Virgin Media Discussion Thread

Virgin came round shortly after Zen (BT) to replace the cables... will be interesting to see if that makes any difference.

In the mean time, on the Zen connection, I've switched the Zyxel router to bridged mode and hooked it up via my pfsense box and it's got the ping down to 7ms... very happy with that.

I was hoping for 5ms, but I'm not complaining :) It's wonderfully stable with barely any variation at all.
 
I asked the VM web chat (India) to add Homeworks+ to our account today. We currently have VIVID 200, XL TV and medium phone with TiVo downstairs and a V+ HD box upstairs. Our monthly sub is around £40 atm after discounts, and H+ is £13.99 a month on top.

After much waiting, the chap said that H+ isn't available in our area (boo, contention and hardware issues probably; we're still on 16QAM upstream). I then asked about VIVID 200 Gamer as at least I'd get the 20Mbps upstream, which I'd definitely use. Not to mention it's STM free. Sure thing sir, your new bill would be £78 a month. LOLWUT? Nearly doubling the bill for 10Mbps extra upstream, when most areas can get 300/20 for just £13 a month extra? No thanks...

We're out of contract so it's time to moan at retentions. I have a Ubiquiti UBI-UAP-AC-PRO WAP coming tomorrow as well as a nice SFF box (APU2C4 quad, 4GB RAM, 3x Intel NICs) preloaded with IPFire. Gonna get me some proper networking set up again. I removed it when I trialled the SH3 (yuck) and never got around to setting back up after we moved house. Can't wait to get a proper LAN running again with decent networking gear. The sooner the SH3 is in modem mode the better!
 
Azza said:
Anyone else's TiVo box gone from Turtle speed slow to tectonic plate shifting slow recently?

Ours has just gone woeful past couple of weeks.
Click to expand...

Yeah, took mine 15 minutes to boot up from being switched off at the wall, also a further 5 minutes trying to navigate around the menu, really is poor.
 
I asked when I was arguing about the price rise and I'm sure she said November. TiVo is embarrassingly slow.
 
Hi guys,

I am thinking about moving to a new house and when I went up to view it today virgin have started digging up the road and pretty much done most of it. The house where I am wanting to move to the work has not quite got to there yet but its close. I just want to make sure they are doing to make it available to the terraced houses that I am moving too. Do they install it in a whole estate? like will every house be able to get it?

Is there anyway to contact virgin and ask them if the house will be covered?
 
Rainmaker said:
I asked the VM web chat (India) to add Homeworks+ to our account today. We currently have VIVID 200, XL TV and medium phone with TiVo downstairs and a V+ HD box upstairs. Our monthly sub is around £40 atm after discounts, and H+ is £13.99 a month on top.

After much waiting, the chap said that H+ isn't available in our area (boo, contention and hardware issues probably; we're still on 16QAM upstream). I then asked about VIVID 200 Gamer as at least I'd get the 20Mbps upstream, which I'd definitely use. Not to mention it's STM free. Sure thing sir, your new bill would be £78 a month. LOLWUT? Nearly doubling the bill for 10Mbps extra upstream, when most areas can get 300/20 for just £13 a month extra? No thanks...

We're out of contract so it's time to moan at retentions. I have a Ubiquiti UBI-UAP-AC-PRO WAP coming tomorrow as well as a nice SFF box (APU2C4 quad, 4GB RAM, 3x Intel NICs) preloaded with IPFire. Gonna get me some proper networking set up again. I removed it when I trialled the SH3 (yuck) and never got around to setting back up after we moved house. Can't wait to get a proper LAN running again with decent networking gear. The sooner the SH3 is in modem mode the better!
Click to expand...

Are you able to link to the preloaded box?
 
DIABLO said:
Are you able to link to the preloaded box?
Click to expand...

Yes it's from a German company on a well known auction site for just over £150 (after currency conversion).

APU2C4 (Jaguar quad core @ 1.0GHz), 4GB DDR3 RAM, 3x Intel i210AT gigabit NICs etc), pre-loaded with IPFire. Runs off a 12v adapter and consumes about 6W.

I was also strongly considering a sweet J1900 mini PC (another 12v/6W job) I found for under £175. Despite having double the clock speed (2.0GHz Intel quad) the J1900 doesn't have AES-NI so I skipped it. It was a close one though tbf, even though I make use of OpenVPN. Even now I'm debating my choice as I preferred the J1900 box's layout and it has 4x Intel gigabit NICs and although it doesn't have anything preloaded, I've a decade of *nix experience and pfSense/IPFire are trivial to install. This box also has an SSD.

