Virgin Media Throttling - Moving House and considering changing ISP

[Unique]

Hmm, Interesting mix of replies there.

One of the main reasons I had considered going to VM is that I have never had a paid-TV service and now that it's my own house I quite fancy it. I can also get the XL package of TV and BB for £33 a month through "Mates Rates" on VM.

BE I am supposed to be on an 8meg package with an expected speed of 6meg but I have never seen it go bellow 8 and consistency is what I want if I am going to switch to VM.

I'd rather have some real experiences like Agent, oolon & uni. Jay - that post taught me nothing, I'd like some story or facts to back up what you say.

Ben

if you are on an 8mb ADSL package and happy with the speed, then i'm sure you'll be delighted if you get the 30mb (which is the XL internet) package as that still runs at a solid 7.5mb if you reach the STM

there is additional p2p/port throttling but that shouldn't bother you for the use you listed. i'm not a p2p fan but the odd times i've used it i've not noticed any throttling but i think it's setup in a way that depends on how much general usage is in your area

i suppose it also depends on area too, but i've hardly had any downtime with VM either

[Unique]

Get a replacement, my first one sucked, the replacement goes for miles.

hmm, i thought it was just the spec of the router as i've seen loads of people complaining about it. i thought i was also partly because it's going through 3 stone walls, although i can get my neighbours signal downstairs through i don't know how many walls, using whatever VM router came with the 20mb package in december. linksys?

[Bunjiweb]

Thanks for the further comments, Uni - that information was much more useful

[Apex]

Bunjiweb.

When VM works it works but when it goes pete tong get ready for a nightmare ride.

Like other said, if you can afford the higher packages get it because if you do get hit with the STM you will still have a connection faster then any adsl connection i have seen.

Also if you do torrents, set them to d/l after midnight (defeats the whole point of having the connection but meh - i went one further and set it so my speeds were limited such has that i could not d/l more then was aloud before the trigger kicked in but each to their own.)

[Betty_Swallocks]

I can't comment on the P2P issue as I gave up using torrents years ago when I had my eyes opened to the superiority of Usenet. Using Giganews I now download everything at around 3800kb/s when not limited and around 950 when I am which I work out is pretty much maxing out my 30~Mb connection.

I contacted Sky when they first came to this area and got them to test my line and they informed me that the best I could reliably expect would be about 4Mb.

Likewise I can't comment on XBL as I'm a PC gamer and never use my xBrick online. PC gaming is just about perfect. I get ridiculously low pings.

[Barrichello]

Likewise I can't comment on XBL as I'm a PC gamer and never use my xBrick online. PC gaming is just about perfect. I get ridiculously low pings.

My experience as well. Been using Virgin for general use/gaming (PC and PS3)/p2p and never had any issues with this (compared to pre cable issues with other suppliers) Normally download at night with PC set to auto close on completion so prefer downloading then so rarely hit the cap during normal hours.

You mentioned about TV as well, and really Virgin is a great choice, as it has the Tivo which is a great piece of kit.....

http://www.pocket-lint.com/review/52...tv-tivo-review

[iftiq]

I have the 50mb virgin media and it's pretty much perfect. I, like you, watch a lot of content streaming and I can't say I've ever noticed a problem. I also download a lot of data fairly constantly and again I almost always manage to hit the 50mb download rate.

I've been with virgin for a few years now and it is true that their customer service is just appalling at times, but I think they've gotten better at it. I used to have the 20mb package which was also pretty good, my experience with throttling is that it works exactly as they say it will- so at least you know what to expect.

[watercooled]

Edit: It seems VM may not be to blame for the problems I've been having, so take my following posts with a pinch of salt. And you'll get bad days with all ISPs.

My experience, along with that from friends:

VM is very good if you look at it from an average user's point of view i.e. go on speedtest, see your 10Mbps quoted speed and <20ms ping and walk away happy. The reality is quite different.

The P2P throttling is very real but they have a very different idea of what P2P is than me - it includes XBL, even downloads/videos/gamertag information. I can see how much data is passing through my data and on my 10 Mbps connection (not properly checked 20Mb yet) downloads would go at 10 meg for a few seconds/minutes then drop to 4Mbps max. This was NOT because of the well-known traffic shaping - it even happened outside of the capping times and with small downloads. Hosting is also affected heavily by this - 1Mbps upload is all well and good but you get nothing like it in reality - I could host a normal CoD game perfectly but as soon as a certain number of people joined on ground war it would just die completely. And before anyone mentions 50Mbps - it's also affected and to the same extent, a friend uses it and cannot host ground war games despite the upload traffic being far from saturating the connection.

