Slow broadband - advice needed

blueflyingtonight

My daughter is at Uni in Birmingham and she and her housemates have Virgin broadband internet. The speed is desperately slow and it appears that, with a very high concentration of student houses locally, this is affecting anyone living in the area who is on Virgin. The internet is pretty much unusable at peak times. Virgin don't appear to be prepared to do anything in the short term. They are midway through a 12 month contract - changing to a new provider isn't really an option as they are only there for another 5 months. Is there anything they can do? Can the contract be broken on the basis that the service is not fit for purpose? Any advice welcome.

Steve

macman

Students sharing a connection = lots of downloads?
They're probably being throttled. Which package are they on, as the cheaper packages are more heavily subject to throttling?
Contention should not (in theory) be an issue on VM cable.
You didn't say if they are on VM (cable) or Virgin National (ADSL)?
Unless they're getting sub 128MBps, no grounds for breaking the contract.