Virgin Broadband

[arrkaye]

Anyone have any experiences with Virgin?

I'm considering the 100Mb package, but am concerned about throttling/blocked sites.

[Ryan2801]

They're doubling speeds this autumn. As for blocked sites, you can always use Cyberghost for free.

[PorcupineTime]

I have a few friends who use the 152Mb package, I am jealous although I doubt I need the bandwidth, truth be told. The usual feedback is that their service is very good, until you have to contact customer service. My wife won't let us get Virgin because of the nightmares she had contacting them when she was last with them.

One of my friends, who watches films illegally online and the like, simply googles for '[film name] watch online virgin media' and finds links that not blocked that way. I pay for Netflix, so I'd not be too worried about that kind of thing.

What do Virgin block?

[GreenPiggy]

Yeah don't concern yourself with blocked sites, since the ISPs only comply with the instruction in a pretty lukewarm way, you can get to any of them with a simple browser plugin.
I use my connection pretty heavily(torrenting plus remotely watching things on my plex server) and i've never seen any throttling.
One thing you'll want to do though(especially if you have more than one PC in the house) is to slap the Superhub in modem mode and use a separate router for internal traffic and wifi

[Ryan2801]

Hola is a good browser add on for blocked sites.

[PorcupineTime]

I would be careful of Hola if I were you. They've been found to be doing some dodgy stuff in the background.

[URL="http://lifehacker.com/the-always-up-to-date-guide-to-streaming-blocked-conten-5983904"]

This article shows some other recommendations and links to why to avoid Hola. I haven't found an alternative that's as easy to use.

ETA -took me ages to get that link right.

Further Edit - I still haven't got it right. Just copy and paste and if one of you lovely people could explain how to get it right, that'd be fab.

[Ryan2801]

Thanks for the heads up. I'll look into that in more detail.

[GoNz0]

Not had an issue with the fastest service here and I think 50mb at my old addy.

Now I used to get throttled if I downloaded 40-50gb when I was involved with EA and testing pre release dedicated servers due to the huge file size of the games, Now I can quite happily download way over 100gb in a couple of hours and not get throttled, so I am no longer in the top 5%? who get throttled.

CS can be pratt's at times but I get there in the end.

[alexw]

I have virgin for more than a year now (fastest package), on my third price hike(though they upgrade it for free).
It's preety fast usually, but I get furious when my youtube is buffering which happens sometimes -not necesserily virgin fault i wonder?
they block sites like other major ISP, I use zen vpn plugin for that

[Ryan2801]

I occasionally get throttled during peak hours even if I've downloaded zilch.

[Kanoe]

The headline speed is great (on 152mb package) but the consistency of line have found to not be as good as say BT Infinity 2. On BT I had 80mb down but the ping was sub 5ms day and night and the speed was always at that.

With VM have variable ping of 15ms and above and it does seem to sometimes go a little stuttery. Plus like has been said before they are OK as long as nothing goes wrong. Still gets me how things went when they left me without internet for 4 months and still wouldnt let me get out of the contract early without penalty (eventually won the war but it cost me my clan spot in WoW).

[shaithis]

Pretty much every single VM customer I know has ditched them after being subjected to a very poor service. The people who haven't kicked them into touch are very happy with the service.

They are a big gamble and it's normally worth checking the VM forums to see if your postcode is in any thread titles.

[Blastuk]

Been with them since last year, overall been problem free.
Having a few connectivity issues recently around the time they announced the speed upgrades...

Here's the ping graph from our router over the year, the lows are around 2-3ms, and at some point they probably put some kinda qos on us and we get a constant 8-9ms to the gateway now.
That peak is when someone left their uploads unchecked and we got throttled. (yeah, they throttle your uploads)


We have 4 of us on the same connection and use a total of around 800GB - 1TB per month (of which 50GB is upload)

This is what a typical day looks like:

A bit of packet loss around peak times.

We're on 152Mb package and are able to hit the max speed consistently (with steam, battlenet etc)
I've had more stability on bt infinity before, so given the choice and if the price was similar, I would go for that over this, even if it means losing speed. We don't use a landline, so virgin is currently a lot cheaper.

[Jowsey]

As most have said, when it's good it's great but when it's bad it's shocking.

I've had it for coming towards 3 years, initially on the 60mb package. (Poor student/apprentice living!) but a while back got put our speeds upped to 100mb.

We always at least get our rated. Regularly though I will download through Steam/Torrent and get 110+! I haven't worked out why, I think it's because the cabinet is on my street but even then, the ping isn't silly (~15ms) so that doesn't make sense! Either way, I'm not whining.

We've had a couple days where the line just dies so no TV or internet, but never more than 14 hours. You can check on the virgin media website for progress reports so you're not completely left in the dark, as long as that dead internet connection isn't your only method of accessing the internet! I would say it's occurred 4 times, so about 9 month apart, not great, but it's a give and take situation.

I've never been throttled and I've never had a site blocked that people on other ISP's hadn't.

Would rate 9/10 for service & price, 6/10 for customer service.

[Matt.]

VM has been a bit up and down with me. A while back we were really struggling with the Internet - having to reboot the modem multiple times a day. A guy come out and redone some wiring in the green box at the end of the road, and it was off like a rocket for a few months.
Overtime it's slowed again, so we phoned up asking for the Superhub 2AC, which they sent out to replace our Superhub 1.
This has sorted a few speed issues, jumping from ~30mbps to ~150mbps on wireless, and wired.
Our ping isn't bad, seems to be around ~30ms on wireless, and ~12ms wired.
We still get that occasional signal drop for a split second on WiFi which is annoying when gaming. Using Ethernet it's fine though. So it's a bit of a mixed bag.
Connection drops are fine if you're streaming, but no so much when you're under fire in BF4.

[jetfire]

im getting 1 of these to replace my old 1 when there out
http://www.4gon.co.uk/ubiquiti-unifi...nt-p-6638.html