20mb Virgin or 24mb ADSL?

Metalface Mark

Metalface Mark

Metalface Mark

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Paisley
Im moving house shortly and finally will be free of the rubbish exchange ive been on since internet was born, i can get Virgin or BE at the new address, from what ive heard BE is pretty good, but how is virgin?

When is the 50mb service coming in for Virgin?

Is there caps, restrictions on either?
 
virgin is an excellent service.
i pay for 10mbps and thats what i get!
from my experience of ADSL getting more than 4mbps whatever plan you pay for is very rare.
 
Be* - No shaping or caps (at the moment) but a lot of places are heavily over subscribed, speed will also be dependant on the length and quality of your phone line.

VM - Lots of traffic shaping and caps in terms of what you can download in a given time period (STM) though you *should* get the advertised speed until those systems kick in.

50Mbit cable is out in some areas now, fairly sure if you search google you can get a list of when it is being rolled out in various areas.


Is Be any good? Personally my experience has been less than brilliant, it was amazing but it is just now so oversubscribed in my area that at peak times it is often unusable with throughput dropping down to 1-2Mbit/sec (my line is synced at the full 21.5Mbit/sec).
 
ian|Squared² said:
from my experience of ADSL getting more than 4mbps whatever plan you pay for is very rare.
Click to expand...

I can max out my Be connection at 2MByte/sec downstream when it works properly.

My Zen line ALWAYS works at the full 8Mbit/sec, but that is why it costs me £35 a month for 50Gb of data.

I live <600m from my exchange.
 
+1 for Virgin

I have never used ADSL as I live too far away from the exchange and they reckon my top speed would be around 2meg, I am on virgin, and as ian|Squared² said, I get the 10meg I pay for

Rich
 
Im not a heavy downloader by any means, ive been using about 90/100gb a month (mostly offpeak) with my current isp, the prospect of tv/internet and phone all for less than im paying for sky at the moment is appealing.
 
If its gaming you are doing then cable with Virgin all the way.
ADSL is not great for gaming, certainly better then HSDPA but cable,fibre and well implemented FWA is better
 
Pings on pretty much anything are going to depend on the ISP, especially on ADSL. With a good provider, the difference in latency between cable and ADSL will be tiny.
 
Go for Virgin, 20meg service is permanently 20meg for me apart from capping. Caps aren't that bad either, if you time your downloads right.

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Pings are incredibly good to just about everywhere. Plus there's the added bonus of free unlimited usenet access (eg binaries). 7 day retention but it's absolutely perfect for downloading new tv eps in 720p stupidly quickly.
 
Had vm20 meg for 15 months and superb i pay £22 a month in the deal and have downloaded in the past well over 1tb in a month(came from 3 meg adsl max so was new lol ) no letters etc, great service.

I had a average ping on adsl max and now have a fantastic one all the time on cable, its down to one thing is your area good on cable simple as if you live in a crap area you will get poor speeds.
 
I had a terrible time with NTL (VM) due to horrific packetloss during peak times, probably an overloaded UBR but their support was absolutely hopeless.

A shame really because a good, uncontended cable connection can give nice sub-10ms latencies.

Be are generally regarded as a better outfit for gaming as you can request to have fastpath enabled.
 
There are the other things to consider with VM though, Phorm being one of the big ones. 12 month contracts another, at least with most ADSL providers you have 1 month contracts, OK your BT line is 12 months but you need that anyway for the service.

If you're a 'heavy downloader' I would think very hard about the STM system and whether you can live with the restrictions, if so then you should get a decent service out of it - especially with the bundle deals you can get very good value for money.

VM's customer support is probably no worse than Be, which is ****e, I've had the misfortune of having to call them up a couple of times and just ended up getting frustrated that I could never understand the person I was talking to and they were more intent with just fobbing me off with excuses than admitting there was an issue or actually trying to solve the problem.

Zen on the other hand are brilliant, full speed all the time, 10ms pings to anywhere within reason, support from the UK by people who ACTUALLY know what they are talking about and don't just read off a script. But I pay through the nose for the service (£45.50 a month inc. the line rental from BT) which is by no means a cheap connection.

If I had to chose between my Zen connection and cable then I know I would go for Zen as at the end of the day they are a premium provider and they deliver the service that I expect, and when there is an issue (which there rarely has been) I know it would be sorted out very quickly.
 
virgins caps arent that bad you can still download a hell of a lot each day, they have the best technical support ive seen from an ISP but only there newsgroup support telephone is hit n miss sometimes you get an indian call centres but ocasionaly you get some english chap who knows the ins and outs.

pings have always been really good for me and ive had very little downtime in the 7 or so years ive had cable
 
I have to agree with vm's technical support i have had 2 issues with V+ boxes and 1 modem died, on all those occasions they sent a engineer out the same day and replaced them you really can't get better service than that.

My service has never been down yet, its never been slow i get my full speeds day or night 2.3mbs, obviously if i go into the stm i get reduced too 5 meg but i rarely hit the stm as downloading can be done in the times its truly unlimited, i can get BE at my exchange maybe 10-12m but atm why would i leave when i get such good speeds and service and all for £22 a month.
 
Metalface Mark said:
Im not a heavy downloader by any means, ive been using about 90/100gb a month (mostly offpeak) with my current isp, .
Click to expand...

Then by Virgin standards you are heavy downloader. Users with less than 3Gb a day is their target. 3Gb on 24Mbit is less than 3 hours of line maxed out. You get a lot of nothing, but fast. Do yourself a favour and go for 24Mbit ADSL, preferably from proper unlimited provider, like Be Unlimited. Internet grows, your usage grows, meanwhile Virgin is the type of "ISP" that is known for rasing hell when people started using video streaming and was postulating iPlayer should pay them for traffic. It's not worth sponsoring sham and idiocy when so many fantastic alternatives are available.
 
Cable - Best, stable, fastest internet avaliable.
ADSL - Noticeabley slower, wont get more then 8/9MB, not futureproof.
 
Virgin cable is better IF you are on an OK UBR, otherwise it can be hit and miss.
It's a no-brainer for me - up to 3.5Mb ADSL or up to 20Mb cable....with 50Mb possible.
 
You will get 50mb on VM you have just go to wait for you area to be upgraded, they are meant to be finishing the full roll-out for this summer.
 
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