Virgin Media will launch 500Mbps broadband in the spring

[Phrontis]

We have the 350Mbps VM cable broadband, I can get over 400Mbps on a really good day, this evening it has just come in at 378Mbps down and 20 up at 20:00 in the evening. I will upgrade to the new 500Mbs service if it is offered, quite simply for the willy waving rights it gives you. It was great when the 3 boys lived with us, but now there are only the two of us we really don't need it. The 100Mbs would probably be fine. Last month with watching so much on the smart TV and then downloading stuff of the interweb thingy we used over 700Gb of data at no additional charge. Our whole package for TV Phone including almost all calls is less than £85.00 a month. I do call them every now and then and tell them I'm leaving and I get the price reduced. I won't be moving anywhere soon though as BT cannot give me more than about 40Mbs here if that.

Biggest issue will be that I will have to upgrade from my Draytek Vigor 2960 to the Vigor 3900 due to the download speed of the firewall of the 2960 "only" being 500 Mbps. The 3900 is rated to 1Gbps, so that will be another £580 less what I can get for the 2960. Anyone want a Draytek Vigor 2960? If anyone knows of any other firewall routers that will do over 500Mbs please let me know.

[ik9000]

Question is: is it still the cacky VM hub3 or have they finally replaced it? No way I'm unpluggin my Hub2.5 until there's a new shiny hub4 or whatever without the latency spikes and packet loss. I took a speed downgrade as it is limited to circa 200mb/s but the stability improvement was worth it.

[watercooled]

I believe the latest firmware updates have resolved most of the issues with the SH3 - I'm running one myself now and I'd be happy to provide feedback if that's what you're concerned about? It passes that latency spike test at dslreports and I've not encountered any issues myself (I'll run a test and post the results if you like?).

The SH3 has some advantages over the 2.5m e.g. it's capable of bonding more channels - 24 down and 4 up for me, and I don't think they offer above maybe 200Mbps with the 2.5? In theory it should be capable of more (~440Mbps max, ~55 per channel x 8 channels) but it would heavily load a few channels and make load balancing hard work, hence why they're restricting it.

[anselhelm]

Nice download speed. Shame about the upload... and the fact that it's Virgin Media, which is notorious for "traffic management" (i.e., throttling).

I'll stick with FTTC until we finally get FTTH/FTTP from other providers.

[watercooled]

Virgin don't use throttling and haven't for several years on their main packages.

[Ravens Nest]

Every time I hear about a "FREE" upgrade i think the bills going up again..

Also every time I get near renewal date I say drop my speed as I don't need it (Obviously to get the bill down)

[ik9000]

I believe the latest firmware updates have resolved most of the issues with the SH3 - I'm running one myself now and I'd be happy to provide feedback if that's what you're concerned about? It passes that latency spike test at dslreports and I've not encountered any issues myself (I'll run a test and post the results if you like?).

The SH3 has some advantages over the 2.5m e.g. it's capable of bonding more channels - 24 down and 4 up for me, and I don't think they offer above maybe 200Mbps with the 2.5? In theory it should be capable of more (~440Mbps max, ~55 per channel x 8 channels) but it would heavily load a few channels and make load balancing hard work, hence why they're restricting it.

we could not get stable VPN, alexa (echo) or prime firestick TV/iplayer streaming. Constant drop outs. Anecdotely it seems some units are affected more than others, but the latest report by ispreview suggests while the patches help, there is only so much they can do. From my experience our unit wasn't great, and the switch resolved the problem for the most part. Alexa was still prone to give up, just far less frequently. the echo is unplugged now and we're not using it anymore for various reasons on the Saracen scale. Everything else mostly works. You're right re the speed. As I said 200 stable is better than 300 jittery.

[Troopa]

Virgin Media is a shill of a company that has under-invested for years. Bottom line is they have been waiting for another takeover like when NTL brought them. All of the capital investments, expansion etc is all to encourage the Vodafone purchase which has stalled for so many years because of the amount of debt VM has because of the historic NTL debt. The only profit VM has made yoy is largely due to the price rises, which only ever keeps the markets happy.
What makes me laugh is that people actually think Richard Branson owns the company, looool.

