Virgin Media - pay for 8MB, get 0.11

gorblimeyguvnor

If you did the bt speed test you would get something like -
IP profile for your line is - 4000 kbps
DSL connection rate: 448 kbps(UP-STREAM) 4608 kbps(DOWN-STREAM)
Actual IP throughput achieved during the test was - 3424 kbps


What are your IP profile and dsl connection rates?

griff.

normanmark wrote: »

As for going to court over how quick your broadband is, is a little OTT.

Read my post. I am not the one taking them to court. Although I would have if they had taken the settlement fee from my account. They are threatening legal action against me.


As far as I can see there was no consensus ad idem (meeting of minds when a contract is made) when I signed up with them. I was on a 2mb connection before transferring. They offered me 'upto 8mbs'.

After connection, they told me I could only get 2.5 mb with them - they had tested the line they said.

It is not reasonable to suggest you will get 'upto 8mb' and then be told you will only get 2.5mb.

Their statement to me that my line could only get 2.5mb seems to only relate to what they could give me. I transfered to Zen, and I got 6mb.

Virgin need to take full responsiblity for what they are offering to customers at the point of sale and formation of contract.

VM are acting against the Sale of Goods Act 1979 in terms of description and quality.

And even if there was a contract, I seriously doubt whether their 'settlement fee' of £200 odd is compliant with the Unfair Contract Terms Act 2005. Why on earth should I pay for 10 months adsl service that they never gave me? I appreciate there may be some setup costs that they have incurred - what does that amount to? £40?


Virgin are not the only ones doing this kind of crap to consumers, but they are very much in my radar at the moment.

pepsi_max2k

Note: the below assumes you're all on ADSL connections over a phone line, not cable connections. By the sound of it you're all adsl so...


At lot of the problems are probably down to poor marketing. No where should say a deffinate 8 Mbps, and technically you can get "up to" 8 Mbps minus network overheads.

This is because you're not paying, ordering, or running an "8 Mbps connection". You're probably using a product called DSLMax (either that or an LLU service that will likely be much the same), a specific technology which can transfer data over telephone lines up to a theoretical maximum of 8 Mbps, but varies on a house by house basis due to degredation of the signal due to distance from the exchange, external cabling quality, internal house wiring quality, electrical interferance affecting any of the cabling, modem quality, whether your sync rate (connection between your modem and telephone exchange) wants to play up (lightning storm = electircal interferance = drop in sync rate for the next 14 days) and then rounded down based on your eventual sync rate. Then minus network overheads (data that needs to be sent regardless of the data you really want). Other types of connection are available, either a regular fixed speed ADSL product (up to a fixed 2 Mbps), ADSL2 / 2+ (up to a variable 24 Mbps I think), cable (fixed speed I think) and all manner of obscure wireless types, but all "up to 8 Mbps" products on a BT line are usually DSLMax (unless they're LLU or ADSL2+, but only a few people offer it atm).

In reality the average UK household speed for DSL Max is around 2.5 Mbps, giving a realistic transfer rate of about 290 KBps or 0.29 MBps (note the B difference, b is bits, B is bytes, eight bits in a byte so a Megabyte rating will be an eigth of a megabit rating).

Unfortunately someone must've decided no one would understand the benefits of a product called "DSL Max", so they figured they'd call it "up to 8 Mbps" instead. Probably something about being too technical for people to understand. Surely not...

Then again there's plenty of ISP specific reasons it can be slow - network congestion and wrongly configured connection profiles (I was on a 2 Mbps profile even after officially being moved to Max) are the most likely - and these are usually solved by moving ISP or hoping someone at your current ISP fixes the problem soon enough. If you're really getting a very low speed connection, you (or a technically knowledged friend / neighbour / me, i need a job, really, anyone in york? i charge nothing?) have put effort into trying to solve it (checking/understanding sync rates, re-syncing modem, messing about with internal cabling, getting tech support to really make sure you're on a correct dslmax profile) and nothing's worked then you may be better off on a fixed rate ADSL product, or at least finding out what speed you should get on one (neighbours might know, bt keep a database apparently...). That or a cable connection. And I'm not sure what the Virgin vs. Zen deal is... sounds like V could've messed something up their end I supose, or there's some LLU involved with one and not with the other..

But for the rest thinking of claiming court action over a product you don't understand functioning correctly but not as you think it should, well... good luck.

Carl.

I had the same thing with Eclipse. Really slow speeds in comparison to what my line was supposed to be able to handle.

BT said I could get 4.5mbs, I got 1.2mbs.
Hopped to BT Broadband, BT said I could get 4.5mbs, got 6mbs.
Hopped back to Eclipse, BT said I could get 2mbs, got 1.2mbs.
Hopped to my current ISP, BT said I could get 2mbs, got 7mbs.
BT now say I could get upto 6.5mbs, I really wonder if they'll ever get it right.

The speed you get does depend on a lot of things as the poster above has stated. Congestion (their network, not the exchange) and packet-shaping did for me on Eclipse, not quite sure why BT never managed to deliver the speeds that I am now getting. Guess I never will!

barneytrouble

Virgin have REALLY got on my nerves now.

After nearly 2 years of patchy service, punctuated by repeated complaints from me about line speeds, the caught me in their trap.
I couldn't believe that they wouldn't act upon the slow speeds I was getting until I provided them with 8-10 speed test readings over a 24 hour period, which, as I am on a mac, they couldn't provide me with a speed-testing site whose results they would accept.

I only stayed with them because I was on a month-by-month contract, so I could move elsewhere as soon as I was confident of getting a better deal elsewhere.

Occasionally, I would get a speed upgrade (I started on 2meg, went to 4, then 8), or switch to a new priceplan, but my line speed was very inconsistent, anything from under 0.1, to about 4/5 meg.

