Virgin Fibre Optic Internet - BUT speed is only 2MB!!

vkalra2007

I am supposed to have 20mb fibre optic from virgin but they have now confirmed to me that they are doing an update and the services since Jan 13 had been affected and will not be fixed until April 13... Since January, I have been getting just 2MB and they have refused to compensate for the loss of service and only give me a one-off £25 credit which I didnt find acceptable as I pay them £26 every month for the internet.

Has anyone faced a similar problem? Or do you know what the best course of action should be?

Your help would be much appreciated!

macman

You can't be paying £26 pm just for broadband? Part of that surely includes your line rental and calls package?
Unfortunately the speed is not guaranteed, it's up to 20MBps.

lee111s

Are you testing wirelessly or via Ethernet?

vkalra2007

£26 is including the line rental. I have tested it via ethernet.

macman

So the voice side of the line is OK?

Nilrem

macman, if it's VM fibre (cable) then the voice is completely separate to the data/tv side of it.


vkalra2007, is the speed you're seeing being reported in mb or MB?
There is a very big difference and a lot of people get confused by it, as whilst internet speeds (for service etc) are listed as something like "up to 20mb" refering to 20 megabit whilst the likes of your browser will usually report download speeds as something like 2MB meaning 2 megabyte,
This is important as you get 8 bits to a byte, so 20Mb is about 2.5MB


Can you take a speed test from somewhere like http://speedtest.net/ and let us know what it reports.

upallnight

A fibre optic line should be 20MB, not 20Mb. I'm getting 13MB on adsl, check out "breach of contract".

Nilrem

upalnight, I doubt you're getting 13MB on ADSL, as that would be about 110megabits, and ADSL tends to top out at about 24mbits, or 40mbits (if fibre to the cabinet).

For example I get 120Mb from VM which is their top package, it equates to about 13MByte for downloads which is about as expected when you convert from bits to bytes.

VM certainly only advertise their speeds as Mb, as do all the xDSL providers I've seen.

upallnight

sorry, typo. 13Mb. I'l wait for the op to confirm his speed.

chaos2

I have now been getting 2 to 5 mb download speed during the evening time from about 6pm onwards till even midnight. I complain to virgin they will credit back £30 back in my next bill. They mention they will monitor as it is not acceptable for me paying for 30mb and receiving only 2 to 5 mb in the evening.

All of you on virgin please check your speed and complain to get acceptable service as they are more than willing to put prices up, so get credit back if they fail to provide the service.

Buzby

I'm on 30Mb and get around 27-29 reliably outside of peak times. During peak, I get from 7-16 depending, but since no other provider can offer anything close to this, I'm not complaining.

The are known to make one-off goodwill gestures, but the fact remains, if you expect 30Mb 24x7 and complain when this doesn't happen, you're going to be pretty busy - if everyone piles in the available bandwidth reduces, area re-segmentation helps, but as long as the headline rate is achievable at some time, they've done nothing wrong.