Virgin Media Cable Advert

Ace Modder · 9 Aug 2015 at 19:05

Virgin Media is the best ISP I've ever had.

152mb connection, no throttling, no caps, nothing.

Never had any down time EVER!

I was with VM for 8 years, then moved to BT just because I moved house and the area didnt have Virgin, but then moved again back to a virgin area and have VM for 3 years again.

I have had VM in 4 cities/towns.
Wolverhampton, Walsall, Stafford and Newcastle under Lyme.

OP - you are very misguided with the Quality of Service VM gives.

CREATIVE!11 · 9 Aug 2015 at 19:08

Ace Modder said:
Virgin Media is the best ISP I've ever had.

152mb connection, no throttling, no caps, nothing.

Never had any down time EVER!

Bah... I wanted virgin here but it's not available.

I went from Virgin (amazing) to BT (oh god I will never touch this company ever again as LONG AS I LIVE) now to Sky.

Wish I could go with virgin...

slick rick · 9 Aug 2015 at 19:18

Ace Modder said:
Virgin Media is the best ISP I've ever had.

152mb connection, no throttling, no caps, nothing.

Never had any down time EVER!

Yep, I have never had a speed lower than what is paid for. 152 meg gives this result on Ookla.

Cant complain about that.

tnx · 9 Aug 2015 at 19:21

yesss adverts.

I opened a packet of bikkies the other day, no puppies what so ever.

tut..

aardvark · 9 Aug 2015 at 19:22

Ace Modder said:
Virgin Media is the best ISP I've ever had.

152mb connection, no throttling, no caps, nothing.

Never had any down time EVER!

I was with VM for 8 years, then moved to BT just because I moved house and the area didnt have Virgin, but then moved again back to a virgin area and have VM for 3 years again.

I have had VM in 4 cities/towns.
Wolverhampton, Walsall, Stafford and Newcastle under Lyme.

OP - you are very misguided with the Quality of Service VM gives.

yeah i've got no probelms here - 100mb always full speed, had maybe 2 problems in the last 10 years but they come out and fix it within a couple of days.

dirtychinchilla · 9 Aug 2015 at 19:22

Lots of interesting comments in here. Completely different experience to Ace Modder and the chap that lived in Leeds. I also lived in Leeds (near Hyde Park) and our connection was appalling. We had almost no internet for about 3 months, and had absolutely no TV through them. They ended up paying for all of it fortunately, as I complained viciously for months on end. The whole street was on VM because we were all students and it was the cheapest, and the exchange definitely couldn't cope with it. After all the complaints from me and hopefully from the rest of the street, they fixed it.

It's no good uni students having no internet!

CREATIVE!11 · 9 Aug 2015 at 19:32

dirtychinchilla said:
Lots of interesting comments in here. Completely different experience to Ace Modder and the chap that lived in Leeds. I also lived in Leeds (near Hyde Park) and our connection was appalling. We had almost no internet for about 3 months, and had absolutely no TV through them. They ended up paying for all of it fortunately, as I complained viciously for months on end. The whole street was on VM because we were all students and it was the cheapest, and the exchange definitely couldn't cope with it. After all the complaints from me and hopefully from the rest of the street, they fixed it.

It's no good uni students having no internet!

I lived in Hyde Park 2 years ago, Hessle Road, had 4 attempted break ins LOLOL.

Also had virgin media and didn't have a single issue with them in few years I was with them and moved a couple times to.

Malevolence · 9 Aug 2015 at 19:56

Isn't this just another of those things that idiots lap up, like £200 HDMI cables and digital TV aerials?

MagicBoy · 9 Aug 2015 at 20:04

It's not quite that bad, it's just marketing. To add some context, Virgin are about to start expanding the network to areas that got missed/have sprung up since the 90s so they need to sell their network as a differentiator.

To my knowledge Virgin have not really done any network building, they're a conglomeration of many separate outfits that merged or got acquired into a single near monopoly. All the digging up of the streets was done by the original licensees like Nynex, Videotron etc before C&W, NTL and Telewest started acquiring all the regional operators in the late 90s.

ArchAnGeL · 9 Aug 2015 at 20:09

Had ntl/virgin broadband for 14 years. Always got max speed. minimal downtime.

Apart from that, their customer service and competency are terrible. But the internet is very good.

BDEE · 9 Aug 2015 at 20:15

Ahhh Telewest - Remember the old cableinet news groups (which later became blueyonder) and the "old ways" of the web. Amazing the day I had 512k installed and kept getting "LPB" abuse in TFC servers because of my 80 ish ping. In fact my steam login remains an old Blueyonder email address which I can't change now..... Memories.