However, this August, when I switched to their latest comparable bundle, they caught me in a 12-month contract, which I have only just found out about as I called them up for my MAC number.
I checked to see where this was stated, and it's 'vaguely' there, in the T&C's, buried in the text. Nowhere was it properly stated in the features.

I would never have agreed to this if I had known, and now they want to charge me £140 to leave a service that isn't any good.

I know that this is ultimately my fault, but I wonder if anybody else has knowledge of any loopholes or get-outs in the contract.

Class-action lawsuit anybody?? lol

normanmark

If you've used the service & not read the T&C's then ultimately theres not a lot you can do unfortunately

garyhopef2s

I am having the same problems with virgin. I have spoken to trading standards and they say that virgin are in breach of the Supply of good and services act 1982 and told me to right them a letter saying that I want the service working correctly withing 7 days or I wish to cancel. They said after that they would follow it up and sort the issue out for me. I have been geting around 275k, but connect to the exchange at around 7000k. It also says my ip profile for my line is 5500k, so they are rate limiting me and automatically taking almost 1500k off me and therefore breaching their contract and they have to at least try and supply the max connection rate for my line - ie 7meg. I also play world of warcraft (wow) and get a latency of 600-3000ms which means it unusable. I asked specifically about IP shaping, WOW and transparent proxying before signing upto them and they said they didn't do anything, so I was also sold the connection under flase pretences.

garyhopef2s

:j :j :j :j :j :j

I will appologise for my grammer and the huge rant in advance, but heres how I did it.....

Still very annoyed when I got home I rang the technical support who told me I had to speak to the cancellations dept. The cancellations dept told me that the tech support needed to put a note on my account saying that it was ok to close my account and waver the £165 cancellation cost. I phoned tech support and they said they couldn't do anything and that I needed to speak to cancellations, so I phoned cancellations again. They once again said that it was tech support so I phoned them again and argued with them. I work for a company who is a small ISP and we provide ADSL connections to some clients. We have circuit testers which are better then BT, so I told them I used one of them on the line - just mentioned ALT 2000 and said that there was nothing wrong with the line. I also said that the line was twisted and croned properly so there couldn't be anything wrong with the line and mentioned the hundreds of people with the same problem posting on the forums on the internet, so it must be their problem and that I had phoned trading standards who said that they were in breach of the 1982 provision of goods and services act and that all he had to was right a small note on my account saying that is was ok to cancel free of charge (basically I just gave them a lot of banter until they got sick and gave in) . I phoned cancellations and they still said that the technical support did not give any tech reason to cancel the line and only put that the customer had asked for the line to be cancelled. At this point I said that it was costing me a fortune phoning up at 25p per min, but I would continue phoning tech support, then cancellations until my account was cancelled. At this point the operator said that I couldn't just continue phoning them up. I said why not? then he said that they would cancel my account free of charge in 5 working days - yey. :j :j :j :j All I have to do now is wait for my bill and send a copy to virgin media for a refund of the 25p call charges, which they said they would do :j :j

Basically I think you just have to be determined and don't give in. Just ring the tech support and get them to write on your account then tell the cancellations dept that you will just keep phoning till it's sorted. Then claim back your call charges :beer:

good luck......

Gary

griff.

pepsi_max2k wrote: »

But for the rest thinking of claiming court action over a product you don't understand functioning correctly but not as you think it should, well... good luck.

This is very true. I don't understand how it works. But when they named it 'upto 8mbps' they misled the person entering into the contract with them. The basic element of contract law - strengthened by the Sale of Goods Act 1979 (amended by the Sale & Supply of Goods Act 1994) in terms of ‘satisfactory quality’ and ‘as described’ at the point of sale - is that there should be a meeting of minds at the point the contract is made. What could I expect for 'upto 8mbps' ? Well the answer to that lies in what the reasonable man would expect. Would the reasonable man expect 2.5mpbs? I think not.

Let's think of this in a different way. Say, I bought a car that the advertising materials state could get 'upto 50mpg.' Now, it's very clear in the advertising materials that come with all new cars that you can only get 50mpg if you drive it at a certain speed, for a certain length of time and in certain conditions. Let's say, for the sake of arguement, that I did exactly what the manufacturer said I should do. And I didn't get 50mpg, I only got 10mpg. Would my lack of knowledge of pistons and fuel-injection systems disqualify me from raising an action of breach of contract, or a breach of the Sale of Goods Act 1979? My understanding of the law in the United Kingdom allows a little leeway for sellers of services - but not of the magnitude suggested above.

Ignorance of the law is no excuse.

grey_lady

Im having a similar problem, signed up for an advertised 8, told would only be 6.5 and getting approx 5% of that no matter what time of day i check.

I called their 'tech' support line yesterday ran through a few checks and was quite appalled to be told to remove the facia's off my master socket (the one with the 50v capacitor in) and plug directly into their. How removing the facia would make a differene i have no idea but it wasnt something i wanted to do and asked to speak to the next level of support - 24 hours still no callback so i just spent 30 minutes on the phone (most of that on hold) to their customer service people, who couldnt help as they're all busy dealing with the fact that 14000 of their customers are without email / internet access today. So i might get a callback at some point today.

I feel cheated through - ive been a cable customer for years until now and never had any problems. If im paying £14.99 a month for 6.5 and i get 1/2 a meg then surely my bill should be reduced accordingly....

I find it useful that other people have been through the same thing and yet as soon as they switched to a different ISP they started getting a lot closer to the speeds that bt say the line can support.

Just not sure if i can be bothered to go through all the hassle of switching...

Very helpful thread, thanks for all the info above.