MSE News: Virgin Media to boost broadband speeds

VoucherMan

Should be good.

Once this comes in I'll be able to sit and watch internet TV in the evening and reach my 'fair use limit' even quicker before I'm throttled to the usual slow speed.

VoucherMan

...And congratulations to the reporter for unearthing this news.

No doubt useful for potential new customers but most existing customers have probably known about it for over a week anyway

frosty1970

Hmm sounds like a superb plan in theory...remember the last "upgrade" we had from 2mb to 10mb free of charge they told us yet on the next months bill we had a £5 "admin charge"

wait & see what happens in june but will probably need a new router had their old webstar for a while now & its very tempremental!

Parking_Trouble

I have been a VM customer since the NTL days.
On the whole I have been very happy with them.

Currently a 50Mb BB user. Spent months with it stuck at 20Mb until I finally changed to the wireless router to the one they gave me! Reliable 50Mb since I rectified my mistake.

More than happy to get upgraded to 100Mb for nowt.

My only gripe is having to wait until October!

camaj

MSE is about a week slow on this news! Also 50mb customers are getting 120mb not 100mb as originally announced, so we will have 20, 60 and 120 tiers after the upgrade is finished. I imagine in a few years we'll have 50, 100, 200

donnie_CLPGS

I hope we get the upgrade soon. do you know when it will be rolled out in London?

essexman77

Pincher wrote: »

I am on Virgin 10Mbps, got the e-mail about upgrading.

Same thing happened when I was with Tiscali, they upgraded me from 2Mbps to Tiscali Max, which was supposed to be 8Mbps max, but of course I got 4.5Mbps in reality.

No reason to moan, provded they don't sneak the price up.

At 10Mbps, I can watch BBC iPlayer in HD, but it's borderline OK.
My Samsung SmartTV has 3D demos from the internet, which only works for some of the demos. I expect 720p works, but 1080p content is buffering too much. Hopefully, 20Mbps will make 1080p viewable.

You will likely find this is samsungs server faults with the 3D content content not your provider this has been documented on other forums around the world.

VoucherMan

donnie_CLPGS wrote: »

do you know when it will be rolled out in London?

Postcode checker should give a clue when it's coming to your area

kittycatface

Did any other virgin customers get this email first:

Good news - we're giving you even faster broadband, for less.

You're already getting the UK's fastest widely available broadband, and starting this summer we'll be starting the roll-out to boost your speeds from up to 100Mb to up to 120Mb. We'll also be lowering the price of your broadband package in April to match the price of our 50Mb Broadband XXL packages.

These are nice extras we do to make you smile. We call them Virgin Media tickles, and we only give them to people we know and like - our customers.

Our ongoing commitment to offering the UK's fastest broadband.


Virgin Media offers the fastest broadband speeds in the UK*, as proven by Ofcom for three years in a row. And we're committed to keeping it this way. Which is why we're upgrading our award winning fibre optic network over the next 18 months.

As part of this upgrade, you may have seen we'll be doubling many of our customers' broadband speeds. But, because you already get our fastest broadband, we're upgrading you to up to 120Mb and giving you a discount instead.

So whether you love streaming HD movies, ruling the gaming world or downloading tunes in super quick time - you'll soon be able to do it even faster and for less.

You don't have to lift a finger.

The 120Mb upgrade kick off in the summer and will have a slightly different roll-out schedule to our other work. We'll let you know nearer the time when to expect your broadband speed boost. In the meantime, see what you can do with faster speeds at virginmedia.com/evenfaster.

We'll be in touch in a few weeks with more details about your price reduction, so there's no need to call us, or do a thing – except keep enjoying what is already the UK's fastest broadband.

They then sent an apology. No price reduction!!!


If like someone said, they ask you to pay an admin charge at the end of the year, check your bills and phone them up to get it refunded. You didnt ask for the upgrade, it was automatic, so why should you have to pay for it??? Virgin charged me £45 for someone to come out and fix my phone line when they had said it would be free, and also for a new router when the old one didn't work. First three months were free, turns out on my bill they weren't. I've had to ring them to get the charges "credited to my account." would have preferred a cheque for time, money, effort, stress for infinity pounds! My new hobby: sorting out the internet...
I am a very very unhappy current customer of theirs, about to send my ninth complaint letter in 6 months, endless phone calls and the internet has only just started working despite them sending me at least two texts a week saying "congratulations we have fixed your problem" followed by some jolly exclamation marks. Worst customer service ever, constant expensive and lengthy phone calls and all for £20 a month. I will be including in my latest complaint a copy of the above email. They send out "good news" before they've even thought about it, then muck up. If they are like this with the new Virgin banks lord only knows what will happen to people's money.

ukmaggie45

I got a message about the upgrade, then a day or so (can't remember exactly) another one to say that the previous email had been sent in error. Haven't heard anything from them since, so assume nothing happening here!

I'm with kittycatface over charges. I'm sure I was promised 3 months free too, but then it turns out it was a £5 a month reduction for 3 months. Bit of a difference! Our charges are around £60 a month (or more depending on phone use), which I think is a lot. Not sure what broadband we're supposed to be on, but just did a test and it comes in at 16.05Mbps download and 3.10Mbps upload. We have basic TV package (plus one other TV point in bedroom) and phone as well as internet, and it's all costing a LOT more than we were given to believe when they were selling it to us. Tied in for 18 months, think will arrange for a BT line before then and get an aerial (sp?) on the roof and just use Freeview. I'm not a terribly happy bunny where Virgin is concerned, and I don't even have anything to say what broadband we're supposed to be getting. But suspect the speed we actually are getting is a lot lower than what we're paying for. Grrr.