Anyone else on Virgin internet?

[manic111]

Ive just read the terms and conditions, thought I would post my findings if anyone is interested.

Between 4pm and midnight, Virgin monitor your internet usage. The internet speeds of the 5% of people who download the most in the previous week is capped to "as low as 512kbps" for the next week between those "peak hours".

After midnight and before 4pm you can download as much as you want, and if you have been capped between those hours the cap will be removed outside of them.

 

[dbmzk1]

If your are on 8mb you are on ADSL, NOT cable. Virgin ADSL is not great and doesn't pretend to be.

I'm on 20mb and Steam hardly ever goes above 1mb/s for me. It usually sits around 300-700 kb/s.

But just to clear a few things up... cable - be it NTL or Telewest - just like any other provider has ALWAYS said UP TO. No provider has ever said you are guaranteed a particular speed and never will do unless it is a dedicated connection.

For the record I always get 20mb even in peak times and I'm connected to one of the most complained about parts of the Network! I've never had any major problem with them and the quality of service is vastly superior than any ADSL provider I've experienced.

As for the throttling on Virgin, it's not new news anymore - it's been around for a few months now. I have been throttled loads of times. But I'd rather have that than a set limit per month.

 

[Amnesia]

On the VM site it says "upto", the same as ADSL. No-one can guarantee a speed as there are too many factors involved that could slow it down.

i didnt say they guarantee it...im just saying i got the full speed for all the time i was on it ...up until the last 2 years where it went straight downhill.

it depends a lot on the area you live in....some areas their network is very congested

btw distance from some exchange or what ever doesnt come into it with cable as it does with adsl...so ppl normally do get the whole speed...well until VM took over

 

[Delboy]

I understand that they say "up to 4mb/8mb" etc. But if I pay for 4Mb and more often than not get less than 1mb (average 1.5Mb which is less than half of what I pay for) then why am I paying for a 4mb service? I would'nt care too much if the average was 3Mb, but sometimes it goes so slow i've considered buying a 56k modem as a backup.

 

[alexakasloth]

I think it's steam, I get quite fast speeds downloading from steam and a steady connection from VM.

 

[n1kunj]

Also bare in mind that Virgin Inernet now throttle connections, if you download more than xxx ammount (3Gb for me) between the hours of 4pm and midnight your connection gets capped.

If you think your 3gb before throttled is bad, my 4mbit connection gets throttled after just 500mb. It's terrible.

On topic though, steam has always had crap speeds for me as well, no matter the connection speed. Nothing you can do about it except maybe deleting the clientregistry.blob file as said earlier.

 

[manic111]

Actually I wouldnt be at all surprised if I had been throttled-Im at uni with another 2 housemates here at the moment and we were all internet-less until last week, so we went a bit download happy! Plus Steam is occasionally slow for the odd hour, but not the entire day. And finally, Im only getting a DL speed of 500kbps on Net Speedtest.

 

[Grumps82]

i always get about 1-10kbs on steam with virgin, its because they are god awful crap and deserve to slowly and painfully killed.

So true, i moved house and went with Virgin for broadband. I promptly went back to BT as Virgin were utter rubbish.

 

[Hamoodii]

usefull info, i got the 'orange' pack yesterday, took many hours to DL TF2, 20mb line =/

newsgroups are fine though.

Same here.

Nice car though

 

[NVIDIA_x64]

I wen't back to BT too coz you can't really beat BT coz they own 95% of the lines anyway.

I pay for 8mb and get 7mb so i am happy

 

[Delboy]

I didn't think the orange pack was out until mid october?

 

[dbmzk1]

...so ppl normally do get the whole speed...well until VM took over

Virgin Media did not take over. They simply renamed the company. It is exactly the same company run by exactly the same people in exactly the same way using exactly the same equipment. So there is either a problem which you need to get on to them about, or you have an over active imagination!

I understand that they say "up to 4mb/8mb" etc. But if I pay for 4Mb and more often than not get less than 1mb (average 1.5Mb which is less than half of what I pay for) then why am I paying for a 4mb service? I would'nt care too much if the average was 3Mb, but sometimes it goes so slow i've considered buying a 56k modem as a backup.

Then there is clearly something wrong. Contact support. If they find a problem, you can have the cost of the phone call refunded. Awesome sig by the way

 

[twoodster]

The main problem with Virgin is the pings - I can hardly ever play multiplayer games these days! It's terrible most nights on Battlefield 2 - struggle to find servers with less than 200 ping

 

[Dano]

The main problem with Virgin is the pings - I can hardly ever play multiplayer games these days! It's terrible most nights on Battlefield 2 - struggle to find servers with less than 200 ping

My Virgin cable gives me great pings.

 

[n1kunj]

My Virgin cable gives me great pings.

Same here - that and the free usenet are really the only good things about cable anymore I get pings of about 10-15ms on most multiplay bf2 and 2142 servers.

 

[Amnesia]

Virgin Media did not take over. They simply renamed the company. It is exactly the same company run by exactly the same people in exactly the same way using exactly the same equipment. So there is either a problem which you need to get on to them about, or you have an over active imagination!

who said that the staff had changed or the equipment had been all ripped out and new equipment had been put in ? are you nuts lol
shortly before it became virgin media(happy?)... ntl were fine...i had been with them 8 years....there was never any throttling/capping and gaming was great.

then things changed.... never got the full speed no more and if i downloaded a bit before gaming on the evening it became a joke...gaming was near impossible through lack of upload bandwidth.

you think its my imagination ? you think the throttling isnt affecting gaming in any way ?
ntl never had a download cap then throttle.

also i had been in touch with them enough times and they said it straight that they are over subscribed too...some areas more than others

 

[Raves]

I'm using 8Mb Virgin ADSL. Its great until the centrals get congested - then the bandwidth drops and the pings go up. I often force my router to reconnect to the centrals when performance drops, until I find an uncongested central.

I'm dling CoH:OF from Steam atm; I'm getting 675kb/s.

 

[chris74]

Cant complain myself. Constant 2.3mb/s with giganews.

 

[craaaaaig]

my virgin 4mb has been absolutely awful lately
pings on ventrilo 150+ regular spike to 2000+
ping in cs a lovely constant 100
been meaning to phone and complain

 

[TheOtherOption]

Our 20mb virgin connection is good for downloads - can get a steady 2.3mb/s easily enough, although their traffic shaping is a bit annoying.

I think now we're up on 20mb its a few gigs which need to be downloaded between 4pm-midnight and you get throttled to a 5mb line ... not that bad but our old 2mb line would halve and our upload would become untenable (couldn't play sup com with more than 2 others over the net without massive pings)

Steam isn't normally that bad though - can get pretty good speeds with them and some decent pings with servers too