Virgin media..any good?

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Rabtech said:
Dont make me jealous :( Do a reverse DNS lookup and the UBR your on is part of your address http://remote.12dt.com/

I'm located on the edge of Savick/Lea and connected to UBR04 which is having 'High TX Load' issues ie oversubscribed.
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I'm now living in Walton Le Dale, so out of the range of the decent speed available with o2/Be* but seriously wanted them speeds again so only option now is cable with virgin and may upgrade eventually to the 20mb service pending funds.
 
Had ntl/virgin cable for a number of years now.
Always been spot on, although my UBR was getting oversubscribed and after 4pm my 20mb service was dropping like a stone but for the past couple of weeks it looks like they have been doing some work on the network and my UBR and im getting 20mb speeds 24/7 :)

Cant fault it at all, its not the cheapest service available at over £30 for 20mb but its realiable and fast. I wouldnt go back to DSL now.
 
check out my latest speed on virgin media
Speed.jpg
 
Av8 said:
A mate of mine said he had problems with their service and left because of them cache'ing their DNS servers, is this true or do they still do this?
I'm not 100% sure on what he means by that :confused:
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Anyone got opinions of this question my mate asked ? Cheers
 
It doesn't make sense - every ISP runs a caching DNS server, that's the whole point of them running a DNS server in the first place...

Sounds like he's talking about the caching web proxies, which are (it seems) gone.
 
Very area dependant, if your in a good area then you wont find a better connection, if your in a bad area then you wont find a worse.

I get full download speeds 24 hours a day (2.35-2.4mb/sec) from capable sources, ping under 15 to good game servers and I get about 15 mins of downtime a year. The download cap is fair and easily avoided.
 
tolien said:
It doesn't make sense - every ISP runs a caching DNS server, that's the whole point of them running a DNS server in the first place...

Sounds like he's talking about the caching web proxies, which are (it seems) gone.
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Thanks for giving me the lowdown on that one, that helps now you've described it like that. I'll put him straight too now ;)
 
Any way to find out if mu UBR is maxed out on connections?

I did a bit of googling and came back with phoning up Virgin being the only way, but I figured I'd see if people here with knowledge might know of other ways. :)

Also what are the 'peak' times? People in this thread have mentioned a few different ones.

I seem to be dropping from fairly high speed to low speed the last couple of days, and I'm guessing it's to do with peak hours etc. although there was no mention of peaks (or caps on 20Mb unlimited...I checked over their site many times) when I signed up in August.

What really confuses me is that my mates who leave nearby who also have 20Mb cable get a much better connection than I do and can download a lot faster than I can, any guesses as to why?

InvG
 
You are fine until something goes wrong. They are fairly useless at resolving issues and will often take you around in circles over the phone. They cant seem to stray from their Diagnostic guide. Being an ex NTL engineer, I know their platform very well and know what the fault is, yet I can never get them to understand. Their billing was all over the place for years, but they have since sorted this out and now seems a little more settled. As I work in support, I kind of expect the same level of service I provide to come back to me, but it never seems to.
 
Turophobic said:
You are fine until something goes wrong. They are fairly useless at resolving issues and will often take you around in circles over the phone. They cant seem to stray from their Diagnostic guide. Being an ex NTL engineer, I know their platform very well and know what the fault is, yet I can never get them to understand. Their billing was all over the place for years, but they have since sorted this out and now seems a little more settled. As I work in support, I kind of expect the same level of service I provide to come back to me, but it never seems to.
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So whats the fault?
 
Well the service is installed, very quick so far even using a wireless network too. :D
Happy chappy so far ;)
 
Av8 said:
Well the service is installed, very quick so far even using a wireless network too. :D
Happy chappy so far ;)
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It certainly is a nice connection. I was used to a 2Mb service that was a huge distance from the exchange, moved to uni, got Virgin and it's just awesome in comparison...but now it seems slow (even when running fast), but that's probably due to me playing with the uni's connection....man that's fast. :D

InvG
 
Depends where you are :) I would never ever ever go back to VM cable, was the worst ISP experience I've had in a long time, due to the fact where I was, there was an unbelievably high student population, with probably on average 4 users per household all probably heavily downloading all the time :(

I rarely saw more than 200kb/s download during term time. Once christmas or easter came about I was back up to 20ms< pings 2mb/s download etc.

On a UBR that isn't oversubscribed it is amazingly quick, on heavily congested UBR's it'll drive you insane :)
 
Blue Cypher said:
So whats the fault?
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Hmm, been quite a few over the last few years, mainly to do with signal strength, billing area faults, freezing pictures, some domains being blocked for no good reason. Price, they are quite expensive compared to other ISPs, they offer you a deal to keep you, but do not honor it until I had called back several times. Sudden total loss of broadband caused by them removing my account (for no reason), had to have a new modem, same model, different MAC address.


Poor install which resulted in intermittent loss of MCNS. Trying to get them to understand I needed the signal tested was a nightmare.

Billing: They took far too much money for my broadband account which in turn took me into the red with my bank, losing their goodwill and slightly affecting my ability to get Debit car. Which I sorted in the end, but took a few months before they got it right.

Mostly the service has been present and working. The fact they are over subscribed to and they are capping speeds and at the same time, increasing the current speeds concerns me a little.
 
Thought I'd do a quick download test. Went to Nvidia and grabbed the latest 8800GT drivers...only went there as I know they have rather nice speeds. :)

Virgin.jpg


2.4MB/s

I win. :p

InvG
 
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