Virgin Media Throttling - Moving House and considering changing ISP

[Bunjiweb]

I've been with BE broadband for the last 2 years and have been extremely happy with the service and speed I've gotten from them - I would recommend them to anyone.

I have just bought a new house in Gloucester and it is in a Virgin Media area, so was considering moving to VM so I could get a combined TV / Broadband package from them. I have however heard all sorts of stories about throttling speeds at peak times and throttling speeds of those that do a lot of downloading.

I use torrents but also stream an awful lot of video - I tend to watch most stuff off BBC iPlayer, Youtube etc. rather than actually watching everything live. What I am worried about is that if I went with VM I would end up regretting it if they insist on throttling my connection.

Also would the connection throttling have any effect on online gaming etc?

Cheers for any opinions on this.

Ben

[Jay]

Depending on the package you get I think you will be unhappy with VM for your type of usage.

[Betty_Swallocks]

In a word. No. I'm on VM and when I download obscene amounts of data (about 8 or 9 gig) in peak times I get limited to a paltry 10Mb which is still more than twice as fast as the best I could expect from ADSL. The throttling just isn't a problem.
The worst case is that it might take me 10 minutes to download a movie rather than 2 or 3.

I'd go as far as to say that I wouldn't move to a house where I couldn't get cable.

[oolon]

I have just moved house as virgin messed up the cable install at my new house I had to move to ADSL, so I have moved from 20M virgin (15 years a cable customer) to Be (which is getting me about 6M). To be frank I could swear my Be connection is faster than my old virgin one. I also now have a static IP which is something Virgin were never able/willing to give me, so they have lost a 100 quid a month customer... My street is cabled up however there was a problem installing the cable into the pipe.

[Stephen C]

Also, if you do any type of Xbox Live gaming then stear clear. The not so recently implemented P2P upload management system catches some XBL ports and they haven't fixed it despite being fully aware for a good 4-5 months.

[Agent]

I moved from VM to O2 at my 'rents house, and are now on Sky at my place.

When Virgin worked, it was great, but I had really hit and miss experience with their throttling. If you speak to VM, they will say that your connection is just capped at a certain speed. My experience was very different though, and while it was usable for web browsing, other types of traffic seemed to play up chronic.
I also got hit by random speed throttling when I clearly hadn't hit the limit. For example, I went on holiday, unplugged the modem, came back and browsed for 10 mins and I was throttled.
VM denied this was happening, despite me having speed tests and graphs (the source of all knowledge) to prove this. It was only after it got escalated to the highest people that they admitted it 'wasn't perfect' and they were 'having issues' with it. Granted, this was a few years ago, but the utter incompetency of their staff on the phone was shocking. And that's without even getting into the billing issues when it came to renewing the contract.

When it worked, I was happy. Sadly whenever I was using the connection, I always felt like I was waiting for it to stop working and / or do something stupid (lol DNS servers as another example).

It was kinda like watching a kid try and ride his first bike. You want him to do it successfully, but you're on the sideline waiting for the inevitable fall and tears when he comes off.

The only other thing I'd add is VM differs hugely from area to area. My experiences above were at my parents house. The place I'm in now has 2 net connections (Sky and VM), and the house mates that have VM only complain of the router bombing out every week, not the actual connection. Then again, they use it for very little apart from browsing.

edit - I was typing this and didn't see Zaps post before submitting. Nice to see they still don't have the throttling sorted out

[Unique]

i've found VM great. i moved from 10mb to 30mb recently, and it was a pain being reduced to 2.5mb after hitting a threshold, but along with 3x the speed i get a much bigger allowance before being throttled so rarely get a reduced speed. and when i do, then it's 7.5mb which is still pretty decent, and only 25% slower than my old full speed

i'd hate to be on anything other than VM. the wifi signal on the new superhub is crap though. luckily i don't really need it

[Bunjiweb]

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

[Stephen C]

the wifi signal on the new superhub is crap though. luckily i don't really need it

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

[oolon]

All I can say is I am very happy now not to have virgin, my ADSL is setup as it should be with a bridge and a static IP, it does not do anything like PPP over ATM or anything else, so it does not have login problems. With virgin I always had problems with the dhcp from the cable modem, I wrote a script to power cycle it, and bring it back online. My BE connection just works. Its feels faster, only down side is I quite like the TV/Phone package from virgin my options are not a good on those any more. With virgin i was never able to run my servers at home, now I can I feel like I have finally grown up, now i can run my own (I have for a long time run other people jobwise just not mine) .

James

[Bunjiweb]

I'm not overly fussed about static IPs, i've never quite understood what the relevance of it is.

I won't be running any servers and am not hugely fussed about the upload as long as it is good enough for XBL....

[Stephen C]

I'm not overly fussed about static IPs, i've never quite understood what the relevance of it is.

I won't be running any servers and am not hugely fussed about the upload as long as it is good enough for XBL....

Check the gaming section of Virgin Media's forum - http://community.virginmedia.com/t5/Gaming/bd-p/Gaming

[oolon]

I'm not overly fussed about static IPs, i've never quite understood what the relevance of it is.

For me I access my machine when I am away from home all the time, from a ego point of view its nice having a reverse look up that is my own domain name. Having a static IP, allows you to always know where the machine is. Yes there is dynamic DNS, however that isn't quite a good, and you sure can't roll your own DNS servers from a machine on a dynamic IP. None of these things are important to you.

The thing that is important to you is Be provides me with a nice stable connection, however they are not cheap.

[Bunjiweb]

Check the gaming section of Virgin Media's forum - http://community.virginmedia.com/t5/Gaming/bd-p/Gaming

The problem with looking at the VM forum is that generally that is where most people will go to complain. It's very rare that a provider's forum is full of the people who are happy with the service, so it makes it rather bias when you are looking for some impartial opinions of people who have had good service.

[Stephen C]

Not when it's regarding a specific issue like the P2P upload traffic management system.
http://gaming.hexus.net/content/item.php?item=30147

[Disturbedguy]

My parents house is on Virgin at first the throttling wasnt too bad but it did slowly get worse. One of my main bugs with the throttling is that you are throttled between set hours and even if you hit your limit with less than a second remaining during your throttling period, you will be throttled for the next 4 - 5 hours (This is something the.."helpfull" Virgin tech person I spoke to confirmed)

(http://shop.virginmedia.com/help/tra...nt-policy.html)

On the same hand, I NEVER experienced any issues while gaming when using Virgin, even when being throttled I found I hada relatively decent and stable ping with 0 packet loss.

The one time I did have a major issue, I didnt find the technical support much use/ help at all.

In brief -

We were having random connection drop outs during the day, lasting minutes or hours.
Mother phoned Virgin, engineer instantly decided a new router at the costof £70 was needed (Didn't do any trouble shooting, just said it was I needed)
I phoned up some 30 seconds later requesting that the router be cancelled as that wasn't the issue. Apparently this couldnt be done as it had already been ordered and booked.
I then asked to speak to a technical advisor whom was willing to help, after 20 - 30 minutes or so of trying things I had already told the engineer I had tried it was decided an engineer visit was required. Initially a two week wait, after some arguing an engineer slot was suddenly available the coming Monday.
Turned out we needed a filter fitting to our line as our modem was receiving to much "crap" which was causing the modem to drop the connection.

On the other hand, we had £10 a month knocked off our monthly bills due to that one incident...

Hmm maybe it wasn't so brief...

It may seem extreme, but if you are that concerned about throttling and providing you can afford it, go for the 50Mb package as this has no throttling of the connection.