Will joining Virgin Media Broadband mean i get max speed?

Vampgirl

hurrah wrote: »

Do you by any chance work for Virgin Media.:D

Nope I don't work for VM, nor have I ever worked for NTL, Telewest or any of the other incarnations. In fact I work for the business arm of one of their rivals!

I have been both an ADSL and cable broadband subscriber over the years and have a very good idea how ADSL contention ratios and distance from the exchange effect service levels as I deal with business grade S- and A-DSL every day.

If prices were roughly equal and I had to chose between the two technologies I would go for the cable any day as it is more future-proof and reliable.

Tribulation

VM have recently introduced traffic shaping. They say that if you download more than 3GB between something like 4pm and midnight, your speed gets temporarily decreased for 4 hrs.

This sounds fair enough, but in practise it simply isn't working like that.
Everyone is getting a slow service in the evenings, regardless of whether they download anything or not.

If you have one computer and are using it simply to browse the web, you wont notice hardly any difference. But the chances are, if this is the case, you wouldn't be on Virgins top rate service.

I pay £37 per month for a 20Mbit line. It was £35 for a 10Mbit line but Virgin recently upgraded it.

I've been with VM's BB service for years and until recently never had any problems. around 3 months ago when on their 10Mbit service, if I ran a speed test anytime 24hrs a day, I was getting between 8 and 10.

Now, on their 20Mbit service if I run a speedtest at say 1pm, I will get around 18.5Mbit. But if I log on at say 5pm, don't download anything but do a speedtest straight away, it's usually less than 4Mbps and often lower than 1Mbps.

The reason why I pay £37 is because I want a top notch service. I usually have myself browsing online, my son playing online games on his PC and my daughter on things like MSN and you tube on her PC. Never had a problem 3 months ago, now it's often as slow as dialup, my son gets thrown off his games and my daughters screaming about how slow the internets running.

Various cable forums have huge threads about this and there are a LOT of unhappy customers out there.

It's worse for me as I recently switched to Virgins VIP package with a new 12 month contract. It seemed too good a deal. I would ditch Sky and BT, for only £3 more a month would get movies and sports, plus a free set top box in the bedroom.

One week after I had Virgin TV installed they dropped Sky 1. A couple of months later and the broadband service isn't worth the money I'm paying for. Might as well go with TalkTalk (only ones in my area with LLU) but I'm stuck in a contract.

Not really interested in sports, movies and an extra set top box was worth an extra £3 a month but wouldn't be missed. I'm now paying £85 a month to Virgin when I could be paying £21 to Sky, £20.49 to talk talk, be over £44 better off a month, still have the same speed broadband.

Had VM's BB remained good, I would be happy, but I am now paying for a service I'm not receiving.

Hotspur

Tribulation,

You could have a legal argument that VM aren't providing the broadband service to a satisfactory standard particularly as you didn't have any broadband problems previously. Worth a try if you want to get out of the contract and have somewhere suitable to go.

I also read on here and elsewhere that VM were allowing people to cancel contracts because of the Sky 1 issue but that may have been only for a short time after the loss of that channel.

H

aethandor

When I was with NTL (now Virgin) as a cable broadband customer for 9 years (not all of that on cable obviously) I was quite happy. A lot of the time I was on the basic 2mb service and typically would get the full 2mb speed if not a bit more.

For cable broadband I have no complaints.

I would however extremely closely examine the new clauses as of today regarding capping and most especially those of privacy for non-cable broadband. There is to be NO privacy whatsoever. Check the terms and conditions section C7 of the non-cable terms and conditions. What they do for one side of the business, you might reasonably expect on the other. Of course if they implement changes which significantly change the nature of the contract then you can reject them and cancel the contract without penalty, but you'll probably still have something of an argument

At the moment Virgin via cable is probably still ok. Always used to be great.

Gareth56

abbas5001 wrote: »

Hi all,

As you may have seen from my earlier post in my new address the highest speed i can get is probably a measly 512K/sec. However, the previous owner had cable and so even though e've now had a BT line installed i still take it we have a cable line.

I was thinking of signing up to Virgin Media's M Broadband package - you hve two options you can either use your normal BT phoneline or through a cable line. I was wondering would i be able to get broadband on cable and so get the maximum 2Mb - or would it still be 512K as it would be down the phone line?

Thanks

Be very careful about joining VM not just because their customer service is terrible but as from July 1st they will be charging their customers who ring their "technical support" service 25p per minute plus a 10p connection charge. Also you will very very rarely get the speed that you pay for if at all. You have been warned!!! :eek: