Virgin Media Upload Speed Upgrades

[SteveOBHave]

Huh interesting to read this thread...

I joined Virgin Media and had the install on Monday and have subsequently cancelled and had it disconnected. Why?

1. Excessive broadband throttling - I downloaded F1 2010 on Steam and it almost ground to a halt part way through. Subsequently my broadband stayed throttled for the rest of the evening.

2. India call centre. 1st call - Hang up, 2nd call - Hang up, 3rd call - talk through the unplug and reconnect, didn't fix it - pretend that something is wrong with the phone line and start repeating quieter and quieter "hello, can you hear me" despite all the people in the background being as loud as normal, hang up. 4th call - repeat of 3rd call.

3. TV not picking up channel information 80% of the time - contacted call centre, had the whole reboot spiel, failed - call out tech. System came right - cancelled tech - 20 mins later failed again.

4. Traffic shaping - using Bittorrent to download a legitimate demo for Evochron Mercenaries and my entire internet connection started timing out.

I called customer service this morning and got an aggressive attempt to make me stay with them and persevere with their services despite me telling them that my main reason for wanting to leave was not because of their broken service but their abysmal tech support who lie, pretend to go quiet when they can't fix something and are nothing short of scripted monkeys.

Enough - I will never go back to Virgin - it is such an appalling service.

 

[Participant]

SteveOBHave, I'm going to try not to appear overly biased here. I don't work for Virgin but I do use (and enjoy) their services, and have never had a problem with their customer services that wasn't resolved very quickly.

1. Excessive broadband throttling - I downloaded F1 2010 on Steam and it almost ground to a halt part way through. Subsequently my broadband stayed throttled for the rest of the evening.

'Excessive' by what benchmark? Most other providers throttle too, but are slower to boot. Just download overnight like most people and you'd be fine. F1 2010 is hardly a small file.

2. India call centre. 1st call - Hang up, 2nd call - Hang up, 3rd call - talk through the unplug and reconnect, didn't fix it - pretend that something is wrong with the phone line and start repeating quieter and quieter "hello, can you hear me" despite all the people in the background being as loud as normal, hang up. 4th call - repeat of 3rd call.

The only time I spoke to someone in India was when my V+ box was being sent out for home install and they were fine. Random hang-ups seem strange. You can always ask to be put back through to a UK call centre.

3. TV not picking up channel information 80% of the time - contacted call centre, had the whole reboot spiel, failed - call out tech. System came right - cancelled tech - 20 mins later failed again.

You shouldn't have cancelled the tech visit. There's probably something wrong with the signal.

4. Traffic shaping - using Bittorrent to download a legitimate demo for Evochron Mercenaries and my entire internet connection started timing out.

Are you sure that's not your router unable to handle the connections? They are now shaping P2P traffic, but only in peak usage times such as the evenings when everyone is watching iPlayer. