News - US cable group Liberty Global to buy Virgin Media

[crossy]

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/3...on-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/fib...-330-mbps.html

Sorry, I'm going to totally disagree with most of what you're saying. If you've got the 60meg service and you're getting "a constant 54mb" then wtf are you complaining about? According to VM's stuff on the Subscriber Traffic Management

This policy does not impact any applications other than Peer to Peer, so things like watching iPlayer, online gaming, making calls via Skype, downloading music tracks from iTunes or streaming them from Spotify and sending an email or normal browsing are unaffected.

(according to http://help.virginmedia.com/system/s...PE=Cable#heavy)
So if you were only doing iPlayer then it's bl**dy unlikely that STM would be the cause of the slow down. On the other hand if you were torrenting 2GB/hour for a couple of hours then I can see the STM kicking in. Oh, and unless you're talking about upstream speed then the STM is only supposed to be a 50% slowdown - again if you were on the 60Mb service then surely that's only a "demotion" to 30Mb - which is still 10x what BT or Sky could offer me now. If your access is dropping off that badly then I'd seriously recommend a call to the customer service/tech support folks - I had similar problems last year and it turned out not to be STM, but actually water ingress into the local patch box.

Oh, and I looked up that 330Mb service you're haverin' on about, and from the blurb on the OpenReach site it's pretty clear that (a) it's limited availability; (b) it's "due Spring 2013" so it's not an actual product at the moment, and (c) it's designed for business use. And I'll argue that it's a bit mendacious of you to try and compare that to Virgin's current consumer products - although wrt (a) I'll happily admit that it's probably comparable to Virgin. As noted here many times their currently limited reach is somewhat of a handicap - and one that hopefully the new management will address as priority #2 (#1 being customer service of course).

I don't work for Virgin (they couldn't afford me!) by the way, and in fact I'll happily agree with anyone that points out where they DO have issues.

[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/3...on-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/fib...-330-mbps.html

Sorry, I'm going to totally disagree with most of what you're saying. If you've got the 60meg service and you're getting "a constant 54mb" then wtf are you complaining about? According to VM's stuff on the Subscriber Traffic Management

This policy does not impact any applications other than Peer to Peer, so things like watching iPlayer, online gaming, making calls via Skype, downloading music tracks from iTunes or streaming them from Spotify and sending an email or normal browsing are unaffected.

(according to http://help.virginmedia.com/system/s...PE=Cable#heavy)
So if you were only doing iPlayer then it's bl**dy unlikely that STM would be the cause of the slow down. On the other hand if you were torrenting 2GB/hour for a couple of hours then I can see the STM kicking in. Oh, and unless you're talking about upstream speed then the STM is only supposed to be a 50% slowdown - again if you were on the 60Mb service then surely that's only a "demotion" to 30Mb - which is still 10x what BT or Sky could offer me now. If your access is dropping off that badly then I'd seriously recommend a call to the customer service/tech support folks - I had similar problems last year and it turned out not to be STM, but actually water ingress into the local patch box.

Oh, and I looked up that 330Mb service you're haverin' on about, and from the blurb on the OpenReach site it's pretty clear that (a) it's limited availability; (b) it's "due Spring 2013" so it's not an actual product at the moment, and (c) it's designed for business use. And I'll argue that it's a bit mendacious of you to try and compare that to Virgin's current consumer products - although wrt (a) I'll happily admit that it's probably comparable to Virgin. As noted here many times their currently limited reach is somewhat of a handicap - and one that hopefully the new management will address as priority #2 (#1 being customer service of course).

I don't work for Virgin (they couldn't afford me!) by the way, and in fact I'll happily agree with anyone that points out where they DO have issues.

I'm guessing you have not used sky's catchup feather ..you can download tv programs to your sky box not "stream" they go to the hdd .. ..example @ mo "Silent witness hd " 2.61gb in size.... very easy to hit the STM

FTTP is not just designed for business it is also getting installed to several new build housing projects as and is due to be rolled out to FTTC cabs from the end of March (very costly tho )

[pinkpound]

oops auto spell "feature not feather" .. lol.. On that said day I had not downloaded anything and I don't use torrents. I'm on 50mb and times that stm has kicked in my ping as gone to hell I know that VM say it should'nt but ......

[Hicks12]

the virgin box works on a seperate line and arent applicable to STM, I am confident that Virgins catchup service is much better than Skys except for the BBCI player on the TiVo is a stupid flash app .

I am baffled how your 50mb line hit by STM would cause high pings, I know when I had 10 mb the reason why pings went up so high is because they throttled upload aswell but now it shouldnt matter at all you have plenty of bandwidth as you should have a 30mb connection when throttled and an upload of 3 or 6 mb (still waiting for my upgrade!).

@ crossy, I should have said more about the TiVo box as it has great pros and some cons the main issues are what I noted previously (i think this search issue is on all boxes...) and just one other which is the BBC on demand/catch up as apparently BBC told them that they cant use their normal catchup interface from now on and that they must implement BBCs horrible flash application which is just terrible on a tv, its laggy glitchy and impossible to fast forward/skip and buffers like mad!.

Apart from that though it is a excellent, 3 tuners means I can watch 1 channel and record 2 others it means everyone in the household can record their own shows with very little risk of missing out (have once ), the other great thing is that these 3 tuners are always on buffering the 1 hour( i think) so you can always pause/rewind up to an hour on either of those 3 channels. It is faster than the other boxes by a mile (apart from booting up which takes as long as a blackberry, several minutes). Another one of the top of my head is the function that you can record with that buffer so for example you are 40 minute into a program and decide you want to record it because someone else might want to watch it then you just hit record and it will record the whole slot (if it falls within that buffer) so unlikely to miss anything .

[crossy]

oops auto spell "feature not feather" .. lol.. On that said day I had not downloaded anything and I don't use torrents. I'm on 50mb and times that stm has kicked in my ping as gone to hell I know that VM say it should'nt but ......

I'd recommend you contact technical support (valium on standby?). Like I said, I'd assumed I was being STM'd to the max because I was getting extremely patchy response - when I checked with them I was told that I'd not come closer than about 90% of the STM threshold in the last three years, so I obviously had a hardware issue. Mysteriously enough a couple of days later my connection was going like a rocket (2.4-2.5MB/s on a 20Mb/s connection).

And no - I've not used Sky's catchup feature (although "catchup feather" had me intrigued) - been a Blueyonder/VM dude.

@Hick12: thanks for the Tivo info, you're a star. Total agreement about iPlayer's shonky interface - I end up using my Bravia's own version because it's a lot more reliable.

[Smudger]

You can get Sky catchup on VM now, and it uses the box's dedicated 10Mb line, which has no STM, and doesn't count towards limits on your normal BB line...

[Sohaib.27]

Goodbye virgin media! I will be ending my contract soon to start a new journey with BT broadband! Hopefully I'll get constant speed and a better service with them. I did not make this decision after reading this news update.

[Savas]

They're not buying to improve Virgin Media, maybe they could improve it a little (internally), but then it will stay like that until they can milk every penny from the buyout.

Virgin Media lost me as a customer when I couldn't get a stable ping to play any sort of online game. Their downloading is top notch, at least in central London. They provide near to 90% what they offered. But then again, you download any time during the day passed the allowed peek time limit and you're stuck to lower than if your line was **** and could only push 5mb. So same thing, unless they sorted out the illogical download limits.