Happy 20Mb Virgin Customer

[Dark_Angel]

It's after 4pm, which is when most people get home from work/school and start doing their downloading or whatever. They say the cap lifts at midnight, but if you're really unlucky and get capped at midnight it'll be running until 4am.

Your choices are: -

a.) Download very little, which defeats the point of a 20Mbit fibre optic cable.
b.) Download while leaving the PC on all night and/or all day.

Both of those conditions were unacceptable to me, so I picked up and left. Couldn't be happier.

Very happy with mine, I rarely download over 3GB's a day anyway, so I don't normally get capped, and the cap gets reset every 4 hours anyway, so not really a big deal for me, and I much prefer the almost 100KB upload speed.

However I am curious as to your ISP?

 

[Vicar]

Very happy with mine, I rarely download over 3GB's a day anyway, so I don't normally get capped, and the cap gets reset every 4 hours anyway, so not really a big deal for me, and I much prefer the almost 100KB upload speed.

However I am curious as to your ISP?

Ulfhedjinn went to sky BB, think he is syncing around 5 meg, but has unlimited Downloading, personally I think he is nutz for that transfer, but hey each to our own No offence intended Ulfhedjinn

 

[Vibez]

Excuse me fibre optic? Virgin Medias network is fibre optic to the cabinet but co-axial from the street cabinet to the house

 

[Fothsn]

Excuse me fibre optic? Virgin Medias network is fibre optic to the cabinet but co-axial from the street cabinet to the house

State the obvious I doubt he meant fibre optic direct to our homes, I also feel Ulfhedjinn has made the wrong move if indeed he has gone to sky and only getting 5Mbps what’s the point in moving? All for an extra 1Mbps speed increase when/if you get throttled

 

[drunkenmaster]

personally i'm very much in the belief that sky is going to have caps/limits just as bad, there seem to be many people on "bad" sky exchanges which is basically sky maxing out their capacity which is way way way too little for all the people so a lot of people are getting bad speeds.

bethere seem to on purpose only use a limited number of ports and have said they will never max them out and try to always keep theoretical max speed they have setup for the exchanged matched fairly to number of customers. sky and their 500k users is kinda killing them. as with any newish company with huge amounts of new customers theres a long bedding in time where they hire more support who being phone people at first have no clue what they are doing. more engineers who aren't always great and being sent to wrong places to fix wrong things by phone people who are new and useless added to small capacity and lead in time for upgrades on exchanges.

sky are simply charging to little on the 16mb product and aren't making any money off it and are apparently actively pushing people to the ipstream services unless you push hard to talk to higher ups.


either way, my 20mb cable i can max out the speed, but when it does limit i'm very VERY rarely getting the 5mb, and this is the problem. a LOT of people aren't getting anywhere near their 5mb while limited, i've seen as low as 50kb/s while limited, and 0.1mb's upload which is terrible. if i'm not limited i can max out upload and download , hit the limit and instantly have awful just browsing so its not everyone locally maxing the exchange. but very dodgey software/hardware doing the limiting and screwing it up royally.

also the terrible customer services. on friday talking to tech support trying to get them to do something as despite good speeds my pings are pretty crap, he told me they won't do anything if pings are below 50ms, and they don't support gaming. despite the XL product saying "great for gaming". when we indicated we might leave phoning on wednesday a different guy was like, screw that, lets see if we can't fix it. that was maybe 5pm, an engineer came around today, fixed a couple problems we had with both tv boxes and checked modem/cable/cable outside, boarderline power, went to boost it. which unfortunately hasn't boosted pings much, but a has a bit. but that guy on the phone was great, knew exactly what he was talking about and tried to sort it. but for every knowledgable person on the phones you have to talk to 30 useless ****.

almost certainly leaving, just trying to work out how to get adsl up and running before we leave, and keep the number we moved from bulldogdsl over to virgin which we'll want for BT again.

 

[Darkwave]

Ulfhedjinn went to sky BB, think he is syncing around 5 meg, but has unlimited Downloading, personally I think he is nutz for that transfer, but hey each to our own No offence intended Ulfhedjinn

I'd already downgraded to Virgin 4Mbit because I couldn't justify the rip-off price of Virgin 20Mbit, which got chopped down to 5Mbit at the times I wanted to download and if I had to download even remotely a lot. Then I switched to Sky because I couldn't justify spending £25+ on Virgin 4Mbit which is capped to 2Mbit after 750MB when I could be paying £10/month for Sky on 5Mbit (guaranteed out of a possible 16Mbit) with no caps or anything.

