Because it is NOT the service I agreed to or pay for, I don't know how to put it any clearer than that.
Virgin's New STM Policy
- Thread starter Robert
- Start date
Because it is NOT the service I agreed to or pay for, I don't know how to put it any clearer than that.
Soldato
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but its not the advertising that you should listen to its the contract you signed. surely you know virgin are out to make money so will advertise in the best way possible to make most money so what they say on a quick advert will not be the whole situation.
also i would have to say the example you stated is not very similiar as this isnt virgin saying you dont need to, its them saying heavy downloaders worsen the service. the example given before is more similiar, which roughyl said its like going into a shop were there is 2 bags of apples with 10 apple in each. you buy a bag for cutting all of them up to put in a pie, someone else buys another same reason, then a third person comes in asks for a bag, so the shop keeper removes 3 apples from each bag and gives them to the third person. you wouldn't return every if that happened yet is happening with vm.
however with that said i agree with stm (well atm i do) only problem i am having is that i get massive pings whilst and after the cap rendering the net basically useless, even with 5mb download google takes 20 slash 30 seconds
i have to say i have no problems in obiding by reasonable stms but the new ones are more than un reasonable.
Why should i pay the amount i am and not be able to download when i want?
With the likes of i player,itunes et al i cant work out how this is going to work for them. As people are soon gonna be mad.
The 4-9 one was workable. As i could wait till 9 and queue stuff up and go to sleep no i have to worry about whether it will be done by the morning next day.
Most people that have signed up to the 20mb one will not be using it for browsing and email, lets not be niave about it.
I guess they probably think most people wont leave because of the hassle, i for one am contemplating paying over 100 for a new line and stuff just to leave the monkeys.
If they had a good customer service id ring and complain, but all i ever get is non coherent indians or at least they sound indian.
If they are indeed bringing out this 50mb package what then?>
Also there is another little known tier thats for business users that has a higher upload speed and no stm's- dont ask but im sure theres probably info some where.
All in all for the price ive been happy even with the down time but there new stm is unworkable for me as a 20mb customer.
I would rather have like a 500gb cap or something.
For the money i pay i want to download at full speed when i want.
I might of missed something and i know im not the best at getting my thoughts across but hopefully i havent made a complete fool of myself with this post
Why should i pay the amount i am and not be able to download when i want?
With the likes of i player,itunes et al i cant work out how this is going to work for them. As people are soon gonna be mad.
The 4-9 one was workable. As i could wait till 9 and queue stuff up and go to sleep no i have to worry about whether it will be done by the morning next day.
Most people that have signed up to the 20mb one will not be using it for browsing and email, lets not be niave about it.
I guess they probably think most people wont leave because of the hassle, i for one am contemplating paying over 100 for a new line and stuff just to leave the monkeys.
If they had a good customer service id ring and complain, but all i ever get is non coherent indians or at least they sound indian.
If they are indeed bringing out this 50mb package what then?>
Also there is another little known tier thats for business users that has a higher upload speed and no stm's- dont ask but im sure theres probably info some where.
All in all for the price ive been happy even with the down time but there new stm is unworkable for me as a 20mb customer.
I would rather have like a 500gb cap or something.
For the money i pay i want to download at full speed when i want.
I might of missed something and i know im not the best at getting my thoughts across but hopefully i havent made a complete fool of myself with this post
I disagree. They need to be more transparant with their advertising.
"No download limits" should mean "No download limits" and NOT "no download limits unless you go over 350mb then we half your dl rate for 5 hours in the evening, then we'll do it again in the morning".
They use a deliberatly deceptive language when advertising their products. There's no getting around this fact.
They're careful enough to tuck their usage policy deep within their website, whilst banging on about having the best superfast broadband service in the uk. From their main page, I just spent 10 minutes looking for their policy until I found it. That's simply not on. If you dare to use their 20mg service too much (too much? what the hell), you're sent a letter explaining that you're "abusing" the service. Again with the cloak and dagger, "lets keep our policy on the hush hush", tactics, whilst at the same time blaming the end user and making them feel like some sort of thief. You pay them a premium rate for their fastest service because, well, you want their fastest service, then you're penalised when you use it. Heck, you're penalised if you use any of their services.
