News - Virgin Media backs bid to stop 'broadband con'

[HEXUS]

Petition launched to cease misleading broadband advertising.

Read more.

[miniyazz]

Virgin Media has already started to publish the average speeds its customers receive each month across its 10Mb, 20Mb and 50Mb services.

Mean, median or mode? While a good idea in principle, I could see this giving an incentive to providers not to supply any broadband at all to those living more than a certain distance from the exchange, to keep their numbers up.

[Lee H]

Virgin are having a laugh aren't they?

their 50 Mb service at the moment is woefully shocking between 5pm and 12am due to their new traffic management policy.

EVERYTHING no matter what the traffic is be it usenet, steam downloads or even FTP transfers is peaking at 250 Kb/s maximum and as the 50 Mb line is as much use as a chocolate fireguard for anything between these times when most people are using their connection for playing games or things like this.

Their forum is full of people complaining now regarding this and even their staff didn't know it was implemented on the 50 Mb after saying there is no traffic shaping on their XXL service.

[oolon]

I wish virgin would get their house in order first. For a start I wish they would stop calling it "fibre optic broadband", it is not "firer optic", the trunk to the street might be but my house isn't. I am moving from one house in London to another a few streets away, when i put my new street post code into virgin. They tell me there isn't cable! Which is strange go look outside my house see hole cover call "CATV", check houses on street others have cable external boxes too! So decide to phone Virgin, I wish I had not! Call centre in India, idiot with a script on the line. First he tells me he can move my services even if they don't serve the area by installing a BT line, omits he cannot do the TV section of my service via that system, when i pulled him up on that later he said well you stopped me getting to that, lying GIT! Keeps going on about how it must be on the "Fibre optic broadband", to be able to provide any services, I say I get cable already at my current house that isn't "fibre" it was installed before "fibre to cabinette" as well. Guy tells me well if we give you a service it must be! Can't I just have an "old" style connection? Anyway long and short of it, he is getting someone to come out to the area to check if they can provide "Fibre optic broadband" at my address, even though someone previously has had cable TV at the property! You would have thought they wanted a 90-100 quid a month customer, tempted by Sky+BE however that would be 20 quid more a month for what I get.

[Cozwin]

I wish virgin would get their house in order first. For a start I wish they would stop calling it "fibre optic broadband", it is not "firer optic", the trunk to the street might be but my house isn't. I am moving from one house in London to another a few streets away, when i put my new street post code into virgin. They tell me there isn't cable! Which is strange go look outside my house see hole cover call "CATV", check houses on street others have cable external boxes too! So decide to phone Virgin, I wish I had not! Call centre in India, idiot with a script on the line. First he tells me he can move my services even if they don't serve the area by installing a BT line, omits he cannot do the TV section of my service via that system, when i pulled him up on that later he said well you stopped me getting to that, lying GIT! Keeps going on about how it must be on the "Fibre optic broadband", to be able to provide any services, I say I get cable already at my current house that isn't "fibre" it was installed before "fibre to cabinette" as well. Guy tells me well if we give you a service it must be! Can't I just have an "old" style connection? Anyway long and short of it, he is getting someone to come out to the area to check if they can provide "Fibre optic broadband" at my address, even though someone previously has had cable TV at the property! You would have thought they wanted a 90-100 quid a month customer, tempted by Sky+BE however that would be 20 quid more a month for what I get.

Humm bizarre must vary area to area as my house has cable right up to the house as does most other peoples i know on VM.

[Cozwin]

Virgin are having a laugh aren't they?

their 50 Mb service at the moment is woefully shocking between 5pm and 12am due to their new traffic management policy.

EVERYTHING no matter what the traffic is be it usenet, steam downloads or even FTP transfers is peaking at 250 Kb/s maximum and as the 50 Mb line is as much use as a chocolate fireguard for anything between these times when most people are using their connection for playing games or things like this.

Their forum is full of people complaining now regarding this and even their staff didn't know it was implemented on the 50 Mb after saying there is no traffic shaping on their XXL service.

I cant talk for 50mb as i only have 20, but i would suspect that ever a managed 50mb service is insanely fast. But on my 20mb connection no matter what time of day i do a speed test it is 19mb out of 20mb, lowest i have ever had it is 15mb... so i really do not see your problem....all isps manage and throttle whether they admit it or not, sky and BE are both great at doing this with BT being the worst.

