virgin media b'strds!!

[milwaukees-junglist]

a quick question for those having problems: why don't you just ditch Virgin?

I would do if it were my house but I'm staying with my parents for the next year or so to save a deposit for a house. Not much I can do about because as shit as virgin are my dad can't be arsed to change and he doesn't want to lose his virgin.net email address.

The thing is, if I changed the ADSL ISP I'd get better reliability and less throttling but I still wouldn't get faster speeds. Milton Keynes has a very weird telephone infrastructure, it was laid with aluminium cables in the 1970's because it was cheaper than using copper, and we have two massive telephone exchanges instead of lots of smaller ones. That's fine for voice but for broadband is absolute shite because the line lengths are way too long and the aluminium isn't as good as copper for broadband. I can just about get 1Mb, downhill.....with the wind behind me Some parts of Milton Keynes can't get any broadband at all, not even mobile broadband because of all the trees. The stupid thing is that more or less all homes in MK have a cable connection as standard, they've been fitting cable to all homes in MK as standard since the 1970's. Virgin own the cable franchise but because of some bollocks about who actually owns the cabling Virgin won't upgrade the cable network to digital. So you've got a massive city crying out for broadband with all the homes already wired up to cable but because of some political shenanigans between Virgin and/or whoever own the actual cable infrastructure (BT I think) the cable is only fit for old style analogue cable TV. It's crazy.

[jaz]

Never have any trouble with Virgin myself, get it on a cheap deal & only get capped down to 5mb if I cain the newsgroups & hit about 2-5gb in a single session.

[Beagle]

just goes to show what a shit-bag of a company Virgin is as they clearly treat some customers differently from others for seemingly no real reason.

[jaz]

Yeah seems weird about the differences between peoples connections on here with Virgin. There seems to be no real consistency of advertised speed versus what you actually recieve. My speedtest above was from a so called peak time, this ones from a non peak time & as you can see it's almost exactly the same speed.

[milwaukees-junglist]

Last 24hrs have been an absolute joke. My router was connected to VM but the connection has been grinding to pretty much a complete standstill, even ping using ms-dos was timing out.

I tried rebooting the router several times which usually sorts the problem out but even that didn't didn't help.

Connection suddenly came back up at about 1.30am. Today was fine in the afternoon then ground to a halt at about 6pm, tried endlessly rebooting the router - nothing. Now it suddenly comes back on again at 11pm.

I swear Virgin media's shit network just doesn't have enough capacity for peak time usage and it just grinds to a halt. It's definitely got worse since the school holidays ended.

But have just heard some awesome news. BT are laying Fibre Optic connections to the home in 'first of it's kind' trial from January 2010 on my telephone exchange in Milton Keynes. http://www.thinkbroadband.com/news/4062 ... rials.html Fuckin' get in there :D As soon as that fibre is laid I'll be signing up and giving Virgin Meida and their dog shit broadband the elbow.

[blade187]

Always been with Virgin/NTL/Cable & Wireless (as they've changed hands) and never had a problem. Odd glitch on rare occasions but excellent overall.

[milwaukees-junglist]

Always been with Virgin/NTL/Cable & Wireless (as they've changed hands) and never had a problem. Odd glitch on rare occasions but excellent overall.

I used to be on Telewest cable broadband in London and found their service to be excellent although I've heard it's gone downhill since Virgin took over.

From what I can tell Virgin Cable Broadband seems to 'ok-ish' so long as you don't mind traffic shaping and P2P throttling.

But with Virgin Media's National ADSL broadband I've had nothing but grief - it's a joke of a service. A couple of people in my office also use Virgin ADSL and we're just constantly bitching about how shit they are. I'll never use their service again once fibre is an option in MK.

[DJ_Nik_Gnashers]

Virgin are shit. Worst ISP I've ever used. I'm only with them because I'm staying with family at the moment and it's too much hassle for them to switch to another ISP.

VM won't upgrade Milton Keynes' cable system to digital even though the phone system in MK isn't suited to ADSL so most of us in MK can barely get 1Mb on ADSL. And the VM ADSL connection is always dropping, I have to reboot the router at least twice a day. Virgin suck.

