Dumping Virgin Media

[AndrewJ]

Glad to know it is not just me.

[BUFF]

They throttle my connection if I download or not so his "only if you are a heavy user" is a load of crap. I get 19mbps in the easrly hours and between 6:00pm and 12:00am I get from 4 to 10mbps.

that's more likely due to there being more users online & therefore less available bandwidth per user - you will find that ADSL suffers from that too.
On the other hand e.g. my mother would love to get 10Mb, the best that her (LLU) line supports is ~4Mb albeit package is "upto 8Mb" so if you aren't close to the exchange then your max speed may drop permanently if you move to ADSL from cable rather than just at peak periods ...

Are VM perfect, no but they may not be the worst evil.

[Betty_Swallocks]

Well, I seem to be the lone voice in the darkness here. I'm staying with Virgin.
Yes, they throttle your bandwidth if you download a lot. I do and yes, sometimes I get throttled, but mostly I set my downloads to come on at other times so it doesn't affect me.

But the killer for me is that even when Virgin throttle my bandwidth I still get better speeds than I would on any ADSL provider.

I looked into Sky's "up to" 16Mb package and got them to test my line. The best they could give me was 4Mb.

Well, that's what Virgin throttle my bandwidth to on the occasions I hit their limits so 90% of the time I'm running significantly faster than anyone else could give me.

Alright, I rarely, if ever, get the full 20Mb but then what ISP does ever give everything they offer? None that I know of, especially on the higher speed packages. Your only chance of getting anything like the advertised speeds seems to be if you live withn a few hundred yards of the exchange. I'm about 2 miles away so my signal has a lot of attenuation by the time it gets to me. ADSL? No thanks.

I've just run a speedtest.net test and I'm getting around 16Mb from Virgin.

Can any other provider give me anything like that?
I'd be interested to hear if they can.

I'm not a Virgin fanboy, I'm just not prepared to lose so much speed in order to change to someone else.

[Jay]

I think 50% loss of bandwith because their network can't handle it is pretty poor, also the fact that my speedtests during the day are always the same means to me that they are cutting peoples bandwith.

[BUFF]

thing is that your low of 4Mb is higher than many people can get on ADSL max.
Of course if you mostly just browse the web you don't need a 20Mb service in the 1st place.

[nichomach]

I'm with Betty above; VM cable (from my POV) has been far, FAR more reliable, stable and quick than the ADSL connections we implement to remote sites at work, whichever provider we use. Maybe there's something wrong with me, but I've never been shaped or throttled, and as far as Phorm goes, VM's assurances re: their not having implemented it, having no immediate plans to, and that they will not even test it without agreement from individual users does go some way toward assuaging my concerns.

[Jay]

I got 20Mb so its there is I need it, downloading drivers, linux .iso files. The problem is I got 20Mb and its not there when I need it. I know that if I drop to 10Mb I will only see 5Mb and if I drop to 4 I will only see 2.... that can't be the network.

I am looking at going with Be, its worth it for the upload alone.

[aidanjt]

Virgin do not packet shape, they throttle if you down/upload too much data between 4 and 9. There is a big difference between throttling and shaping

++

But remember kids, shaping good, throttling bad.

[BUFF]

I am looking at going with Be, its worth it for the upload alone.

my mother's connection (4Mb max) is with Be (via O2) ...

[SuicidaL]

Have to agree with you, the bandwidth throttling is pretty annoying. Although I think it's only between 4 and 9pm - would it be possible for you to run torrenting apps overnight (or at least outside of those hours) to avoid being throttled? Don't get me wrong, I know this solution is inconvenient at best, but if you can get a decent deal from VM through their cancellations dept. then the savings may be worth it.

not anymore it's not, they have now reviewed the stm and has been revised for the worse - Link

10am – 3pm Download only
4pm – 9pm Download
3pm – 8pm Upload

During these times the following thresholds will be applied for upstream and downstream.

10am – 3pm Download
Size M: 900Mb
Size L: 2400Mb
Size XL: 6000Mb

4pm – 9pm Download
Size M: 450Mb
Size L:1200Mb
Size XL: 3000Mb

3pm – 8pm Upload
Size M: 200Mb
Size L: 700Mb
Size XL: 1400Mb

so you could do as much as u liked before 4pm, thats if the stm didn't co@k up first and throttle you after a few hundred meg, now they're just screwing left right and centre. and until they can sort the network out i.e capacity and chipped boxes etc etc then stm is here to stay.

