Is Virgin Media broadband good?

visidigi

moesasji wrote: »

It is a long time ago that I was with Virgin Broadband. The thing that made me drop it like a stone was their "throttling" the connection if you go over a certain amount during the day to an unworkably slow connection. Basically it is slowed down to dialup speed when you go over their threshold.

As I often work from home so going over that was a pretty regular occurance and is extremely annoying considering that when I went over it was because I needed to get something done.

If you can get it. I have had very good experience with BeThere. Plusnet is also very good. Not fibre optic, but I doubt that fibre-optic is actually beneficial seeing the throttling policy from Virgin.

Then your complaint is unfair on Virgin, they don't offer you a business service, so they don't have to offer you business quality lines...in addition if this was a while ago the top tier connections we're uncapped. You get what you pay for to be fair to them...

Sphinx wrote: »

Well,

I'm currently with Plusnet and they are excellent for support (24/7 and UK call centres which I like).

Is it worth waiting for Fibre on Plusnet to be available at my cabinet (September 2012) and pay presumably less as I believe Plusnet are cheaper yet they price match anyhow.

If you can get cable where you are, and they are price competitive then I would stay where you are if you are happy.

Virgin's connections tend to be more stable and the speed they advertise, when correctly setup (I say that as some will say I only get XX when in fact they need to be setup properly) - none of this up to rubbish with the cable product.

When setup right its pretty unbeatable, but its not cheap.

Nilrem

In my experience, and from what I can tell from having spent a lot of time over the years reading peoples experiences with it.

Virgin cable when it's good, is extremely good.
When it's bad, it can be very bad.
When you sign up read the T&C, and the throttling times - don't sign up for the basic package, then be surprised when they throttle at times if you're watching a lot of iplayer/playing a lot of games on multple machines at once

My personal experience has been virgin(pun intended) of the superb over the years - I had problems back in about 2000 with what eventually turned out to be a dodgy modem, but apart from that I've rarely had more than a couple of hours down and a lot of the time when it is down, I'm not sure if it's the modem of my router playing up (I suspect my router personally), but that's rare, about one reboot of the pair every 2-3 months at most.

In some areas they are oversubscribed and the speed can be quite poor

Gordon_Hose

visidigi wrote: »

Then your complaint is unfair on Virgin, they don't offer you a business service, so they don't have to offer you business quality lines...in addition if this was a while ago the top tier connections we're uncapped. You get what you pay for to be fair to them...

I had this argument with Sky. I sometimes work from home, mainly I work from the office in London. Because some people "work from home" (frequency is irrelevant) it doesn't mean they are "running a business" from home.

Sky sent me a route I could use my VPN on in the end. Shortly after they updated the firmware on their Sagem routers to allow VPN access.

Don't get the two mixed up.

prowla

I've just signed up to Virgin's 60 Mb service, because my Sky BB service has had too many outages of late, and I can't rely on it.

I do teleworking and so need the remote access (I use multiple VPNs concurrently, BTW), and if I can't get in remotely then I have to go in to London, which costs me roughly the same the price of the Virgin service.

I also went through to Sky's cancellations and discussed the issues with them and said that I was considering swapping to Virgin; they've reduced my bill for a year, so I'll keep their BB as a standby.

Gordon_Hose

There were always massive issues with VPN's and Virgin.

Anubis_2

Anyone any idea what the cap is before they throttle? The Internet is used heavily here. I have ad no throttling or traffic shaping on 02 and 02 has been great, but considering an offer from Virgin.

jb66

Even if they do throttle you it's only by 50%. I stop my torrents between 3 and 8pm so never get throttled

usignuolo

Sorry to rain on everyone's parade but.

We have Virgin L cable broadband, 10mbs, waiting for upgrade. Virgin throttle by 75% at peak periods, including from 4-9pm, if you exceed 1.5gb (for L users) in total during this time. A film streamed takes around 750mb ph, live HD sport can be 1gb ph. OH got throttled yesterday after streaming 1.5 hours of live baseball game. That took us back to 2.5gb for the rest of the evening.

Once throttled service is reduced by 75% for the following 5 hours, ie for L users that means down to 2.5gb. You need 3.2gb to watch iplayer in HD. Apparently this equates to 1.5gb per hour (according to BBC)

Mista_C

I followed them right the way through from Blueyonder and was always happy with the service until it became Virgin Media.

Most days I would get what seemed like dial-up speeds if I had a connection at all, this was on their 20mbps package. I thought maybe I was being throttled as I did a fair bit of remote work that involved VPN connections for email, CRM, file shares, etc.

In the end I couldn't function so called CS who promised to have someone call me back, no one did. I started calling every day but never received a call back. After 4 weeks I jumped ship and went with BeThere. Another 4 weeks after that VM got in touch with me regarding my connection problems.

I asked the engineer to hold as I was sorting out a server problem and no sooner had I said I was a network engineer he got off the script and explained that VM had been over subscribing in my area and the contention ratio was 300:1 (should be between 25-50:1). He continued to explain that VM engineers had been advising VM management of these issues but had been ignored. He said it'll get worse when they bring the 50mbps into play.

His advice was to tell VM where to shove it and go with another service provider, which I had already done at that point.

Pikeyp

No problems here with Virgin!

Happily using the 50 mb service across three desktops , one tablet and an XBOX , never been throttled as far as I can tell!