Not to mention that we already had the Sky television service and whatnot, and didn't want to switch it to Virgin.

I also feel Ulfhedjinn has made the wrong move if indeed he has gone to sky and only getting 5Mbps what’s the point in moving? All for an extra 1Mbps speed increase when/if you get throttled

Erm, that's 1Mbit extra for less than half the price of 4Mbit Virgin and no daft shaping. You work it out.

personally i'm very much in the belief that sky is going to have caps/limits just as bad

One day, probably. If it happens, I'll switch again. So is the way of the world.


The bottom line is, I was paying a lot for 5Mbit (which was supposed to be 20Mbit) even with a discount from Virgin. Why should I take that when I can get the exact same speed 24/7 for £10/month? Honestly, it's lunacy, and I am so glad that I made the change. This is also coming from someone who hates ADSL with a passion.

Don't even get me started about BT and Sky, it wasn't my choice to keep the TV service going or to switch the phoneline, but in the end it's worked out so much cheaper, faster, and more reliable that honestly you're completely kidding yourself if you think otherwise. I understand that people will want to justify their purchase but after being a Cable/Cable&Wireless/CableInet/Blueyonder/Telewest customer for roughly ten-to-twelve years now I can safely say that the service has gone to pot and anyone would be miles better off switching to another one.

Did I mention that they signed me up to a new 12-month contract without even telling me? Only took me mentioning Ofcom to have them reverse that pathetic con.

P.S. Yes, I have been out on the pop, so I apologise for any endless sentences.

 

[ChoÞÞer]

am on virgin media, but i dont know what mb mine is? any way of finding out? sorry i moved house and my dad set it up.. i was on 8mb in my old house, would just like 2 know what am on now

 

[Darkwave]

am on virgin media, but i dont know what mb mine is? any way of finding out? sorry i moved house and my dad set it up.. i was on 8mb in my old house, would just like 2 know what am on now

You can try www.speedtest.net and it'll give you a rough speed in kbps, divide by 1024 for Mbit.

 

[ChoÞÞer]

You can try www.speedtest.net and it'll give you a rough speed in kbps, divide by 1024 for Mbit.

Cheers mate for that.
i did that last time at my house.
this is what i got, but i am downloading on bitlord aswell if that change's anythink

 

[MouseMat2004]

I'm happy with my Virgin connection, although I'm not on 20Mbit yet but I'm still capped. Like said, it's only between 4pm and 12am and you still get 5Mbit, that plently for most things.

 

[Robert]

It's after 4pm, which is when most people get home from work/school and start doing their downloading or whatever. They say the cap lifts at midnight, but if you're really unlucky and get capped at midnight it'll be running until 4am.

Your choices are: -

a.) Download very little, which defeats the point of a 20Mbit fibre optic cable.
b.) Download while leaving the PC on all night and/or all day.

Both of those conditions were unacceptable to me, so I picked up and left. Couldn't be happier.

So...werewolf worked it out recently that you can still download around 170+gb A DAY even when you've been traffic managed. It worked out only a tiny bit lower than before.

 

[Darkwave]

Cheers mate for that.
i did that last time at my house.
this is what i got, but i am downloading on bitlord aswell if that change's anythink

Aye being on Bitlord at the time will really mess with the result, it's best to do it when you have little to nothing running that uses an internet connection. Stuff like MSN won't bother it, but Bittorrent etc. is really bad for it.

So...werewolf worked it out recently that you can still download around 170+gb A DAY even when you've been traffic managed. It worked out only a tiny bit lower than before.

And for those who can't leave their PC on all night and day, and can only download between 4pm and 12am anyway, that's more like 32GB/day without traffic shaping kicking in and around half that if you get chucked down to 5Mbit after the first 2GB? I'm going on the rough guess of half an hour per gigabyte here, which is actually a very liberal figure as you can do 1GB in ~19min on 20Mbit assuming your connection is good.

But, alas, that is not why I was sick of it as I don't download anywhere near that much. I was sick of paying through the nose for a connection that would be 1/4 of what I was paying for in the event I really had to use it. I couldn't justify the massive price of 20Mbit, and if anyone downloads enough to justify the price of it, then they're going to spend most of their time at 5Mbit anyway.

Thus: Sky Broadband, £10/month for up to 16Mbit (of which I get a guaranteed 5Mbit) was more than the best choice for me. Not sure how that translates to me getting a bum deal but there you go!

