Virgin Media Discussion Thread

Cromulent said:
I'm hoping that VM will release a faster plan at some point. I saw that EE do 1.6Gbps near me and I'd love something similar.
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They already do 2 Gbps, you just need to be in one of their newer full fibre areas. Everything will be upgraded over time. I don’t see higher download coming to HFC or hybrid connections any time soon.
 
ChrisD. said:
They already do 2 Gbps, you just need to be in one of their newer full fibre areas. Everything will be upgraded over time. I don’t see higher download coming to HFC or hybrid connections any time soon.
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Hmm. I didn't know that. Thank you.

I should have probably said I'm on VM Business and not their consumer product. Not sure if that makes a difference. I might just call them on the off chance.
 
Cromulent said:
It is more the faster upload that comes with the increased download. 100Mb/s upload is OK but it would be nice to have more.
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Oh yeah, I'm on Virgin's fastest DOCSIS connection for that reason. I don't need 500Mbps down let alone 1 gig, but felt 100 up was quite limiting for work.

Ironically since negotiating the broadband and moving here, I no longer work from home at all.
 
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LuckyBenski said:
I'd be fascinated to know what a household user can genuinely make use of >1Gbps for.
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Offloading giant game installs from the Series X and being able to pull something down again quickly if the fact takes me. And lots and lots of Linux ISOs!

Seriously though, Mrs W is WFH and sometimes has colleagues over, as well as running participation events online… definitely a huge improvement these when we shifted from 80/20 to 1g/1g
 
This "discounted rate for another 12 months" doesn't work and is becoming an irritation now as we have VM cold calling us every other day because we will be out of contract.
Why offer somthing then hound your customer base to the Nth degree. We have told them twice now we are happy with their offer!

LuckyBenski said:
I'd be fascinated to know what a household user can genuinely make use of >1Gbps for.
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I would like a fibre connection to get rid of being at the mercy of a very old coxial cable system. Easier to diagnose when it goes wrong or gets flakey.
More speed we don't need, but would be nice to have, more love to spread around. If we all had 4K viewing habits that would be a problem i guess.
I'm more on the side of QOS to keep everbody on an equal footing with a 250/20 connection but I hear thats not needed so much with a good fibre connection of 1Gbps each way.


What do I mean, well.
This:
ChannelLocked StatusRxMER (dB)Pre RS ErrorsPost RS Errors
1Locked392800
2Locked3969853
3Locked392570191
4Locked39114588
5Locked3927744121
6Locked3916878024893
7Locked3920903946423
8Locked3914316110698

And This:

Channel IDLocked StatusRxMER Data (dB)PLC Power (dBmV)Corrected errors (Active Profile)Uncorrectable errors (Active Profile)
33Locked405.3356979658356

System up time: 36day(s)22h:48m:48s
 
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Game downloads was a big one for us. Spend way more time waiting for it to download than playing. Especially updates. But also general speed (I went from 20/5 to 1100/1100 mbps!). Streaming higher quality video across multiple devices simultaneously etc. Avoiding QoS issues was helpful as we have multiple people working from home via video as well.

Just got an email that the Giffgaff trialists for nexfibre have been selected. I’m not one of them unfortunately.

Anyone get selected?
 
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In a busy household it means that nobody is stepping on anybody else - someone can download a 30GB file for work at a decent speed without impacting a video call happening in another room, or a large game patch.
 
Steampunk said:
It's often good for busy households with multiple people wanting to use high bandwidth applications at the same time. Five or six people streaming/gaming, etc.
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Streaming and gaming are not high bandwidth in my book :eek:

Even an inefficient 4k stream should be 40-50Mbps with little upload. I guess gaming can have a lot of upload and general spiky traffic.

So that's in the 300-500Mbps region.

Want some overhead? Sure, go 1Gbps. It's very common now. I'd like to know who actually needs more than that.
 
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People buying the big headline grabbing speeds are subsidising the lower end service that you might subscribe to, so don't worry about whether they have a need for it
 
Streams are bursty, they can spike 2-500 Mbps for a second or two then idle for several seconds. I've seem some stuff spike all the way to 1 Gbps and probably a bit more but because the spike is so short my network monitor can't read it accurately.

The fatter the pipe the more idle time and less likely to impact other stuff so no need for QoS or SQM. Some ISPs aren't as good on the back end as well so lower speed packages perform worse than the higher speed ones even when the utilisation is the same.

I've never had a VM connection I refuse to be treated like that but I wouldn't be without my symmetrical cityfibre connection after 15 years on FTTTC, internet access is no longer the bottleneck it's the remote servers and even then slow servers are rare and can usually be got around with a multithreaded DL manager. I can be uploading at 1.5 Gbps and gaming is unaffected, the latency doesn't even flinch all without having to do any QoS/SQM.

It's easy to scoff at fat connections on the face of it but whatever your doing on it your benefitting, everything happens as fast as possible with little impact on anything else, if it's worth the extra few quid to you is for you to decide.
 
LuckyBenski said:
I'd be fascinated to know what a household user can genuinely make use of >1Gbps for.
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That's probably the wrong question, but i'll answer it anyway. First, let's dispel the obvious, gaming is an inherently low bandwidth activity, even remote play, downloading games and updates tends to be more bandwidth intensive, but streaming 4K BD-REMUX - with a handful of notable exceptions - generally won't go above 100Mbit, given the official spec was under 60Mbit and nobody is bothering to stream that remotely with the likes of H264/H265/AV1.

At a certain point - with fibre especially as the latency is generally lower - things like 'remote' storage or the 'cloud' stop feeling remote for certain types of files, updates and downloads just happen without anyone really noticing. It's not that households saturate 1Gb/s 24/7, it's that with a big enough pipe, your view of the internet and how different services can be harnessed and used changes drastically, along with limiting the impact your usage has on other household members. It's not that many years ago that we used to have threads about shared connections where p2p usage was bringing everyone's connection to a standstill because the uplink was saturated.

To put it in context, 1Gb/s comes out at 10.8TB/day from memory, so a better question is what sort of person is able to saturate that 24/7 regularly, i'd be interested in what they're running/doing... r/datahoarder may give you a few ideas.
 
LuckyBenski said:
Want some overhead? Sure, go 1Gbps. It's very common now. I'd like to know who actually needs more than that.
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Impatient people who can’t wait another 5-10 minutes to download something and those that like to post their speed results on here to show everyone how fast there internet is.:D
 
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