidly slow unit was an idiots decision, should have made it so you type whatever you want then press OK and it searches which would reduce so much lag!.

Dammit, I was kind of hoping to persuade the missus to let us go Tivo to get rid of this V+HD box while, while still being streets ahead of the box it replaced, isn't the most reliable. E.g. it decided not to record a BBT episode I'd got on series link, but did record the new series of Leverage because I'd forgotten to cancel the series link setting at the close of the last series.
But if we're in for a worse "user experience" then that'll be a "no sale" on her part.

BT do FTTP 160mb and now 330mb....

I went to the BT Openreach site, which is where I got the figure of 76Mb from. I've just checked now and the website is showing that 160Mb product, but no sign of the 330 you're quoting.

Oh and as a matter of very minor interest these figures don't apply to me anyway. Just checked and apparently I can get a whole "up to 3Mb/s" where I am from BT and "60Mb/s" when they roll out Infinity locally in over a month's time. On the other hand I've got 60Mb/s now from Virgin with the option to switch quickly to 100Mb/s, and then presumably to whatever speed they jump to next - I remember reading that 200Gb/s was "easy" and then (according to http://hexus.net/tech/news/network/3...on-roundabout/) maybe even up to faster-than-gigabit speeds. No doubt BT's doing the same, but the thing that interested me about VM's trials were that it was supposedly the same gear as they currently use for their 100Mb/s service.

[pinkpound]

Yes very good speeds on VM (for some)I do get a constant 54mb but the problem is the crappy stm

Over xmas I was ill and decide to grab a few HD programs off iplayer via sky box and then the stm kicked in which in turn buggered up the ping for online play

BT have now gone unthrottled on p2p etc unlike VM

And reading http://hexus.net/tech/news/network/31256-virgin-trials-15gb-broadband-silicon-roundabout/

made me fall off my chair with laughter so less than a minute to hit stm

re FTTP 330 checker here http://forums.thinkbroadband.com/fibre/t/4200391-recommended-router-for-fttp-330-mbps.html