 

[afraser2k]

Aye being on Bitlord at the time will really mess with the result, it's best to do it when you have little to nothing running that uses an internet connection. Stuff like MSN won't bother it, but Bittorrent etc. is really bad for it.

Did you have to get a BT line installed for ADSL (iirc you said you did but I wasn't sure)? I'm thinking of making the move and would like to know of any issues you had getting the new line installed. I checked and it was about £135 for a new BT line and I'm 1.06km from my local exchange so should get up to 6.5 Mb.

I've had a lot of problems with my VM connection in the past and things have only slightly improved now that Renfrew has been 20 Mb-upgraded. I need a BT line though for ADSL, which I don't have at the moment.

 

[Darkwave]

Did you have to get a BT line installed for ADSL (iirc you said you did but I wasn't sure)? I'm thinking of making the move and would like to know of any issues you had getting the new line installed. I checked and it was about £135 for a new BT line and I'm 1.06km from my local exchange so should get up to 6.5 Mb.

We already had a BT line from years ago so it just needed re-activating, which was free. Probably that "Coming Back To BT" scheme. They even repaired it for free (one reason we left ADSL and BT phone is because the pole got struck by lightning and they refused to fix it all.)

I'm not sure how much it would cost to get an entirely fresh, new line in. I dread to think in fact because I recently asked about getting the socket moved from the hallway and they said about £100, to which I just said "nah that's ok, I'll run an extension along the skirting board."

I've had a lot of problems with my VM connection in the past and things have only slightly improved now that Renfrew has been 20 Mb-upgraded. I need a BT line though for ADSL, which I don't have at the moment.

Yeah. If you don't have a BT line, and it would cost you that much to get one installed, I seriously wouldn't bother. Instead I'd just harrass Virgin technical support until they got the problem fixed, will cost less and be less hassle in the long-run than getting a brand new BT phoneline installed.

 

[Andre]

am on virgin media, but i dont know what mb mine is? any way of finding out? sorry i moved house and my dad set it up.. i was on 8mb in my old house, would just like 2 know what am on now

Go to http://192.168.100.1 and use name and password of root - then check out the operation/configuration page. This will give the connected speed of your modem

 

[snazzy_dazzy]

its possible to get 2mb/second


And I thought my 12kbps 3mb internet was good

 

[HangTime]

I changed from NTL 10mbit to Sky as well, their upgrade to 20mbit was a blessing for me because the associated price increase allowed me to get out of my 12 month contract.

I'm now paying £10/month for 16mbit/768kbit (syncs at 13mbit/764). Only downside is I had to get a BT phoneline reactivated meaning that I'm currently paying two phonelines for a few months - the BT one has never even had a phone plugged into it except just to check that it works!

 

[HangTime]

Yeah. If you don't have a BT line, and it would cost you that much to get one installed, I seriously wouldn't bother. Instead I'd just harrass Virgin technical support until they got the problem fixed, will cost less and be less hassle in the long-run than getting a brand new BT phoneline installed.

Probably true although after months of trying to get NTL to fix my connection I gave up and ordered a BT line despite my NTL line still being under contract (luckily like you I had an old one which could be reconnected, but I'd have paid the £130 anyway if necessary). I think the problem with these big mass-market ISPs is that as long as you can connect and download speeds are OK they don't really care about any problems you are having (latency/packetloss). Also engineers visit during the day when problems aren't as severe so in their eyes everything is peachy.

 

[Ace Modder]

Lucky you,still waiting for my upgrade.

same im from walsall! u?

 

[megatron]

Im in Maidstone, definately faster, used to max at 1250Kb/s now its 1700Kb/s I see with a download manager or 1.7Mb/s. Did 1.38Gb file in about 10min.

Apparently newsgroups are the way to really hammer your bandwidth but Ive never got on with them, especially because u need to buy a newsgroup service since the VM one doesnt retain files long enough.


Edit:
Upstream used to be 384k now its 768k!:

Downstream Status
Operational

Channel ID
0

Downstream Frequency
331000000 Hz

Modulation
QAM256

Bit Rate
20480000 bps

Power Level
-4.10 dBmV

Signal to Noise Ratio
36 dB

Upstream Channel
The data shown in the table below provides information about the signal being transmitted to the network from your cable modem.

Upstream Status
Operational

Channel ID
2

Upstream Frequency
25488000 Hz

Bit Rate
768000 bps

Power Level
44.00 dBmV