Cancelled Virgin Media what next?

Unseen · 21 May 2016 at 16:46

Hi,

I have been a Virgin Media customer for years but went ahead and cancelled the other day through frustration. I have been a regular on the Virgin Media forums and also phoned them a good 10 times in the past year over peak time slowdowns. All I kept being told was "high utilization in the area, we are reviewing on such a date" Well this has been the case for the past 2 years. No fix to date.

I am at work during the day so the evenings and the weekends are the only time I get a bit of time to myself to play some online multiplayers, but I'm never able to due to Virgin Media's poorly oversubscribed service in the area. Peak time speeds is a maximum of 20MB seriously. The speed fluctuations also seem to heavily affect game latencies as it tends to be allover the place during the evenings and weekends. The latency spikes are the absolute worst and not ideal when gaming. This is all on a 200MB package. What good to me are high speeds in the morning or later on at night when I cannot play at such times?

Most of my time on the PC is done on multiplayer games, uploading large files to the web and the family are often browsing the web on the laptops and mobiles.

What other broadband options are out there? None of them seem to compare with Virgin Media's speeds, does that really matter?

MagicUK · 21 May 2016 at 19:03

Sse have a offer on at £21 for fttc including line rental

Flashheart · 22 May 2016 at 12:34

Virgin throttle uploads I believe. May not be great considering your usage

dbmzk1 · 22 May 2016 at 13:02

Unseen said:
Hi,

I have been a Virgin Media customer for years but went ahead and cancelled the other day through frustration. I have been a regular on the Virgin Media forums and also phoned them a good 10 times in the past year over peak time slowdowns. All I kept being told was "high utilization in the area, we are reviewing on such a date" Well this has been the case for the past 2 years. No fix to date.

I am at work during the day so the evenings and the weekends are the only time I get a bit of time to myself to play some online multiplayers, but I'm never able to due to Virgin Media's poorly oversubscribed service in the area. Peak time speeds is a maximum of 20MB seriously. The speed fluctuations also seem to heavily affect game latencies as it tends to be allover the place during the evenings and weekends. The latency spikes are the absolute worst and not ideal when gaming. This is all on a 200MB package. What good to me are high speeds in the morning or later on at night when I cannot play at such times?

Most of my time on the PC is done on multiplayer games, uploading large files to the web and the family are often browsing the web on the laptops and mobiles.

What other broadband options are out there? None of them seem to compare with Virgin Media's speeds, does that really matter?

Nothing can really compare to a fully functioning VM connection. You should complain until they fix it, phone them regularly. You'll get it heavily discounted or even free until it's fixed.

Flashheart said:
Virgin throttle uploads I believe. May not be great considering your usage

The upload is throttled in the evening and weekend, if you upload more than 2250MB in an hour and it caps at 6Mb for and hour - or if you upload over 3000MB in 2 hours it caps it at 4Mb for 2 hours. It's hard to hit the cap to be honest and doesn't effect download speed or ping etc when it does. No big deal

They do not cap downloads any more.

https://my.virginmedia.com/traffic-management/traffic-management-policy-thresholds.html

Caged · 22 May 2016 at 13:31

dbmzk1 said:
Nothing can really compare to a fully functioning VM connection. You should complain until they fix it, phone them regularly. You'll get it heavily discounted or even free until it's fixed.

I get the impression that the OP isn't too fussed about the pricing - they want to use the connection in their spare time to unwind with some multiplayer games, they don't want to spend that time complaining to Virgin Media, and not paying for a connection that they can't use is little consolation.

What difference would more complaining do if their networks teams are aware that there is an area capacity issue that has existed for two years but has gone unresolved? Cancelling and citing these issues as the reason for leaving is probably the only way that the message will get through.

ADT · 22 May 2016 at 14:17

I'm with VM and in the past month I have been having the same issue. Going to give them a call soon.

MissChief · 22 May 2016 at 14:38

Got to dslchecker.bt.com and use the address checker. VM might not be your only option for a decent connection.

platypus · 22 May 2016 at 15:55

Write a letter of complaint to the office of the chairman or CEO. Thats what I did, and it got me results.

Unseen · 22 May 2016 at 16:38

Flashheart said:
Virgin throttle uploads I believe. May not be great considering your usage

Believe me uploading isnt the cause for the slowdowns. I found out about the upload throttling during peak times ages ago when I could not live stream sessions on Twitch for any more than an hour due to hitting the upload traffic management capacity so was forced to halt plans.

dbmzk1 said:
The upload is throttled in the evening and weekend, if you upload more than 2250MB in an hour and it caps at 6Mb for and hour - or if you upload over 3000MB in 2 hours it caps it at 4Mb for 2 hours. It's hard to hit the cap to be honest and doesn't effect download speed or ping etc when it does. No big deal They do not cap downloads any more.

The upload stays at around about 12MB during peak times, only the download is affected which seems to be causing most of the problems. I try my best to stay in line with the traffic management figures on upload during peak times. I have not actually uploaded anything in peak times for a long while, most of it is done overnight with the PC left on.

MissChief said:
Got to dslchecker.bt.com and use the address checker. VM might not be your only option for a decent connection.

DH/DL - Download high/low
UH/UL - Upload High/low

VDSL Range A (Clean) DH 71 DL 54 UH 20 UL 15.8
VDSL Range B (Impacted) DH 57.5 DL 32.4 UH 17.3 UL 7.7

No BT phoneline connected so I could only do the "address checker" option as instructed.

