how do you know how many mbs you need

Deals_2

on an internet line. am looking into the virgin fibre optic option at £10 per month with 20mbs. not sure how much that actually represents. thanks

espresso

Deals wrote: »

on an internet line. am looking into the virgin fibre optic option at £10 per month with 20mbs. not sure how much that actually represents. thanks

Virgin don't do 20Mbs for £10 per month. see here.

dieselglider

espresso wrote: »

Virgin don't do 20Mbs for £10 per month. see here.

Thay do if combined with 'Phone M'. £10 for the first three months.

20Mbps = blooming fasstttt!! And it is for 'unlimited' usage, subject to 'fair use'.

macman

But after 3 months it doubles to £20. That's an average over the 1st year of £17.50, which doesn't sound quite as good.
Impossible to say how many MBps you need, as it is is dependent on what you use the net for. If you just surf and email, 2-4 MBps will be fine. if you want to download music and videos a lot, faster is better. 20 MBps will be overkill for most people.
However, remember it's UP to 20MBps. You may only get half that in practice (but that is still fast).

Deals_2

i would like to do simple surf and the odd movie download so dont know what it is like for movie download as never done this. and was is fair usage???? thanks in advance.

macman wrote: »

But after 3 months it doubles to £20. That's an average over the 1st year of £17.50, which doesn't sound quite as good.
Impossible to say how many MBps you need, as it is is dependent on what you use the net for. If you just surf and email, 2-4 MBps will be fine. if you want to download music and videos a lot, faster is better. 20 MBps will be overkill for most people.
However, remember it's UP to 20MBps. You may only get half that in practice (but that is still fast).

macman

I think you may be confusing linespeed with data usage. Speed is download speed and with 20MBps you can do movies very fast. 20MBps is overkill for simple surfing. Most people surf fine with 2-4MBps, some with much less. You can still download a movie at this speed, it will just take longer.
Data usage is total data used in upload and download. Some deals cap this monthly and you pay more if you go over. Others say that you can have unlimited usage, but all have a 'fair usage clause'. Which basically means that if you download movies 24/7 they reserve the right to throttle your speed back, or terminate your contract in extreme cases. This is because lines are generally shared between 50 subscribers and a few people hogging all the bandwidth can slow everyone else down.
PS: what speed are you currently on with Pipex? if it's say 2MBps, then on Virgin cable you might get 10MB, i.e. 5 times faster.

MoscowFlyer

macman wrote: »

However, remember it's UP to 20MBps. You may only get half that in practice (but that is still fast).

Virgin are pretty much spot on, as it's fibre optic it doesn't matter how far you are away from an exchange like with ASDL carriers.

My 20mb broadband is exactly that, although they do throttle me to 5mb when I download a fair bit as I tend to do regularly.

456789

I'd rather have a slower adsl line than get throttled to hell by VM

macman

Th OP doesn't want a BT line for some reason I'm not quite clear about. He says he wants to download the odd movie, so mobile broadband is not really an option, unless he has money to burn.
So it seems Virgin Cable (assuming he can get it) is the best option. I've never had cable, so I'm not familiar with their fair usage/throttling policies.
Seems to me his best option might be to start with the basic 10MB package and then if he wants more speed they will be happy to upgrade him while he is still in contract. I assume the cable modem and cabling is the same for any speed-they just turn up the speed at Virgin Media Central?