As for forum full of people complaining... check every isp... its all the same because people complain about not having amazing connections when they don't realise how many people in their area are on Virgin and they switch back to adsl and realise what a true crap connection is like, my dad pays for 16mb with BE he is only 1km away from exchange and only gets 5mb..... now if that isn't a 'throttle' i dont know what is, but that is just because the bt cable sucks there.

[oolon]

Humm bizarre must vary area to area as my house has cable right up to the house as does most other peoples i know on VM.

Is that cable (COAX) or fibre to your house? I have a coax cable and bell wire for the phone to my current property.

[LuckyNV]

I cant talk for 50mb as i only have 20, but i would suspect that ever a managed 50mb service is insanely fast. But on my 20mb connection no matter what time of day i do a speed test it is 19mb out of 20mb, lowest i have ever had it is 15mb... so i really do not see your problem....all isps manage and throttle whether they admit it or not, sky and BE are both great at doing this with BT being the worst.

As for forum full of people complaining... check every isp... its all the same because people complain about not having amazing connections when they don't realise how many people in their area are on Virgin and they switch back to adsl and realise what a true crap connection is like, my dad pays for 16mb with BE he is only 1km away from exchange and only gets 5mb..... now if that isn't a 'throttle' i dont know what is, but that is just because the bt cable sucks there.

You're a bit confused as to what throttling actually is.

If your dad syncs at 5Mbps but actually should connect at a higher speed then that is due to an issue with the line, either poor line quality, oversubscribed exchange or some other factor.

A throttle would be having an actual connection at 15Mbps or whatever, and only being able to download at 5Mbps after downloading 2GB or with a certain time period (peak time for e.g.)

As for Be, depending on connection profile I use I can get between 15MBps and 20Mbps, I'm able to achieve max of my connection at any time, I do load it 24/7 but I can receive full speed at demand at anytime and probably for as long as I want. (Obviously this would depend on the source, but I base it on files downloaded from normally very good servers like Microsoft, AMD and Nvidia for drivers and other files)

This has been discussed many times before, due to the nature of ADSL technology, there is little ISPs can do but use "up to", household speed would otherwise vary greatly, and factors affect speed isn't just distance but the line quality itself on the house.

[MonkeyL]

Humm bizarre must vary area to area as my house has cable right up to the house as does most other peoples i know on VM.

Yes you have a cable, it's not an optic fibre cable.

[MonkeyL]

Petition launched to cease misleading broadband advertising.

A petition that is in itself misleading, since VM employ traffic management and traffic shaping on Usenet and P2P. If VM removed the "up to" qualifier, then they too can't deliver what they sell all of the time.

Are they advocating the removal of "up to" on adverts for their ADSL service, nope.. didn't think so.

Pot... meet kettle.

[Carlh]

I cant talk for 50mb as i only have 20, but i would suspect that ever a managed 50mb service is insanely fast. But on my 20mb connection no matter what time of day i do a speed test it is 19mb out of 20mb, lowest i have ever had it is 15mb... so i really do not see your problem....all isps manage and throttle whether they admit it or not, sky and BE are both great at doing this with BT being the worst.

As for forum full of people complaining... check every isp... its all the same because people complain about not having amazing connections when they don't realise how many people in their area are on Virgin and they switch back to adsl and realise what a true crap connection is like, my dad pays for 16mb with BE he is only 1km away from exchange and only gets 5mb..... now if that isn't a 'throttle' i dont know what is, but that is just because the bt cable sucks there.

The problem with the 50Mb service is that the new traffic management policy isnt advertised on the website as the VM site currently states that theres no traffic management in place on the XXL service...

All the other speeds Virgin offer - clearly show the limits you can download and what you can be reduce to speed wise if you go over the limits defined.

I havent use my PC for a couple of days, however last night when I powered it up was immediately only getting 240k downloads speeds regardless of protocol or method of transfer... funnily enough the speed went back to full speed after midnight.

I have called VM today to cancel my account as frankly as I only use the PC at nights with working there is no way I am paying a premium to be restricited further than what the current limits are on the 10 and 20 Mb service.

[mercyground]

Read more.

well they can remove it on CABLED areas but for ADSL they cant really. Hence up to limits. What would be better is a guarenteed minimum but that cant be done as you might be in a rural area and lucky to get ADSL at all. Its not really a situation you can win. However it should get better in the end once lines are upgraded or fiber via telephone poles is rolled out.