Virgin Media Discussion Thread

Going to try and fix my parents VM this week. Still creeping along at 2mb. This is why i'm hesitant to get rid of my 20mb and upgrade. I've never had any troubles with my 20mb modem. The superhub is really a pants piece of kit.
 
Still on 20Mb myself as it "had" been perfect. I've always got full speeds and gaming/streaming never a problem.

Now the past month streaming and gaming is pretty much impossible. Battlefield 3 on PC is really frustrating as I'm constantly rubber banding when running. Web browsing is a lot slower and tests show packet loss and high pings. It seems at its worst in the evenings and weekends. From what I've been reading over at the vm forums it's since they rolled out 30, 50 and 100Mb services the main routers and infrastructure can't cope. Really ****** me off since I've been a customer for around 10 years and like I say it was fine before.

I really don't know what to do. I've never heard anything good about sky or BT and infinity isn't in my area. The BT checker says the max speed I can get is 6Mb.... I just don't know what to do :(

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http://www.hardwareheaven.com/news.php?newsid=3381

The proposed speed increase will see customers with 10Mb speed increased to 30Mb, customers with 30Mb speed increased to 60Mb and customers with 50Mb increase to 100Mb making the minimum broadband speed that Virgin Media offer to new and existing customers 30Mb. The speed increase will come at no additional cost to the customer and is to be rolled out in the first quarter of 2012.
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:D
 
Back from my upgrade from 10 to 50meg, here is my results now




Really pleased so far and amazed at how fast it all is, I feel like im using some kind of invisible bandwitch limit when i load videos and download things? telling myself to 'be careful' I think i may be just to use to a slow connection after all this time :D
 
Greg0986 said:
http://www.hardwareheaven.com/news.php?newsid=3381

The speed increase will come at no additional cost to the customer and is to be rolled out in the first quarter of 2012.


:D
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:mad: Great stuff...., if it is true things are only going to get worse. The infrastructure couldn't cope with the recent increases and is what's causing some of us major lag and slow connections...I dread to think what it will be like if they don't spend money on upgrading their equipment first.

Ridiculous.
 
They are also moving from 4 channels to 8 channels which will spread the load a lot more, but it will mean anyone still on the old modem will need to be on a Superhub at some point.
 
I can confirm that the speed increase is probably going to happen. I am a virgin media technician and wanted to shed some light on the situation.

1. Super Hubs. These are the only hubs we will be fitting from now on. The older grey hubs have now been scrapped.

2. The speed increases will not affect utilisation. It is the upstream QAM that gets affected by the utilisation so increasing speeds wont make a difference as the bandwidth itself is already there for the customers already on the UBR so chill!

3. However anyone changing from a DOCSIS 1 modem or hub will add to utilisation. OK feel free to flame again!

4. There has been heavy segmentation going on around the whole country which consists of laying another 3 fibres for each 1 fibre already in the ground quadrupling the capacity. There are less people suffering from high utilisation than you think. There are loads of people that claim to be suffering from utilisation but are just going from other forum members comments or speculation. A technician can tell you if you suffer from high utilisation and also the first/second line support.

5. Every Friday the company release 'Pitstop' which is like an e'zine telling us about all of the goals, common faults and fixes and any important news we need to be aware of and it was sort of confirmed by Neil Berkett in a video on today's pitstop. He didn't say about the increase but he implied it and said he would announce to us soon

Hope this clears things up :)
 
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Sp00n said:
I've said it before and I'll say it again, fix the current infrastructure before sending out media pleasing BS.
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Do you actually know the history of UK cable? From the day the cables went in the ground they never made a profit until 2010. The company was way in the red and was on the verge of going under. There has never been any money to spend on the network.

Since the company grew in 2010 they have spent £33 million on the network last year, and they are spending another £66 million over the next 2 years on improving the network.

Unfortunately there is no way the infrastructure can be fixed over night and the worst affected areas have been fixed first. I know its crap from a customer point of view but the way I see it is that if you are suffering in your area and it has not been upgraded yet then there must be other areas that are worse off or your time is coming very shortly.

The positive way to see it though is that once the upgrades have been done it will be good for many years to come and now that the business is actually making money the company will have the resources to maintain the network the way it should have been from the start.

I think the future is looking great for virgin media :)
 
Well it's been 3 years of the same problems, with the same BS excuses and constantly moved "fixed" dates, that's what I know.

I don't really care that there has been no profit made etc... if you can't provide a service, don't sell it.
 
awinchurch said:
Do you actually know the history of UK cable? From the day the cables went in the ground they never made a profit until 2010. The company was way in the red and was on the verge of going under. There has never been any money to spend on the network.

Since the company grew in 2010 they have spent £33 million on the network last year, and they are spending another £66 million over the next 2 years on improving the network.

Unfortunately there is no way the infrastructure can be fixed over night and the worst affected areas have been fixed first. I know its crap from a customer point of view but the way I see it is that if you are suffering in your area and it has not been upgraded yet then there must be other areas that are worse off or your time is coming very shortly.

The positive way to see it though is that once the upgrades have been done it will be good for many years to come and now that the business is actually making money the company will have the resources to maintain the network the way it should have been from the start.

I think the future is looking great for virgin media :)
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Im interested, as you're a fellow Network dude. Your fibre, om1 or single mode (om3)? If om3, why not implement a quick fix with 10g gbics on the existing runs? Ive made.the assumption that you have'nt allready. Then pull your new infa and slowly bring it online. While changing the gbics, you could setup some etherchannels ready for the new fibre.

While I'm asking. 7200's by any chance and what is Virgins backplane? I can fully understand if.you can't answer these q's.
 
Awahwah said:
Im interested, as you're a fellow Network dude. Your fibre, om1 or single mode (om3)? If om3, why not implement a quick fix with 10g gbics on the existing runs? Ive made.the assumption that you have'nt allready. Then pull your new infa and slowly bring it online. While changing the gbics, you could setup some etherchannels ready for the new fibre.

While I'm asking. 7200's by any chance and what is Virgins backplane? I can fully understand if.you can't answer these q's.
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I don't work as a network tech so I don't know exactly what infrastructure is currently in place. What I do know however is that they use a combination of both single mode and multi mode fibre. As far as I'm aware they use the multi mode fibre for the 2Meg on the SDH and the single mode for the CATV side but unfortunately that's as far as my knowledge goes on what is in the ground.

But it doesn't change the fact that they have and still are investing lots of money into the network. Obviously me saying they are fixing the network isn't going to make anyone who has had 4 months of **** internet feel happy but for anyone who is interested i wanted to put the information out there for others to read
 
Sp00n said:
Packet loss returneth :(
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Same here, and the fix for my area has been put back now until the end of January, I imagine it will get delayed yet again :(

Also need to ring complaints again as I still haven't received the credit I was promised on my account.
 
People do realise that the ping goes up when your using the service heavily. Whenever I am downloading over a long period my ping goes through te roof.
 
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