Glad to know it is not just me.

nope mate, i'm suffering to, big time with browsing and latency issues

I'm off mate, I've seen service disruptions throughout the night, and the whole oh you can only use your "unlimited" broadband when "we" decide really boils my blood.

I do stand by principles too often but on this occasion I am damn right and I hope others walk out in disgust as Virgin Morons.

well i'm off to mate. about 5 weeks ago i came home after being away working for a week. got home and had no bb, ok i thought, i'll ring in the morning as it's to late now. anyways got told by cs rep that nothing could be done because they were migrating the ex-ntl bb accounts onto the main tv/phone accounts. so i ended up waiting 4 weeks to get it sorted.

but the best bit was that someone cocked up but nothing is going to be done, oh. and my e-mail account has vanished totally and they can't seem to fix it, i was given a fix time of 72hrs and that was last week.

so i've seen my arse with them. i'm keeping the tv pack as thats the only thing they've got right and it works (i refuse to get sky in after the way they treated me the last time i had them), bt are coming to install a new line on friday and then i'm going to order O2 bb in, as O2 customers get a £5 discount (which i believe is for life as long as you keep yuor O2 mobile, and it includes payg mobiles to).

so £15pm for upto*20meg bb and no caps with freephone customer services and tech support that is uk based (twice i've rung them and both time answered within 2-3 rings) makes it a bit of a no brainer. and just in case my line won't (and i don't see why it shouldn't) take the 20meg then i could choose 8meg for £7.50 or 16meg for £10.

[Robert]

They are trial rules, nothing set yet.

[BUFF]

and just in case my line won't (and i don't see why it shouldn't) take the 20meg then i could choose 8meg for £7.50 or 16meg for £10.

let us know what your line can support when you get it.
as I said above my mother can only get ~4Mb max. download & it's not that old a house (10 years maybe) & Be only LLU'ed the exchange a year or so ago.

[Templar87]

They are trial rules, nothing set yet.

Aye, nothing on their website about those limits. I can't understand why they'd introduce the 10am - 3pm bandwidth limit either - it's hardly a peak time.

[SuicidaL]

They are trial rules, nothing set yet.

so were the last set of stm rules and look what happend to them. i think this is only one part of the stm saga, the other is to make stm works properly, there are many instances of stm kincking in at wrong times and for wrong limits and even not even letting people reach the limits.

Virgin Media now say they have reviewed their polices and feel there is a need for change, they have announced:-

well a quote is as good as an admission that it's gonna happen. i've stuck by and up for ntl when they were getting a proper pasting in the press, even when ppl at work said about it i told them it's not like it's made out to be. but not any longer, when it was ntl and telewest they appeared to work hard on their products and i never ever had a problem.

now that they brought out virgin mobile and are leasing the virgin name to the tune of about £30million a year for around 25 years or something like that. thats a £30million loss before anything gets done, so what do they do, they try to squeeze as much out of their network as possible without stuffing it. first though they have to get rid of the hacked modems that bleeding bandwidth away from genuine users, also they have to forget about this 50meg rollout and concentrate on improving the network and 20meg service and existing customers before even thinking about trying to rip more money from us.

[SuicidaL]

let us know what your line can support when you get it.
as I said above my mother can only get ~4Mb max. download & it's not that old a house (10 years maybe) & Be only LLU'ed the exchange a year or so ago.

will do, spanking new line in on friday so will pray tell what the results are.

[SuicidaL]

let us know what your line can support when you get it.
as I said above my mother can only get ~4Mb max. download & it's not that old a house (10 years maybe) & Be only LLU'ed the exchange a year or so ago.

well o2 activated my line 2 days early - although i only found out this morning via email from cs, but hey-ho i'm not complaining. anyway here are my line stats with the uptime being a couple of hours.

Uptime: 0 days, 2:33:48
DSL Type: G.992.5 annex A
Bandwidth (Up/Down) [kbps/kbps]: 1,287 / 11,138
Data Transferred (Sent/Received) [kB/kB]: 0.00 / 0.00
Output Power (Up/Down) [dBm]: 12.0 / 19.0
Line Attenuation (Up/Down) [dB]: 23.0 / 42.5

the line attenuation is a bit high, but that is to be expected with a new line until it has been trained, so when/if it starts to come down then bandwidth down should increase a bit. so it would seem that my line should handle upto 16meg (when it has settled down) and u/l @ 1.2meg is fab thus far. but the browsing to is much faster and smoother, and pinging some of the uk cod4 servers i use well my ping has more than halved - ping to my clans main server was 21ms as opposed to 50-60 on cable. so all this for £10 a month makes me well chuffed so far