Virgin speed increase - why not me?

usignuolo

I have a V+ bundle which includes a cable modem broadband link (previously Blueyonder, previously Telewest.) This has a max sped of around 10mb download (and .5mb upload). For some reason, although I live in outer London, this has no immediate prospect of being upgraded. Nor can I get BT infinity here.

Both Talktalk and Orange have phoned up recently to pitch their broadband offers and then on hearing where I live both have conceded that they can only offer me 10mbps connection speed as well.

When I needed to uploaded some work from home to a supplier not long ago, it took forever. So long that I phoned up Virgin sales who said that my local hub (or whatever it is called) was one of the first ones installed and was almost last on their list of upgrades, for technical reasons. He apologised and said it was particularly bad locally to me because it was a very densely populated area with a high broadband take up and in particular a lot of people wanting to upload as well as download data. They simply did not have enough capacity.

I cannot have a sky disk on my house because we live in a conservation area and the local roof signal is poor. Originally cable seemed the best option, but now it is starting to look like the poor relation. As I said BT does not offer Infinity locally and we tried their ADSL service a few years back and it was hopeless.

Now I see Virgin have announced increased speeds for nearly all the customers, last time this happened it did not include us and I suspect it will not again. I live in SW London BTW not in the middle of the countryside. I gather I am on the Croydon UBR and SE London users are also suffering. "The UBR which handles your connection is currently suffering from very high utilisation, particularly at peak times."

Does anyone know why it is such a problem

mcfisco

I think you've answered your own question
They simply don't have the hardware infrastructure to handle the throughput
Not sure where a Sky dish or roof-top terrestrial aerial come into your argument - you can't use either for broadband, certainly not for uploading

gonzo127

i think you have been very lucky and got a decent answer from them, densley populated area with old equipment thats not likely to give a great return if they are to update it.

got to remember these things are businesses and out to make profit, now more than likely (guesses) with the fact you have a lot of take up in your area for the cable, you will probably find most of them will be on the lowest (cheapest) package. So if virgin where to upgrade their equipment at your 'hub/exchange', at what i would expect would not be cheap, you would still probably find that most people would stay on the lowest package, however they would more than likely start using more data due to increased speed and more capacity - therefore virgin would have higher overheads because of more data being transfered accross their network but no more revenue due to the fact people would stay on the cheap package.

as to BT infinity - if you have very high take up of virgin, BT will have to consider if people would be willing to swop back to BT if they put infinity in the area (not cheap) if they do not believe people will switch they wont put it in because it just doesnt make financial sense

RainyDay123

In the articles I've read it says ALL customers will get the speed increase, when is a different question! Can't post a link as yet as Im too newbie but search for virgin media broadband speed increase .

sonstream

And here is the link to the virgin media broadband speed increase hope this helps http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/db1b4e04-3c65-11e1-8d38-00144feabdc0.html#axzz1jF41pbCC

usignuolo

Sorry I should have said we had the Virgin V+ bundle which includes Broadband partly because Virgin bought up Telewest where we got our broadband from via cable and also because we need a cable tv service due to the other problems I mentioned with tv service.

Given I live in SW London and there seem to be major capacity issues at Virgin's Croydon UBR which also covers SE London, that is an awful lot of London they cannot realistically upgrade to faster speeds. So who are they talking about when they announce these roll outs covering their customer base? if it excludes at least half of their customers in London that must be a lot of customers excluded.

jimmo

From the horse's mouth
http://community.virginmedia.com/t5/Announcements/We-re-doubling-our-customers-broadband-speeds/td-p/958421

spike7451

VM is made up of various 'platforms' across the country,each platform works differently,partly because when cable came along,it was made up of lots of different companies that did things differently & used different equipment & software.For examply,NTL used 2 platforms,Langly & Bromley,We used Langly in my area & had seperate Cable Modems.Bromley ran their's thru the TV STB.At one stage,the old Pace 100s couldn't handle the high speeds over 10mb but the Samsung ones could,so they got all our Samsung boxes apart from those already in use.
Now VM has bought all the franchises under one roof,I suspect they are concentrating on one platform at a time.The OP mentions London,depending on what the demarcation is,the city may be on different platforms depending on what the original cable company was.And the are some cabled areas that cannot support broadband/digital TV without major network modification.

baby_frogmella

usignuolo wrote: »

.
Both Talktalk and Orange have phoned up recently to pitch their broadband offers and then on hearing where I live both have conceded that they can only offer me 10mbps connection speed as well.

Bear in mind that copper based ISPs tend to be very conservative when giving speed estimates, so chances are you will get higher speeds than 10 meg on ADSL2+. At my old property BT (both online checker & telephone monkeys) were saying i could only get 1.5 meg on ADSL1...yet my modem was syncing at 3.5 meg. At my current address, TalkTalk LLU'd my exchange last year and said i could only get 9 meg...yet i get 18 meg:p If any of your neighbours are on ADSL2+, have a quick peek at their modem stats and you will probably find their modem syncs higher than 10 meg

RainyDay123

To be honest although it's nice to have double download speed I'd much rather have my 10MB unlimited download ALL 24 hours and a much faster upload speed. I wish there was an option where you could sacrifice your download for upload speed say in the ratio 5:1.

spike7451

baby_frogmella wrote: »

Bear in mind that copper based ISPs tend to be very conservative when giving speed estimates, so chances are you will get higher speeds than 10 meg on ADSL2+. At my old property BT (both online checker & telephone monkeys) were saying i could only get 1.5 meg on ADSL1...yet my modem was syncing at 3.5 meg. At my current address, TalkTalk LLU'd my exchange last year and said i could only get 9 meg...yet i get 18 meg:p If any of your neighbours are on ADSL2+, have a quick peek at their modem stats and you will probably find their modem syncs higher than 10 meg

OP's on a cable connection,not phoneline based DSL broadband,her's runs over the same line as the TV service so if her neighbors on an ADSL connection,comparing stats is irrelevent.