Caged · 9 Aug 2015 at 21:28

I remember having 64k ISDN and being called an LPB in CS 1.3.

ci_newman · 9 Aug 2015 at 21:49

peterwalkley said:
I work in the industry for a supplier to virgin's parent company (and many other Telco's) and I was rather surprised at the advert. DOCSIS 3 is a technical standard, but you are talking about something so incredibly boring than if I start talking about it to other nerds outside of Telco's their eyes glaze over and they suddenly need to be somewhere else.

Most people don't know and don't care about whether coax cable can give you better speeds than traditional twisted copper pair. In practise it comes down to price and what can you actually get where you live. Strangely BT seem to have a lot more offers available to those of us who live in VM cable areas ! I get junk mail from them week.

VM are really good where I live. I've been a customer for nearly 15 years now. From other posts I've seen, the main issues seem to be areas where they have too many customers in a small area and never had the money to upgrade the cabinets. Being bought by liberty global a while back should improve that.

Just as you should never let marketing people near technology, the opposite also applies.

Who do you work for? My company sells a fair amount of kit into VM too

peterwalkley · 9 Aug 2015 at 22:33

ci_newman said:
Who do you work for? My company sells a fair amount of kit into VM too

Amdocs. I'm on the OSS side of the business.

Lightnix · 9 Aug 2015 at 22:42

I had pretty good experience with them, but their stock router is utter pap.

danielanthony · 9 Aug 2015 at 22:50

I work from home and use Virgin, never had any problems which weren't sorted out quickly.

crinkleshoes · 10 Aug 2015 at 00:05

Sliver said:
Yes it is for BT. Not sure about VM, always thought that was fibre to the premises.

slick rick said:
I'm not sure TBH!

No... as far as I know Virgin for home users don't have a single fibre to the premises install... although I may be mistaken.

Their business side do, but you'd be looking at a couple of grand a month

One of their recent adverts infuriated me... it was blatant false advertisement... they were saying that their whole network was fibre and implying it was FTTP like you guys suggest.

It's fibre to the cabinet (FTTC)... like BT are now offering also.

Only Virgin have been operating as FTTC for a lot longer.

They then run coaxial down the street and into the houses.

The virgin network does, however, genuinely have the capability to provide greater speeds than BT.

BT technology is VDSL2 which has a maximum useable speed of 100-120mbit at short distance. It can start at 250mbit when it leaves the exchange/cabinet... so if you were neighbours with the cabinet/exhange and they allowed the higher sync speeds... then that would be the max you could get, but it degrades quickly with distance.

The only thing neither can improve much without jumping to FTTP now is ping...

DOCSIS 3.0 has the capability to provide 1200mbit with the right hardware :eek:

Lightnix said:
I had pretty good experience with them, but their stock router is utter pap.

At least you can stick it into modem mode

asim18 · 10 Aug 2015 at 08:32

Burnsy2023 said:
It's not quite the same when you mention it's pretty much the same cable as the ariel you've plugged into the back of your TV for pretty much forever.

Why does that even matter?

Any Coaxial cable installed by Virgin Media is going to be decades newer and capable of more than any loop used in the ancient POTS system.

Furthermore Coax is an actual RF transmission line.

POTS is an ancient system originally designed for utterly low quality analogue audio transmission, which BT and Openreach have been absolutely milking for decades with their "Fibre" this and splitters that so you can get a data connection while you talk on the phone down the same old line, and it's the reason broadband hasn't really excelled in the UK at the same pace as other European countries.

Kermit said:
I'm not sure how BT's TV works but I do still find it amazing VM squeeze 162mbit, 3 TV channels (1 to view + 2 to record if you wish) to each of our Tivo boxes (in theory 6 channels in HD) plus a telephone line with what others have said is fairly standard coax vs Sky and those ugly dishes + phone like and the unknown [to me] with regards BT's ability to deliver similar TV content down their wires without affecting BB performancebut I guess thats where DOCSIS 3 and coax wins over twisted pair.

Exactly this. Don't forget each of your TiVo boxes has its own dedicated cable modem connection so you can watch a full HD iPlayer stream, full HD Netflix stream and full HD YouTube stream on all the TiVo's in your house at the same time and still download at your maximum 162mb/s on your computer.

MagicBoy · 10 Aug 2015 at 09:10

Jeez, stop being so snobby. Yeah, twisted pair is so outdated. Not like it can do Gigabit speeds in other applications. OH hang on...

That BT managed to engineer Megabit level speeds out of a universal public utility that was built for analogue voice communications in the middle of the last century is impressive. Getting out a crystal ball and digging up all the roads in the country thirty years ago to fibre connect everyone because of a thirst for internet bandwidth in the last ten years just isn't reasonable. That and your bills would have gone through the roof.