Hyperoptic and Gigabit are not available in the area.

This is a speedtest done at 16:24PM and 17:12PM with Virgin Media until the cancel date. These speeds will gradually get worse the later we get up until about midnight. Also, all it would take now is for someone else to be on the internet in the household and it would plummet. The game latencies will soon start spiking wildly for sure.

platypus said:
Write a letter of complaint to the office of the chairman or CEO. Thats what I did, and it got me results.

Wouldnt this be ignored?

It could take months and months possibly even years of waiting for this issue to be resolved. I have seen many people complain on the Virgin forums with far worse results than I tend to get which I find pretty worrying, as everyone seems to be in oversubscribed areas and nothing is being done to fix the problem.

APM · 22 May 2016 at 18:37

I've been having drop outs from VM for a good 6 months now.

I can have 3 days uptime then only retain a connection for 2 hours then it can drop for a minute,then fine again for an hour then drop for 2 minutes etc.

Very frustrating and of the 2 engineers who came out to have a look one of them said there was a problem with a piece of kit on the network somewhere but that was months ago now and no improvement.

If I hadn't paid the line rental saver until next Feb I think I would have gone with BT and the topcahsback offer they had just recently.

platypus · 22 May 2016 at 18:55

Unseen said:
Wouldnt this be ignored?

It could take months and months possibly even years of waiting for this issue to be resolved. I have seen many people complain on the Virgin forums with far worse results than I tend to get which I find pretty worrying, as everyone seems to be in oversubscribed areas and nothing is being done to fix the problem.

Not in my experience, but it might not be what you're after.

I was ~13 months into a Virgin contract, with a year left to run. It was unusable during peak hours, and I'd gone through months of tests and complaints, and was given a possible fix date of one year and 6 months, so I wanted to leave. Asked for a cancellation and got told how much it would cost. Wrote my letter of complaint to the CEO, and had an apology, an immediate cancellation of my contract, and a full refund of all monies paid since the start of my contract.

In the meantime BT had finally fibred up the cabinet at the end of our street so we switched in a matter of days.

MissChief · 22 May 2016 at 19:22

Without quoting your whole post with the estimates, and as much as I hate to say it, BT Infinity with the new 55Meg profile would be a good option due to the available speeds. Sure it's not got the headline of Virgin but it is far more consistent.

Unseen · 23 May 2016 at 06:18

MissChief said:
Without quoting your whole post with the estimates, and as much as I hate to say it, BT Infinity with the new 55Meg profile would be a good option due to the available speeds. Sure it's not got the headline of Virgin but it is far more consistent.

Went out to check the local fttc cabinets last night and found two in the area. One was 8 minutes distance according to Google Maps and the other 5 minutes distance.

Came home and checked BT checker for the cabinet number and found the 5 minute distance one matched up with the BT checker and CodeLook based on my postcode for the cabinet.

Based on this showing is it possible to achieve the max estimated speed? Not the full 80MB but the Download High of 71MB or near it? If I can achieve that I would go ahead and choose BT Infinity 2. The distance between my house and that fttc cabinet is not actually that far and I would go as far to say that it's a 4 minute journey for the average walker not 5. Distance is approximately 0.4KM (380/390 metres) which matches up quite well with charts I have seen on the internet.

APM · 23 May 2016 at 10:00

How do you identify a BT cabinet?

Unseen · 23 May 2016 at 12:43

APM said:
How do you identify a BT cabinet?

That BT Address Checker tells you what cabinet you should be served on. When I went on my travels I found the fttc cabinet and the pcp cabinet but could not see the number sticker that is meant to be displayed on some or most of the cabinets. Got home, started inputting postcodes and addresses of local streets and found that the ones to the right of my location (Google map view) were mostly on the same cabinet served to me, the closer I got to that particular fttc cabinet the speeds improved and the cabinet number was the same as mine in the majority of the tests.

The cabinet to my left which Google says is a 8 minute walking journey which I may try and prove wrong later today by timing the walking distance from my house to the cabinets were mostly served by that other cabinet. That codelookup also helped. Input the postcode, click on the cabinet number and it should say some postcodes and streets served or partly served by the cabinet.

Or are you on about the actual cabinet itself? If you type fttc cabinet, pcp cabinet etc on the net it shows you the different types of cabinets.

Nocky24 · 23 May 2016 at 18:00

platypus said:
Write a letter of complaint to the office of the chairman or CEO. Thats what I did, and it got me results.

This is what I did too. Saved a lot of money and my connection has been great since. Prior to that I might as well have been banging my head against a brick wall.

APM · 23 May 2016 at 18:41

Unseen said:
That BT Address Checker tells you what cabinet you should be served on. When I went on my travels I found the fttc cabinet and the pcp cabinet but could not see the number sticker that is meant to be displayed on some or most of the cabinets. Got home, started inputting postcodes and addresses of local streets and found that the ones to the right of my location (Google map view) were mostly on the same cabinet served to me, the closer I got to that particular fttc cabinet the speeds improved and the cabinet number was the same as mine in the majority of the tests.

The cabinet to my left which Google says is a 8 minute walking journey which I may try and prove wrong later today by timing the walking distance from my house to the cabinets were mostly served by that other cabinet. That codelookup also helped. Input the postcode, click on the cabinet number and it should say some postcodes and streets served or partly served by the cabinet.

Or are you on about the actual cabinet itself? If you type fttc cabinet, pcp cabinet etc on the net it shows you the different types of cabinets.

Thanks,that narrowed things down a bit.