Lets be real here. A 350mg download is nothing. N-o-t-h-i-n-g. It's not 2002 anymore, I can burn through 350mg without thinking. Iplayer, 360, demo's, patches, youtube, itunes, films, Steam etc etc etc (all legal, I might add). It all adds up very quickly, and their draconian capping policy is ill-conceived and driven only by greed. Load up the network with as much people as possible, and strangle them into placing as little load on it as possible, while at the same time signing up more subscribers to their "no download limits" subterfuge AND introducing 3rd party companies to monitor your browsing habits. They are really squeezing you now.
Virgin aren't the only ones of course, but they're becoming the worst. The broadband service in the UK woefully lags behind the rest of Europe. We're supposed to be one of the great superpowers of the world, yet our broadband is slow, expensive, and riddled with clauses and smallprint. It's a load of rubbish.
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Also, notice how they don't put an asterix next to their claim. Instead of
you see simply
Everybody else points to their fup when they make claims like that. Why not Virgin?
Answer: Because they're trying to hide it from you. I'm aware that sounds like paranoia, but come on. What else could it be? An oversight? A typo? Really?
you see simply
Everybody else points to their fup when they make claims like that. Why not Virgin?
Answer: Because they're trying to hide it from you. I'm aware that sounds like paranoia, but come on. What else could it be? An oversight? A typo? Really?
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Personaly the new STM works well for me, I don't download a massive amount and when I do I time it approriately if possible. If not it's not the end of the world if I do exceed the limits and get a throttled connection for a bit. The bottom line is if you expect completely unmanaged full 20mb downloads 24x7 running to terrabytes of data a month for £30 you're naive. Much like a lot of software licensing the system ran on trust that people wouldn't take the weewee, and the occasional heavy downloader would be counteracted by a user that just surfs and does email. In the end though massive amounts of P2P downloads subscribers pushed things to a point where either the price had to go up to support the data transfers, or the traffic would have to be managed to protect other customers.
Let's be honest here, it's not the legitimate download of the odd games patch or video that got us to this point. It was the rampant downloading of pirated movies, TV programs from the US, music and software. The days of people claiming they have high data usage becuase of downloading "Linux Distros" is long since gone. Some users were hitting Terrabytes of data each month, mostly illegal.
It's these selfish users that have pushed almost every ISP to having to introduce FUP and management. personally i'd have rather have seen VM drop those users contracts and declined their custom, but there you are. The same thing happened in the late 90's when ISPs introduced flat rate internet access via modem. At first it was a flat fee no matter how long you connected, prior to that you paid by the minute for connection. It lasted about a year until the ISPs were being driven out of business by a few and had to introduce line drops every 2 hours or so to stop people staying online 24x7 downloading "stuff".
Perhaps it's time for the ISPs to be more realistic and bring in a low monthly subscription charge with a by the GB data charge. That way rampant mass downloading would either be discouraged or would finince itself, users that only ocasioanly download a very large amount of data would get normal prices and a nippier network. Perhaps 20mb broadband for £20 per month including 20GB of data per month and then an additional £1 per 1Gb after that?
Having said all that the VM network seems noticably more nippy during the evenings of late, so for me I benefit more than the odd inconviniece. If you really object write to the VM CEO with your argument or exercise your rights as a consumer and give your business to another ISP. Whinning here isn't going to change anything
As an aside, can we get over the "it's all gone down hill since the evil Virgin Media took over". NTL:Telewest is still the same company post merger. All that happened is NTL:Telewest bought up Virgin mobile and so aquired the rights to use the Virgin name for 30 years.
Soldato
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It is the service though, if you changed your package you would have resigned a contract with the traffic management already in place.
