Virgin Media Broadband (fibre optic)

Legacy_user

Hi guys,
Am contemplating switching from my regular ADSL O2 broadband connection to Virgin Media's fibre optic broadband. Have been directed to this offer https://www.vmpartnerrates.co.uk/Content/Docs/BB_XL_Solus.pdf via my employer (£18.50 for the 12 months for 30Mb connection). Was wondering if anyone has a fibre optic connection with Virgin and whether it lived up to the hype!
Cheerio!

KillerWatt

It's only fibre to the cab, it's coax after that.

You will get the speeds claimed, but if you take the mickey and download more than 5GB in an evening (very easy to do on 30 Mbit) then VM will throttle you back to 25% (7.5 Mbit) for 5 hours.
If you don't want those restrictions, then you will need either the 50 Mbit or 100 Mbit service.

System

KillerWatt wrote: »

It's only fibre to the cab, it's coax after that.

You will get the speeds claimed, but if you take the mickey and download more than 5GB in an evening (very easy to do on 30 Mbit) then VM will throttle you back to 25% (7.5 Mbit) for 5 hours.
If you don't want those restrictions, then you will need either the 50 Mbit or 100 Mbit service.

Cheers, I understand that it has nothing to do with the phone infrastructure at all and that they only had this in a few places so far (of which my road seems to be one?)

ps. cool - don't see myself downloading 5Gb in a single day, anyday!

spike7451

Paz wrote: »

Cheers, I understand that it has nothing to do with the phone infrastructure at all and that they only had this in a few places so far (of which my road seems to be one?)

ps. cool - don't see myself downloading 5Gb in a single day, anyday!

Virgin's broadband runs over the same line as the TV service & has done ever since broadband was released by the cable companies.Cable phone systems are incapable of running any type of broadband.

KillerWatt

Paz wrote: »

ps. cool - don't see myself downloading 5Gb in a single day, anyday!

I watched my brother pull 3.8 GB in 10 mins 3 seconds flat on his 50 Mbit connection, bloody awesome :j

macman

Bear in mind that once you have your BT ADSL line disconnected, you have no way back from VM without first paying for a reconnection of the line, which could be up to £130. There are no alternative cable providers.

custardy

VM traffic shaping policy is here

http://shop.virginmedia.com/help/traffic-management/traffic-management-policy.html

poet123

I have just gone back to Virgin after 12 months with Sky, Virgin has a far superior product.

Mark_In_Hampshire

The average download speed achieved by 20Mbps users is about 18.7Mbps which is going to outperform perhaps 99% of the phone lines (ADSL broadband) in the country. No figures for the 30Mbps service as yet.

You don't say what throughput you can achieve with your ADSL, but it isn't going to be anywhere very near 30Mbps. If it's say 5Mbps - near the average - you'd be extremely unlucky not to get very much quicker speeds.

However check the traffic management rules which might or might not affect you depending on what you do/use.

There is a known fault with the new Superhub which is impacting some 30Mbps users at the moment (rollout of new modems with firmware issues) but I'd imagine that will get fixed pretty quickly and isn't impacting everyone.

AFAIK that doesn't impact the 50Mbps service which has come down in price now, uses the latest DOCSIS 3.0 network and most users that have posted their experiences have been seeing throughput of 45Mbps+.