The APU2C4 should be absolutely ample (even overkill) though, judging by the throughput scores on the pfSense/IPFire forums. I'll let you know when it arrives and how it performs.
 
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R0Z4G said:
Hi guys,

I am thinking about moving to a new house and when I went up to view it today virgin have started digging up the road and pretty much done most of it. The house where I am wanting to move to the work has not quite got to there yet but its close. I just want to make sure they are doing to make it available to the terraced houses that I am moving too. Do they install it in a whole estate? like will every house be able to get it?

Is there anyway to contact virgin and ask them if the house will be covered?
Click to expand...

They would normally do the whole estate would be pointless to do everyone and miss out a few here and there when they already have everything in place.
 
Psycho Sonny said:
They would normally do the whole estate would be pointless to do everyone and miss out a few here and there when they already have everything in place.
Click to expand...

You'd be surprised I've seen cases where next door can get it but the neighbour can't as they just stopped there for whatever reason.
 
Psycho Sonny said:
I've never had any issues regarding speed. I have always had full speed however I did have some issues at one point and that was due to me having too good a signal to the cabinet (directly outside old home) and they had to attenuate it or something. In the new house it's across the road. I was the closest to the old cabinet but the new one I'm probably within the top 10 closest to it, depends where they decided to cross the road with the cable or my side has it's own cabinet dunno how it's all been wired up.

Again I get better speed than what I actually paid for because I'm so close to the cabinet. I'm on 200/10 I believe and speedtests usually show around 210/12.

I need to set up one of those ping graphs at the new home to check I don't have any issues I don't know about. However I believe most my neighbours have Sky dishes so they probably have ADSL with them.
Click to expand...

I'm not trying to burst your bubble or anything just make you more informed. Everyone's whose Virgin BB works as it should gets the max speed possible, distance to the cabinet plays no factor in what speed you can get with cable only with FTTC from the likes of BT, Sky etc. The reason you get 210 is because every tier is over-provisioned to make sure you get at least the advertised speeds, if you look at the operation config page of the Superhub it'll say either 220000000 bps or 230000000 bps instead of just 200000000 bps :)

The only reason anyone gets a slower speed with them is if the area is over-subscribed or there's a fault.
 
PhoenixUK said:
Anyone heard anything about the new TiVo box? The old one gets on my nerves, it's slower than my 2 year old phone.
Click to expand...

New customers appear to be getting it now with existing customers being able to upgrade at the end of this month, some are getting to test it from having signed up to something a while back too. No official word on upgrade price for existing customers but rumours have been £100 for the 1TB box and £200 for the 2TB, can't see it being that high though as it doesn't appear to be as good as Sky Q.

If you look for the posts by Spaceboyo in this thread on cableforum he's just had his installed and has been answering questions and taking photos. I think i linked to the first page he started talking about it.
 
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NexusK said:
New customers appear to be getting it now with existing customers being able to upgrade at the end of this month, some are getting to test it from having signed up to something a while back too. No official word on upgrade price but rumours have been £100 for the 1TB box and £200 for the 2TB, can't see it being that high though as it doesn't appear to be as good as Sky Q.

If you look for the posts by Spaceboyo in this thread on cableforum he's just had his installed and has been answering questions and taking photos.
Click to expand...

It should be free considering the old one is starting to verge on unusable if you actually want to browse the menus.
 
We'll probably be able to wrangle one for free over the phone like we usually can for new SH's, but the ideal time for that is always after a price rise and surprise surprise the end of November will be just long enough for everyone who was going to phone up and 'threaten to leave' after the recent rise to get a better deal because of it will have done so.
 
Azza said:
Anyone else's TiVo box gone from Turtle speed slow to tectonic plate shifting slow recently?

Ours has just gone woeful past couple of weeks.
Click to expand...

My TiVo has been tectonic slow since I got it.

Just loading the YouTube app takes about 3 minutes. I would love to psychologically evaluate the team tasked with testing the TiVo. I can only assume they were either clinically insane or under the influence of drugs.
 
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It's always been slow but an update a month or two ago slowed it to a crawl. The current theory is its running the software for the new V6 box and they haven't bothered optimising it for Tivo.
 
Soooo... Virgin came out to replace the cable on Wednesday.

Annnnnd... it's worse!

ZoPuzA6.png


Meanwhile... on Zen:

8enoLO3.png
 
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