What I wouldn't give to have my super fast Bethere broadband connection I had in London

Your on VM yes but you are on phone-line internet which means its actually only VM in name, the service is provided by BT
If you had cable you would get MUCH faster speeds. I agreed that the 'fair use policy' that VM applies to customers is a bit harsh and in reality everybody should be able to use their service at full speed 24/7 (thats what we are paying for isnt it)....
Im lucky, I dont download anything like films or games, or even mp3's, so my speed is always 19MBps+ on a 20MBps cable, and my upload is always close to maximum too. Well, that is apart from the once in a blue moon that the main cable servers go down, which has happened about 3 times in the 8 years I have been with them.

[tdo]

just goes to show what a shit-bag of a company Virgin is as they clearly treat some customers differently from others for seemingly no real reason.

That'll be because deep down it's still 2 different companies, Telewest and NTL - Virgin Media is just a name they use under license (if I remember rightly). Telewest used to be good and NTL were total bollox hence why people seem to get totally different service from the "same" company.

[milwaukees-junglist]

Virgin are shit. Worst ISP I've ever used. I'm only with them because I'm staying with family at the moment and it's too much hassle for them to switch to another ISP.

VM won't upgrade Milton Keynes' cable system to digital even though the phone system in MK isn't suited to ADSL so most of us in MK can barely get 1Mb on ADSL. And the VM ADSL connection is always dropping, I have to reboot the router at least twice a day. Virgin suck.

What I wouldn't give to have my super fast Bethere broadband connection I had in London

Your on VM yes but you are on phone-line internet which means its actually only VM in name, the service is provided by BT
If you had cable you would get MUCH faster speeds.

How do you mean the service is provided by BT?

I'd always assumed VM lease their ADSL fibre backhaul at the exchange from BT but I would have thought VM still has control of how much fibre/network capacity it leases from BT. If so then it looks like VM is oversubscribed (in my area) and they haven't got/leased sufficient network capacity.

[man_traic]

a quick question for those having problems: why don't you just ditch Virgin?

I would do if it were my house but I'm staying with my parents for the next year or so to save a deposit for a house. Not much I can do about because as shit as virgin are my dad can't be arsed to change and he doesn't want to lose his virgin.net email address.

The thing is, if I changed the ADSL ISP I'd get better reliability and less throttling but I still wouldn't get faster speeds. Milton Keynes has a very weird telephone infrastructure, it was laid with aluminium cables in the 1970's because it was cheaper than using copper, and we have two massive telephone exchanges instead of lots of smaller ones. That's fine for voice but for broadband is absolute shite because the line lengths are way too long and the aluminium isn't as good as copper for broadband. I can just about get 1Mb, downhill.....with the wind behind me Some parts of Milton Keynes can't get any broadband at all, not even mobile broadband because of all the trees. The stupid thing is that more or less all homes in MK have a cable connection as standard, they've been fitting cable to all homes in MK as standard since the 1970's. Virgin own the cable franchise but because of some bollocks about who actually owns the cabling Virgin won't upgrade the cable network to digital. So you've got a massive city crying out for broadband with all the homes already wired up to cable but because of some political shenanigans between Virgin and/or whoever own the actual cable infrastructure (BT I think) the cable is only fit for old style analogue cable TV. It's crazy.

lol when you think about it virgin have mk tied up -

high speed trains to london that cost a bomb (good)
low speed internet that costs normal ££ (bad)

[rob s.]

I had issues with VM last night - couldn't even stream bassdrive which doesn't take much bandwidth at all.

I assume it's network problems their end, but just hope it's not a wider issue with their overall network capacity.

[fannypad]

What I wouldn't give to have my super fast Bethere broadband connection I had in London

I can vouch for that, get a solid 16Mb down/1.8Mb up (crucial for torrenting and FTP uploads) with Bethere and never a whiff of traffic shaping, even if I juice 20GB+ a day in peak hours from torrents, Rapidshare, newsgroups etc all at the same time. Can't recommend them enough.

[thedjeuphoria]

virgin are a pain but i like them better than bt personally.

[milwaukees-junglist]

What I wouldn't give to have my super fast Bethere broadband connection I had in London

I can vouch for that, get a solid 16Mb down/1.8Mb up (crucial for torrenting and FTP uploads) with Bethere and never a whiff of traffic shaping, even if I juice 20GB+ a day in peak hours from torrents, Rapidshare, newsgroups etc all at the same time. Can't recommend them enough.

You know it mate. I had the same quality service when I was using Bethere London and that was at three different addresses so they were consistently good on different exchanges.

Bethere are top notch, they piss all over Virgin Media that's for sure