It's a sad day indeed...

[Andeh13]

I have had to accept the inevitable, my new Crawley address can only achieve....




...which means Virgin Media is my only option, with their throttling, deep packet inspection and customer service on par with the Nazi party.

This is massively frustrating on a few different levels, we still have 6 months worth of BT line rental at our old uni property which is £100 to cancel early, which I was originally going to transfer to Crawley to cover my half of it which compounds the rubbishness of the situation. Damn

Please tell me they arn't as bad as i think!

[matty-hodgson]

Is a 1.0Mb/s line even that bad? All depends on the ping really. My connection's only 4.0Mb/s but the ping is amazing.

[Lee H]

Please tell me they arn't as bad as i think!

It depends really.

I've got their 50 Mb and it's been superb with crazy speeds all the time (see sig ). I had a few days of slow throughput a few weeks ago, so I posted on the VM forums on their website and then had an engineer round on the Saturday at 8 am to fix the issue pronto.

If you get the slower connection speeds, your subject to their FUP and throttling, but none of that applies to the 50Mb connection at the present time.

[Steve]

You could well get more than that - got any neighbours? You could ask what they sync at.

My girlfriend's line reportedly can do up to 3Mb but it syncs at 7.5 and that's on ADSL not 2+

[g8ina]

We are on 20MB and am very happy. Good customer service too !

[Andeh13]

I will knock on a few doors when I go down there next week, Virgin Media seem more expensive then I realised. The previous occupants had an account with them. Taking the BT line rental with me (and saving paying my half of the £50 cancellation charge) would cost me around £42 for large internet & large TV, with the virgin line rental it brings it to around £35, but then i stomach the £50 cancellation charge up front.

[Agent]

Andehh, I'm looking for a BT line but really don't want to pay the ~£130 install cost. I think BT do a free 'move home' thing. Given that I've just moved into a new place, I'm wondering if you could get it transfer to someone else (like me ) saving you the cancellation fee and me the install fee. We would both win.

I'm not sure how name / account transfers work, but I'd imagine it's a simple case of ringing them once it's done?

I need to check something with Virgin first, but I should know within a few days.

edit - dammit, don't think this will work as he was with Sky. It looks like Openreach charge the full price for a 'reconnect' if it was a none BT provider. Grrhhh.

[mycarsavw]

Andehh, I'm looking for a BT line but really don't want to pay the ~£130 install cost.

You can get it for £30 but you have to sign for 18 months - here - it says it expires 30 June, but ring and see. There are other companies that'll do you a cheaper line install but their name has escaped me

[Agent]

You can get it for £30 but you have to sign for 18 months - here - it says it expires 30 June, but ring and see. There are other companies that'll do you a cheaper line install but their name has escaped me

Doesn't work, have already tried a few days back (even though it says on MSE it's been extended)

It's expired and they will only offer it with a full broadband, phone and vision package.

[Lee H]

That's one of the reasons I went for virgin.

BT wanted to install a 'new' line into the house as the house was vacant for over 12 months so I thought I might as well check if the grass was greener on the other side of the fence.

Cue.. 6 months down with virgin and it's all been good and I'm happy with the service and their TV offerings

[j.o.s.h.1408]

i heard virgin media watch what you download though

[Rave]

Another happy Virgin customer here- I had a bit of grief wih them in my old place but I'm pretty sure that in nearly 4 years of living here I've had one outage- and that was caused by kids mucking about with one of their boxes round the corner from me. I'm on 10Mbit (L) and I consistently get 1.2MByte/S downloads on Steam- after buying a pack of games I left it on overnight and came back the next morning to find that that I'd sucked down something like 36GByte in 8 hours. I'm an ex-NTL customer, which apparently means I'm on a suckier backend than ex-Telewest people, but it's good enough for me.

I'm tempted to go for an upgrade to 20MB and unlimited landline calls all the time, since that would apparently only cost me an extra tenner a month.

[watercooled]

VM aren't nearly as bad as most people make out, their customer services i.e. the people who deal with bills etc aren't the best but the tech support are really helpful and knowledgeable IMO (provided you get an English operator you can understand and vice-versa, of course). Details of traffic shaping here and yeah it would be nice to have none but if you leave your heavy downloading until after 9pm you should have no problems. The good thing about VM is you often get the full advertised speeds and a decent quality connection provided you aren't in an over-subscribed area. About DPI, as long as you aren't stealing software/media or downloading stuff you shouldn't be you have nothing to worry about!

[GoNz0]

never had an issue with vm, i watch when im downloading to avoid the caps, torrents run from 9pm to 10am

[Chan]

Been on the VM 20mb package for like 4+ yrs and never had any major issues, was a period earlier this year where it would disconnect frequently but that seems to be fixed now, total time i've had it probably 98% uptime at max bandwidth.

As for this watching what you download, sounds like scare mongering to me. New laws have been passed that will allow ISPs to monitor traffic but they aren't coming in till 2011, and even then you'll have to be hitting up the mainstream stuff to get noticed (fyi you have more chance of the publishers/licensers tracking you down directly rather than the ISPs).

[j.o.s.h.1408]

Newsgroups FTW mate. encrypted downloads