[876HX]

Still upload speed could be better, which in the past would have been ok as we mainly downloaded, but with cloud storage, we also need good upload speeds to get the data in there first.

[watercooled]

@Troopa: You should consider substantiating what you're saying, Virgin have recently invested huge amounts of money to upgrade existing networks with new equipment both in the headend and out in the access network, both for capacity reasons and in preparation for DOCSIS 3.1. They're also investing heavily in rolling out FTTP/RFoG to many new areas, so I wonder what exactly you'd like them to 'invest' in that they're not already doing?

It's very easy to sit back and criticise companies, and it's hard for large companies to appear perfect in the public eye, but unjustified criticism is unfair and helps no-one.

Virgin Media is currently part of Liberty Global rather than an independent company, and with that they have plenty of scope for investment.

WRT price rises - why do you think these are unjustified or unfair when compared to the rest of the market who also raise prices when the need arises? VM have continued to invest in offering higher speeds to customers, and said customers are using far more bandwidth year-on-year, which despite what many people think is not 'free' or 'unlimited' at the ISP level. How else besides customer bills would you expect a telecoms company to make profits?

@ik9000: No issues with any streaming on SH3 here (standard router mode for now, haven't bothered switching to modem mode plus own router for now even though I used to do that), including Netflix/Prime/iPlayer/etc on a fire stick/computer/Virgin box/etc. I don't really use VPNs often but have managed to use them successfully through the connection with no noticeable issues. Wouldn't touch anything like alexa with a bargepole so couldn't comment on that. I'm not suggesting you switch for the sake of it, but with the latest firmware it's not necessarily the concern it once was if e.g. it's the only thing putting you off a speed upgrade you wanted. It was a factor in putting me off switching back from BT a while ago so I also waited for better firmware and feedback on forums.

The hardware isn't perfect and it will be interesting to see what the SH4 offers, but I'm OK with it for now.

[Iota]

VM don't care about customers in this situation. All they do is knock money off your bill and give you some random date in the future that they're going to upgrade their capacity. This date invariably comes to pass and nothing improves so they just give you another one. I waited over 6 months for improvement and there was nothing, others have been known to wait years.

That wasn't my experience when I had the one issue in 9+ years with Virgin Media, especially after I didn't bother with the normal line of complaint and sent an email directly to the CEO office to complain. Oddly in that situation they bend over backwards to try to resolve the issue and it gets followed up afterwards by the CEO office to ensure it's been rectified.

I guess it depends on how you complain.

[Phrontis]

With regards to the VM SuperHub 3 issues, I did have problems for a while with them, I'm on my third, but I think the last download of firmware has sorted it out. It's not really VM's issue either, it is or was Intel's issue with the Puma chipset and it took them ages to sort it out, see this https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.ph...-3-router.html
As it happens I use the SuperHub in modem mode anyway as I have the Draytek router and a couple of Draytek AP900's from my POE switch for the wireless access in the house. My connection to the VM cabinet is less than 100 yds away and when I moved the cable access point from my cellar into a new extension they put a new cable in free of charge. Though that took 3 attempts due to the technicians who came not really understanding what I was attempting to do. In the end I basically had to take charge with the last guy who came and forced him to do the complete new cable run. I had to help him to pull the cable through the ducts I had laid under the drive to get to my new network data cabinet in the extension. I even ended up making off the cable again after he had gone to get it just right. He did however test it and make some changes to make sure the signal was the best I could get. I suppose if you haven't got a clue as to whats what then you will get what you are given. Fortunately I know a bit of whats what.

[Syphadeus]

That wasn't my experience when I had the one issue in 9+ years with Virgin Media, especially after I didn't bother with the normal line of complaint and sent an email directly to the CEO office to complain. Oddly in that situation they bend over backwards to try to resolve the issue and it gets followed up afterwards by the CEO office to ensure it's been rectified.

