A quick note on VirginMedia XL upgrades

[Steve]

I am, as you might have guessed, connected to the Internizzle through VirginMedia, on their XL tariff.

I live in Bristol; one of the last places to get the fabled 20Mbps upgrade.

I was talking to a colleague on MSN as I'd just deployed some code and he was testing it, when I lost Internet. Here's the modem log:

Thu Aug 30 09:07:53 2007  	 Critical (3) 	 Resetting the cable modem due to docsDevResetNow

Time should be 10:07, obviously it runs to GMT/UTC.

Seconds later I was back on at 20Mbit.

A couple of tweaks of my router's QoS and I was getting 16Mbps.

So the upgrade took less than a minute from my viewpoint.

I guess after all the cockups, they've had plenty of practice by now and know how to do it.

Here's hoping Bristol's cable network doesn't grind to a halt tonight when everybody gets home...

[LadyMinion]

I hope your connection is a reliable one Steve, but I have to warn you that the 20Mb "service" is notoriously bad. I actually downgraded to 4Mb back in June after weeks of miserable speeds on the advice of an wonderful engineer. He sends me email updates on the situation as I want to go back to 20Mb when it's working properly. He was also the first person in the company to admit to me that there were serious issues with 20Mb nationwide and that the network infrastructure was struggling.

I desperately wish they'd change back to 10Mb. Come to think of it, I wish they'd change back to NTL too! Never thought new management could do so much damage in such a short space of time.

Anyway, don't mean to make you feel down, just want you to be prepared. I think some regions do better than others, so hopefully Bristol is doing well.

[Steve]

Hi LadyMinion,

I'm quite aware of Virgin's dire handling of the cable network upgrade, which is why I was surprised by the smooth changeover.

I'm currently holding steady at about 14Mbps according to DSLZone.

Hopefully the upgrades on my part of the network complete and no more load will be put onto it until they expand it further.

We'll see tomorrow...

[mikerr]

I've been with Virgin (TW) for about 7 years and I'm on 20MB too,
but am about to move to Be ADSL, as I've had enough of their throttling and poor performance.

Be also has nice high upload speeds, upto 2.5Mb

[Lee H]

Be also has nice high upload speeds, upto 2.5Mb

With the Be unlimited it's Up to 1.3 meg upload speeds, this again is dependant on line length and SNR.

Only the Be Pro package which is the most expensive option (£40 monthly (incl. VAT)) has Up to 2.5 meg upload speeds.