Broadband Dilema (o2 & Virgin)

[CK1]

I am currently with o2 for my broadband and BT for my home phone. o2 supplies their ADSL2+ service to me and I am getting a connection of about 1.8Mbps. I live 3.7km away from an exchange so I knew that I was never going to get the best service in the world.

However after some recent broadband mishaps I happeend to plug my router into the BT master socket and saw the speed rise to 4Mbps. WOW - I thought! I have since found out that the rest of the wiring in my house was suspect and have been quoted approx £150 by a local electrician to have the internal lines in the house re-done so that I can get the 4Mbps in my study where the router is connected.

My alternative, and hence dilema is should I spend £150 to have this fixed or should I spend the £50 fine to get out of my o2 contract a go to Virgin where I can get the 20Mbps service and a phone for about the same money as I am spending now? With Virgin I am likely to get the full 20Mbps as this is fibre optic to the house, but my only reservation is the download limits that they impose and the monitoring of p2p traffic and throttling of this during certain times of the day which may mean that I don't get any real benefit.

What are other people experiences with Virgin? Should I make the switch? Any advice gratefully received.

CK

[BUFF]

with Virgin in my experience you are unlikley to get the full 20Mb but are more likely to get something like 14Mb which of course is still far in advance of 4Mb on DSL plus of course supposedly 50Mb is coming ...
VM performance still depends upon contention ratios etc. though & is better in some areas than others.

As for whether the traffic management will actually affect you obviously depends upon how you use the connection & you are the best 1 to know that.

[peterb]

Fixing the wiring in the house yourself is not difficult. If the existing cables are surface mounted, they are easy to replace. If they are ducted, you can use the existing cable as a pull through.

I don't know what the hourly rate for an electrician is - sy £20/hour - and add £50 max for materials - he's quoting about 5 hours work. It would probably take you longer - but not that much longer!

Is VM fibre to the house? Check that - often it is fibre to a local distribution box then copper (coax cable) to the house. Immaterial in terms of supported speed at the rates they quote - however there are many other factors involved in both the overall speed you get and the speed from a specific server.

I can't say which is the best course for you, but if it was me, I'd be looking at upgrading the wiring myself - then considering my ISP.

[solar975]

I have recently moved from Virgin to O2 (as I do not have fiber to my new house).

My experience with Virgin was that you do get the decent speeds.

Bandwidth throttling (when I was a customer) was only active (ticked on) from 1600 to 2100, and in effect cut your up and down bandwidth by half. So if you were getting 16Mb you would be throttled to 8Mb. This seemed reasonable to me, as even the throttled rate was decent. (Throttling lasts for 4 hours after it ticks on.)

There is talk of new throttling - but Virgin currently deny this:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/06...ttling_denial/

[CK1]

Fixing the wiring in the house yourself is not difficult. If the existing cables are surface mounted, they are easy to replace. If they are ducted, you can use the existing cable as a pull through.

I don't know what the hourly rate for an electrician is - sy £20/hour - and add £50 max for materials - he's quoting about 5 hours work. It would probably take you longer - but not that much longer!

Is VM fibre to the house? Check that - often it is fibre to a local distribution box then copper (coax cable) to the house. Immaterial in terms of supported speed at the rates they quote - however there are many other factors involved in both the overall speed you get and the speed from a specific server.

I can't say which is the best course for you, but if it was me, I'd be looking at upgrading the wiring myself - then considering my ISP.

As much fun as it might be to do the work myself I dont think I would ever get the time. Working all day and a wife a kids to contend with when I get home and all weekend leaves very little time to undertake such projects.

VM does supply fibre to the house so speed should be high. I am just very worried about the customer service side of Virgin and some reports of people saying that their speed was appalling.

[Pup]

What I noticed with VM, is that the service you get largely seems to depend on the area you live in. Heard numerous people complain about a constant bad service from Blueyonder/NTL/VM, yet myself (in my last place) and many others have experienced a pretty much faultless service.

If it wasn't for the fact my current place can't get the cabling up to the house, I would still be with Virgin. Might be worth trying to get opinions of people that have cable internet in your area.

[SuicidaL]

As much fun as it might be to do the work myself I dont think I would ever get the time. Working all day and a wife a kids to contend with when I get home and all weekend leaves very little time to undertake such projects.

VM does supply fibre to the house so speed should be high. I am just very worried about the customer service side of Virgin and some reports of people saying that their speed was appalling.

a commonly missed point, the fibre only runs to the street cab and from there is still copper. one thing to remember with virgin (if you do go with them) is to try and find what take up is like in the area, because if your ubr is heavily subscribed then you will have issues with speed (pm me and i can direct you to somewhere you can find out). also there is stm - which seems to have a life of it's own, and then there is still the phorm issue that is still to be resolved - o2/be at least don't do anything like this.


i'm not anti vm, i used to have my bb with them, the product is good and when it works correctly it's fast(ish) and stable. but after a seris of cock-up's and mis-truths i gave up and went elsewhere although i kept the tv servcie.

[xAmritx]

Hi CK1,
Im a Virgin Media Broadband customer on 10MB. My speeds run around 9-10meg all day.
During throttling hours (4-11) when playing games, surfing net and even downloading some files there are no problems!
Counterstrike:Source pings on a server I always play on are around 10-40ms. This server is located in netherlands and nearly always has 60players playing!
Downloading files I also always get full speeds and its not hard to get programs which can download files for you outside peak hours.

I do recommend Virgin Media over a ADSL provider. I have a ADSL line too at another location and the benefits from that are upload speeds. I have Tiscali 8mb too at another location and get 6-8mb there and the wiring in that building is old old old!!! But did have big trouble with their QoS at the start (around 3 years ago) maybe it was due to all of the complaints I made they did something to sort my line out!

[Splash]

OT I know, but is your sig big enough?

[xAmritx]

In the process of editing it lol!

[pau1777]

If I was in a cable area I would go with Virgin. I did have virgin broadband at my old house and was really happy with it.
Since I moved to my new house I can only get 1 meg broadband due to the distance from the exchange to my house.
I hope BT pull their finger out soon and upgrade the copper wire that they have used for years!

[moogle]

OT I know, but is your sig big enough?

Bigger the sig the bigger the E - 8============D

[muffin247]

i also moved from virgin to o2 and with these two companies i have never had problems they have both been top class

while i did get around 16mb on virgin i didnt like the throttling at peak times as usually thats when people wanna use it!

if u dont mind the throttling then id go with virgin as like u said fibre optic doesnt depend on distance

hth