- Joined
- 2 Feb 2008
- Posts
- 1,957
- Location
- Rainham - Kent
Nice one thanks for that
There's an offer running at the moment, looks like it'll be running for awhile, hopefully this helps @mr griffin
FTTP VS VIRGIN MEDIA
- Thread starter mr griffin
- Start date
If you get a chance for FTTP then pick that all day. It's the future. VM are supposed to be converting their whole network to FTTP at some point in the future.
CityFibre in particular offer a cheaper price than Openreach with a higher speed.
CityFibre in particular offer a cheaper price than Openreach with a higher speed.
Virgin customer service is atrocious the fight I had to change package to 200Mbps what I paid for in first place.
Kept getting different people clearly no clue what they are doing, then eventually you end up with someone who does.
Fortunately I get a solid 200 on the whole but sometimes it runs like crap down to 100 or lower.
If FTTP comes around I'm off.
Kept getting different people clearly no clue what they are doing, then eventually you end up with someone who does.
Fortunately I get a solid 200 on the whole but sometimes it runs like crap down to 100 or lower.
If FTTP comes around I'm off.
Been with virgin for 3 years now and totally happy... now on the 1gb and its fast, low latency and no issues at all. Billing correct every month and customer service is fine.
Im really not sure why they get so much negative press really they have been great for me?
Im really not sure why they get so much negative press really they have been great for me?
Thats the thing with them its either great or crap, my area doesnt have any contention issues, had a few other issues with it, DNS errors on half the websites i go too for a few hours, or service completely going down for a few hours between 00:00 - 04:00
Associate
- Joined
- 20 Mar 2014
- Posts
- 2,361
Virgin is rubbish, when the internet connection goes down the entire router reboots taking my entire LAN down.
No issues here either, seems quite region specific.
Permabanned
- Joined
- 23 Apr 2014
- Posts
- 23,552
- Location
- Hertfordshire
Fine for me as well but would prefer the lower latency and high upload of fibre.
Define 'low latency'? Are your pings single digits to the UK and most of mainland Europe? When you're downloading at 900Mbps and uploading at 50Mbps, is your ping still the same as it was when the line was idle? Post a flent rrul test out of interest. If you don't notice the pitfalls then that's fine, but trust me VM are a world apart from proper FTTP. The day the Openreach workies turn up on our road ('planned') I'll be out with the bacon butties and cups of tea pushing them to get a bloody move on.
Only argument there is, is the fact that most average consumers don't need this level of performance.
So any point that I make, they may not notice, as the issues don't impact them as their usage for example consuming videos, browsing the web isn't massively impacted by a little extra jitter or packet loss.
But objectively without doubt FTTP will and always is more stable, there's no real discussion there, only thing to speak on is how worse off VM are.
I'd love to see a VM connection w/ SmokePing over a long period of time to see how it compares:
So any point that I make, they may not notice, as the issues don't impact them as their usage for example consuming videos, browsing the web isn't massively impacted by a little extra jitter or packet loss.
But objectively without doubt FTTP will and always is more stable, there's no real discussion there, only thing to speak on is how worse off VM are.
Also the amount of jitter on VM is considerably higher than on most other FTTP connections, also their network tends to have periods where the pings spike & you see random packet loss.
I'd love to see a VM connection w/ SmokePing over a long period of time to see how it compares:
Last edited:
Permabanned
- Joined
- 23 Apr 2014
- Posts
- 23,552
- Location
- Hertfordshire
This is all well and good but in actual usage it's fine for lots of people. Fairly heavy usage household with next to no issues. Gaming, streaming, downloading, browsing, work video calls, whatever. Minimal issues, on the whole.
I will still switch if it ever becomes available though. Just for the upload.
I will still switch if it ever becomes available though. Just for the upload.
I thought the purpose of the thread was to suss out which one is better over the other objectively, something being 'sufficient' enough for 'most' is a completely different point to the one I'm making.
