Virgin Media - How (bad) are they?

[roorooroo]

Infinity isn't coming my way for quite a while so wondered if you could give me some first hand impressions of your Virgin Media connections please.
I've been to their forums and there's a LOT of complaining going on! lol.
Cheers, Roo

[fuddam]

fine with me. joined from Sky in dec last year - so far, all smooth sailing. Have 60mbs fibre - a REAL pleasure.
Plus XL TV plus phone. The whole caboodle.
Wouldn't change any time soon, even if it was an option (tied in for 18 months, iirc)

[Agent]

It really depends on your area. In some they're fine, in others, horrendous.

[roorooroo]

Cheers..just what i thought..anywhere i can check which areas are over subscribed i wonder?

[Agent]

Sadly not. It takes a lot for them to admit they're over subbed at the best of times.

Best bet is to speak to people in that area, if you know any, and see how they rate them.

[deejayburnout]

I left VM to go to sky as they were throttling my speeds on 60mb.

after using 10GB between 6am and 3pm, they would throttle my speeds. now if the kids and/or wife were watching Netflix ( which is done every day. we get our moneys worth )
a 40min HD tv show uses a couple of GBs of data per hour. Once over the 10GB i would be like that until late at night.

i ended up getting 30MB but paying for 60MB. was not happy with them so left for Sky, who dont slow me down.

the super hub VM give you has the wifi range of a cat fart and the tivo box is so slow.

Left and never been so happy

[deejayburnout]

Check out this link

Look like they changed there management system just after i left them

Virgin Media has announced a fairly significant change to its traffic management policy, that will apply to customers who are on a broadband tier of 30 Mbps or faster. The simplest part of the new policy is that the old daytime period of 10am to 3pm has been abolished, additionally rather than being managed for a five hour period if you trigger the traffic management you might be managed for just hour.

[Splash]

I was in a similar boat: no Infinity coming any time soon so I bit the bullet and moved to Virgin fibre. Initial impressions weren't great - the hub isn't the most powerful router on the planet but I figured that down to the fact that I'm on 100Mbps as it only seemed to fall over when maxing the connection out (not very often!) for more than a few minutes. I built a mini-itx pfsense box and since I finished configuring that and put the Virgin hub into modem mode it's not fallen over since. Can't say that I've seen a hit on the traffic management either, which is nice.

One thing I did notice which is a bit of a downer is that streaming media (specifically iPlayer and Mubi) is a little flaky, but this seems to be a general issue across the Virgin network and isn't the end of the world for me.

[Kovoet]

I have the full package with them and I have had no problems with them. Use a dlink setup and my 120mb connection has been brilliant. Upload speed not the greatest but you can't have everything.

[GoNz0]

I have been with VM for 8 years now at 2 houses, apart from expected issues the service is better than I had on DSL, for a stgart the lines don't wear out due to wind like overhead cables.

best to research your postcode area on the forums to make sure your exchange is a good one.

If you have a friend on VM get them to recommend you as you get free install and they get £50 off the bill after a year.

If you have no one on VM I call dibs

[Dareos]

Cheers..just what i thought..anywhere i can check which areas are over subscribed i wonder?

yes, you pm me your postcode and i check it out

Couple of things, new 60Mb and above customers get the shub2, which is a better device than the first one, by quite a margin and people on forums dont post when they are having great service (well, not often)

[Eggbert]

Wired is great. Get the 60Mb/s as advertised almost always, throttling does exist but usually only briefly on a Saturday night for me, no complaints there.

Run as far away as possible if you want a wireless setup though, the Superhub is truly truly abysmal and I get sub 1Mb/s on the floor almost directly above the room where the Superhub is located. That being said I do have a Superhub 1 and they recently released a second edition, not sure how much of an improvement it is.

[roorooroo]

Thanks for the great feedback everyone..very informative and helpful.

Dareos, PM coming your way.

[GoNz0]

they won't give me a SH2 even though I am on 120mb and have a SH1 with poor wireless....

[deejayburnout]

VM really need to increase there upload speed.

Too slow for modern requirements such as cloud and filesharing.

[GoNz0]

i guess that will come to keep up with fibre