Virgin Media BB rant

[0iD]

Virgin media BB (non cable) sucks ass BIGTIME!
If I use it between say 4pm & midnight it's so slow as to be barely useable. I swithched from ID Net (lovely faultless 4000kb/s all the time) to Virgin because the mrs was on an economy drive & wanted the free evening & weekend calls. Still, it was upto 8m & they said I could definately achieve that. ...

My arse!

Take tonight for instance (5 random readings to give an average)
4:30pm 1803kb/s
6:23pm 192kb/s
6:33pm 539kb/s
6:48pm 154kb/s
7:11pm 488kb/s

it's rubbish, online gaming is well nigh impossible lest I do it after 1am

I've tried different PC's, different OS's, different routers, the usb modem they gave me, all the same story.

and when I do complain I get charged 25p a minute for the privilege & a 10p connection charge, sometimes being on hold or in a que for upto 30 mins.

All they have to say is "You have to expect some slow down in peak periods". and I paid £7.60 for the privilege of that bit of sage advice.

So, the upshot is, Virgin Media BB... AVOID! at all costs.

[manwithnoname]

This is my 2mbit Virgin Media BB at the moment
Speed Down 1897.79 Kbps ( 1.9 Mbps )
Speed Up 186.20 Kbps ( 0.2 Mbps )

been online for 3 hours been working for the first 2 hours this has been slow, but it always feels slow when the pc is not connected at 1Gbits (speed at work)

BTW is it just coincidence your speed not been above a 2mbit connection today - I guess at £7.60 the modem speed has been checked? You ever had above 2mbit?

[0iD]

They want to charge me abt £85 for an engineer to check. Since I changed to Virgin it's never been above 2.0Mb/s on an 8mb/s line where with ID i always got 4mb/s +
My router reports this today:
The other week:

[moogle]

cancel!!! and switch to be. look at my sig, i stopped with ntl and im on the £14 package 8mb with be but im getting 10 which is a bonus
vote with your feet!

[0iD]

Unfortunately the mrs signed up for an 18month contract for the cheap phone calls

[moogle]

Unfortunately the mrs signed up for an 18month contract for the cheap phone calls

oh darn

thats why sometimes its good to have them seperate i guess. i used to get traffic shaped too but it slowed me down to 1mb each time..... but i was on cable! if your on your phone line they shouldnt really limit you as your not affecting anyone elses bandwidth..
lets hope they fix it soon

[Agent]

As has been said before, it really matters on your area.
For me, Virgin is fine, but a friend about 10 miles away has similar issues as you mate

[0iD]

I know, it's just annoying when I want to join in the fun on the UT3 server & can't. Was having a girly strop

[Betty_Swallocks]

they did have a lot of problems when rolling out the 20Mb upgrade around here. My connection was fluctuating between about 1.5Mb and 8Mb but recently they seem to have got their act together and I'm getting speeds up around the 14 or 15Mb range



Still not the full 20Mb as reported by Speedtest.net but downloading files from a reliable server in London using Free Download manager I get downloads in the region of 2.8Mb/s which seems about right.

Which is nice, especially as I ranted at them enough when I was experiencing slow connections for them to reduce my bill to £17 a month permanently.

Still major league pissed off about them charging 25p a minute for support though. Support for customers should be free unless it's not related to the service that you are providing.

[Jay]

anyone else feel that VM DNS servers are slow?

I get decent download speeds from my 20meg but it still feels a bit slow while browsing.

[Steve]

Still major league pissed off about them charging 25p a minute for support though. Support for customers should be free unless it's not related to the service that you are providing.

I had to ring the 09 number from a mobile (landline is VoIP) to complain about 25% packet loss between me and the gateway.

Took two calls before I got told more than "wait and see".

Why should I pay to tell them there's a fault with a service that I'm paying for?

[Jay]

Steve, I had the same problem. Loads of packet loss, same answer here as well. This went on for months.

[Instinct]

I am on Virgin Media Cable and i get a constant 2Mbit/s the majority of the time and any slowdowns are often un-noticeable.

Because you are on a BT line, and have only been with them for a couple of weeks your router and Virgin may still be trying to find the fastest / most stable speed avalialbe on your line.

[alsenior]

no problem here

[Jay]

20mb

[Steve]

Steve, I had the same problem. Loads of packet loss, same answer here as well. This went on for months.

Mine was fixed within 36 hours. Still wasn't happy.