I guess it depends on how you complain.

I complained by letter, email and phone. Their written responses to me were a joke, including grammar commensurate with a 7 year old.

Like I say, all they did was reduce my bill to a fraction of what it would have been which is great and all except not very helpful if you’ve, for intents have no internet when you want to use it.

I didn’t accept this and got CISAS involved, but they wouldn’t help me because I wasn’t trying to close my account or having a monetary dispute with VM, ,y argument was asking them why they couldn’t give me a straight answer as to when my area would get a capacity upgrade and why, given the oversubscribed nature of my area, they were actively promoting to get more customers using billboards, mail shots and agents in the town centre. I think that is disgraceful. You need to sort out your house before getting more people living in it.

It all came to nothing. They’re a bunch of liars. Nobody need take my word for it. Go look at their forums. A cursory search will net you loads of topics of people in “insert area number here” who are in an area suffering with overutilisation. That’s what they call it by the way. It’s actually overselling. Adding customers onto a jam packed network node that doesn’t have enough bandwidth to go around when everyone starts using it. This is one disadvantage that cable internet has that isn’t as prevalent with ADSL and VDSL.

Some people don’t have a choice as FTTC isn’t available in their area of they’re at the end of a run / far from the cabinet so their speeds are bad. They’re then forced to make a deal with the devil, which is VM in this case if you hadn’t gathered. A deal whereby you simply have to cross your fingers and hope your area isn’t oversubscribed or that it doesn’t become so. Cus if it does, god help you; VM sure as hell won’t.

[Saracen999]

I complained by letter, email and phone. .....

I suspect what Iota meant by "how you complain" was more about him writing (emailing) the office of the CEO. This is a method I've used, from time to time, having seen it from the inside in my early years.


For example, I had a problem with a faulty Dell PC, back in the days of moving '286 to '386. I used the standard fault procedure and got a right royal runaround for a year or so. Then I got a marketing mail with the CEO's foreword stressing Dell's dedication to customer service. A phone call to Dell got me to the CEO's secretary, and I explained my frustration and asked for a fax (yes, those days) number for her, so she could show the CEO. She said, better than that, here's the number for the fax machine actually on his desk.

So I listed the hassle, the phone calls, faxes and letters and the litany of excuses, and the 15 month duration and queried if he considered that "dedication to customer service"?

I never heard directly from the CEO (a guy called Martin Slagter if memory serves) but within about half a hour of that fax, I did have a somewhat chastened technical director on the phone, who exhibited symptoms of a thorough ass-chewing from the CEO, and within a few days, an engineer hand-delivering a new PC, by which I mean an upgrade from 286 to 386, more memory, an HD about 4 times the size, etc.

A similar experience was with an insurance company years later. After being run pillar-to-post with a claim, for months, I went straight to the top in "a final attempt" to sort it out before instructing a solicitor to commence legal proceedings. Well, "the top" had tne customer service director ring me. I explained (long story) the whole sorry saga and he said he needed to check it out on their end, and "might take a dsy or two". About an hour later, the claims controller I'd spent weeks trying to get a reply from was on the phone, again ass-chewed, and a cheque in full settlement was couriered by motorbike. Next day, the customer service director rang again to confirm directly with me that I was satisfied.

The point, and I think it's what Iota was getting at is that, provided the complaint is genuine, and you've given 'usual channels a fair chance, going direct to the organ grinder perfectly motivates junior level monkeys.

They might ignore you or me, but they can't ignore their boss's boss's boss's boss.

[Smudger]

10MB/s is what I think it should be so 80mbps.
You try flitting between horrifically optimised power point presentations and unecessarilly large Excel files with auto save.
That's my home working experience and I'm on BTs 80/20 package.
It hurts.

Oh and Plex.

I can't get Fibre in my area, so max speed on non-virgin would be 8mbps

[Macman]

Spoke to one of my relatives who works for VM. Being tested in spring but should be available Jan 2020.

Pricing hasn't been confirmed as of yet.