Virgin Media Cable service-minimum speed?

macman

I was asked by a neighbour to sort out their wireless connection and I found that their linespeed was only 1 Mbps. Average ADSL speed in our street is around 3.5 Mbps. Then realised that it's not ADSL, they have a Virgin cable package combined with phone and TV service, costing them about £50 per month. According to the Virgin website, the minimum package offers 2Mbps, twice what they're getting.
I checked with them and apparently they've been on this 1MB package for quite a few years (it was probably the standard speed when they took it out) and I suspect they're now both overpaying and getting a slower service than the norm.
I'm not familiar with the cable packages, so can anyone tell me how they work it-should the linespeed not be uprated automatically to the current minimum of 2 MB? And do they switch you onto the current best price package automatically or do you have to ask them to do it?

roddydogs

Its the old getout-the service is "UP TO" 2Mbps, this is not what youll get most of the time. Im supposed to be on 20Mb, its never even been half of that.

macman

No, I checked and they are actually on an old 1Mbps contract, although their line will supply a theoretical 20 Mbps. My question was, do they not bump you up to the minimum current speed offered (2Mbps) by default?

KingCampo

I'm on Virgin's 'up to 10Mb' service and https://www.speedtest.net tells me I'm getting 10.271Mb which is great! I'm in Swansea btw.

Meant to add that you should ring Virgin and make sure you're getting 2Mb - I can't see any reason why that shouldn't be the case.

Nilrem

What method are they using for their cable internet connection?

At one point it was supplied via TV box (all the cable TV boxes have a built in modem) for the lower speeds if the customer didn't want to pay for an engineer to install a separate modem, however the TV boxes can't cope with more than about 1mb, and will need a separate modem sent out.

Likewise I believe some of the older modems can't cope with higher speeds.

Either way, if the speed is definitely just 1mb*, a call to virgin should result in either the modem's speed being updated (that's usually done automatically as cable has 3 basic speeds, and can only support 3 configs per modem type), or a new modem.

*Run speed tests on a few different sites, or try downloading a reasonably large file from a good host - or log into the modem status page if possible to check the config it's using)