Youtube and iPlayer are also affected by the above problems, again confirmed by friends using VM in different areas of the country so it's not a localised problem. iPlayer will keep freezing and say you need 4Mbps+, even on a 50Mbps package and Youtube videos are slow to buffer.

Basically, they cap pretty much everything but http and whitelisted speed testers so it *appears* you're getting this great, unbeatable download speed but the reality is far from it. So if all you do all day is download through http then you're dandy (provided you don't hit the caps). Sure, there are worse ISPs but VM is just another one, nothing special like they make out considering you get worse speeds than an ADSL connection for lots of bandwidth-intensive activities.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

I had VM ADSL connection which was 11MB and Steam downloads were pretty much around these speeds.

[barnard94]

Move to sky, they're the boss.

[Apex]

on what grounds ?

[pipTheGeek]

I have 50 meg VM broadband and their TiVo TV service.
Their tech support / customer service is awful. Thankfully we haven't had to call them often. (once a year over 6 years)
I've not had any issues with the broadband. Whenever I've done a speedtest it has been more than 45meg down, 4.9 up.
From reading the broadband forum it seems that their P2P throttling is done on a "whitelist" basis at the application level. So traffic they can identify and have listed as allowed is left alone, all other traffic is limited to, at most, 25% of available bandwidth. I'm afraid I can't find the thread that talked about this, they have never publicly (AFAIK) admitted that the traffic management is whitelist but their posts did imply that was how it worked. They did explain the bandwidth share though, and I think they said if there was alot of non shaped traffic then that 25% would get squished further.

I should mention I don't have one of their Superhub things.

As far as the TiVo service goes. There are a few bugs in the box, but nothing really awful. The EPG data isn't always accurate, causes the odd missed program. They do appear to be working on it though. They haven't got the EPG sorted so that overrunning shows are allowed for.
The on-demand for streaming iPlayer content is usable. Haven't tried the catch up for other channels. The on-demand for music is (IMO) un-usable on the TiVo. It is too slow and clunky to browse (I still don't know why they thought not giving any scroll bar or equivalent was a good idea) and there is a 10-20 second advert before each track and it misses the first 5 seconds (ish) of the track! Based on this I haven't bothered with the other on-demand.

Another "bonus" you get is online storage and backup. The storage is only acessable by a rather clunky and un-pleasant (albiet shiney) web app. The backup client is simple, but I've never got on with it. It can only run as an interactive application, the only control you have is tell it what to backup. It attempts to monitor changed files but if it gets it wrong you can't get it to restart. I let it backup some stuff from my PC, then un-installed the client. Now I can't delete any of the files, this was over a year ago and they are still there.

[watercooled]

Edit: Again, it's possible VM are not to blame for the following but I have measured exactly this a number of times. Another possibility is XBL or an upstream provider throttling like this? Something smells either way. Speed dropping off sharply like this to <50% doesn't seem like an accidental thing to happen (link saturation for instance).

There's a good chance it was me complaining about the P2P, unfortunately I'm one of the few to have noticed and measured it because, as you say they seem to white-list any sort of speed tests.

Here is a speed graph from my router, I opened it shortly after starting a video download on my 360 but I've checked countless times - for demos, map packs, etc, it's all the same. As you can see it starts at the quoted 20Mb then quickly drops off to about 4-6Mbps but I usually find it's just above 4Mbps. Quite painful when you're waiting for a huge download!

[Agent]

It's the constant push for headline speeds and lies like the one you posted above that annoy me.

I would have been more than happy with 10meg, if it was a constant 10meg. What's the point of 20 when they knock you down like that?

[pipTheGeek]

I accept that support forums will always be full of complaints. But this thread illustrates the problem with VM. Customer has a problem, but VM tech support are not being helpful and they haven't even bothered to reply to the forum post.

Of course, I don't think I've ever had a useful tech support experiance. (Except reporting a minor fault on the Yamaha website once. )

[DrATty]

I have had the basic Virgin package since the change from NTL. If I check the speed of my connection, it always says 10Mb/s now, the fastest I've had. However, streaming iPlayer, YouTube, and even Spotify content is problematic unless done in the early morning. Clearly, I don't get what the speed-check says I get. I had few problems when my speed was less a couple if years back so can only assume that throttling is the cause.