Not to mention the amount of issues you hear people on VM have because their area/location has capacity issues or is under some sort of maintenance.
I think most people would be surprised to learn just how many of the 'quirks' of the Internet they take for granted, are actually a result of bufferbloat and jitter on a poor connection. Tiny bits of lost audio in WiFi calls, artefacts in video streams, that little delay between clicking something and it opening. You don't even notice unless you've had a comparison, then suddenly you'd trade half your speed just to get low latency and no bloat! Posted from a VM 1 gig connection running at 800Mbps with Cake congestion control until FTTP rolls out.
Smokeping is now running btw.Yeah literally I'd take a 100/100 1ms connection over a 940/940 flaky connection w/ some packet loss if it meant things were stable.
I feel most people just look at the Mbps, rather than speed as a whole - latency/packetloss/downtime which are some of the more important factors.
I'm genuinely curious to see the difference, so post back here after you've aggregated some stats over a period.
I'm using a step of 60 (every 60 seconds), and pings of 10. Rather than the default of 300 (every 300 seconds) & step of 20 so I have a lot more data, (if you do it, delete RRD graphs after you've made changes or you'll get an error.)
I suggest changing the stuff at the bottom aswell if you want to maintain/keep old data, otherwise it gets removed after a few months to make room in the DB - this was very frustrating to me as it took me months to realize this
I suggest changing the stuff at the bottom aswell if you want to maintain/keep old data, otherwise it gets removed after a few months to make room in the DB - this was very frustrating to me as it took me months to realize this
Yeah literally I'd take a 100/100 1ms connection over a 940/940 flaky connection w/ some packet loss if it meant things were stable.
I feel most people just look at the Mbps, rather than speed as a whole - latency/packetloss/downtime which are some of the more important factors.
I'm genuinely curious to see the difference, so post back here after you've aggregated some stats over a period.
I'm using a step of 60 (every 60 seconds), and pings of 10. Rather than the default of 300 (every 300 seconds) & step of 20 so I have a lot more data, (if you do it, delete RRD graphs after you've made changes or you'll get an error.)
I suggest changing the stuff at the bottom aswell if you want to maintain/keep old data, otherwise it gets removed after a few months to make room in the DB - this was very frustrating to me as it took me months to realize this
Thanks for the heads up, I'll leave it running in a Linux VM for a couple of days. Not perfect but I'm a bit hobbled atm (desktop mobo died).
Edit: @0007 scratch that. I forgot about my trusty little FreeBSD 13 server hiding in the corner acting as a seedbox over WireGuard. I've repurposed it for smokeping for the week (sans VPN obviously), just setting up Apache now and I'll leave it to work away. At least that's powerful, reliable and - most importantly - wired directly into the core switch with no virtualisation nonsense. Thanks again for your settings, I'll match them and compare back with you in a few days/week.
Last edited:
Permabanned
- Joined
- 23 Apr 2014
- Posts
- 23,552
- Location
- Hertfordshire
An ADSL 20Mbps connection is great for some people aswell.There is no debate, fibre is better. Just that for a lot of people VM is great.
Same with 3G, it's great for some people, some people don't even need 4G/5G connectivity.
It is all dependent on use case, but when a thread is made to compare the two, I'd expect the differences to be made clear and the advantages.
There's always an argument to say something is excessive or unnecessary with everything.
Permabanned
- Joined
- 23 Apr 2014
- Posts
- 23,552
- Location
- Hertfordshire
Thread is already answered but people have now started wanging on about buffer bloat and all sorts of guff that 99% of users wont even have the hardware to put into affect anyway.
Thread is already answered but people have now started wanging on about buffer bloat and all sorts of guff that 99% of users wont even have the hardware to put into affect anyway.
We're 'wanging on' because it's pertinent to the OP's exact question, as well as the wider question posed in the thread title.
OP said:
If you're done with the thread, just unwatch it?