Its not virgins fault you didnt read the terms and conditions is it?
I can't belive they are advertising fibre optic broadband in the papers when they can't provide decent service.
all the packages are too cheap imho. Everyone is on their 20mb for £20 package so its getting raped, unsurprisingly.
I got cable during Telewest times and that was good now, its fubared.
all the packages are too cheap imho. Everyone is on their 20mb for £20 package so its getting raped, unsurprisingly.
I got cable during Telewest times and that was good now, its fubared.
I was not informed of any change to my terms and conditions and neither was I informed of the STM policy, nor did I sign anything or recieve any paperwork informing me of updated policy regarding STM.
i find BE to be far far superior to vm in terms of latency and downloading at peak times...i get 2.1mb download speed for only 18 quid a month which is an absolute bargain.
guess what? there really is no limit to how much you can download or if there is i havent found it.....i havent tried downloading 24/7 at the connections capacity as you have mentioned but thats not very realistic anyway.
ive never ever been throttled at BE should i write in to complain and ask for throttling ? do you think it will improve the service i get even though i dont get any latancy regardless of the time of day ?
should i also ask for them to charge me for the gb ontop of what they are already charging me? do you think this will improve the service ?
just like to add...just before i left vm i was talking to their tech guys and they said that the latency is down to them being over subscribed...so are you sure its these evil doers who are downloading on a 20mb connection 24/7 ? do they even exist ?
i would have thought a company like vm would take action against ppl like that rather than punish all...unless ofcourse they already got rid of those evil ppl and are over subscribed like the tech guys put it and just cant handle the demand.
Exactly, it would have been far better for them to have punished the so called bandwidth hoggers, but instead they punish everyone really, they messed up big time oversubscribing, and shifted the blame to this invisible mythical fairy tale top 5%, the more and more people they keep signing up without investing a penny in the network means that we will soon have an overnight STM to balance out oversubsciption and squeeze even more users on, you know they could put us all on 56k speeds for 20 hours of the day and they would still get away with it, because they can hide behind the T&C and people would still defend them!. I think im going to move to BE, I don't care if Virgin has 50MBIT coming, because it will be the same old story, headline speeds to get one over on Sky, but with a strangled connection.
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it's not a fairy tail though
all providers are having similar trouble, if I remember from the news a while back.. when one of the largest torrent tracker sites was taken down traffic accross the whole of europe fell by a huge percentage.
it really does make that much impact..
Soldato
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The best thing to do would be for ISP's such as virgin to completely ban torrents and newsgroups for all users, with the main sources of piracy withheld, the need for limits would be redundant.
But that would upset the users who want to download 180gb+ a day...
Seriously though it would cause problems for some very legitimate uses (WOW etc), but it would free up masses of capacity from what i've heard (I think it's been estimated that world wide bit torrent traffic can account for 80%+ of all bandwidth used at times).
you really think that would be the best thing for virgin to do ? losing so many customers and keeping the ones they have happy even though they would make far less money
you dont think this is better for virgin what they are actually doing ? keeping most their customers and just throttling the connections ....this way they can keep advertising super high speeds ...keep signing up more and more ppl and make more money ?
yeah 50mb would just kill it really....even more throttling.
they used to have a pretty fast service i remember....then they decided to give free upgrades...i got 10mb as i was on their top package even though i didnt need it as all i ever did was play games online ...it wasnt soon after that i noticed latency problems in online games....but they had to keep competing for top end speed to get more ppl signed up....ofcourse the ppl who were already with them would suffer in the long run...especially gamers.
Associate
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Are you serious? ban p2p? yes all the legal online services would love that.
Especially the new upcoming p2p service from VM themselfs (still in the work) transmitting HD through p2p.
STM isnt a permanent thing, it's going to be around for a good few years yet though.
Soldato
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I cant see it happening, but it would fix the need for throttling people, although it would just give them something else to moan about, you could hear all the cries now "I never do it myself, but im still up in arms about it!"
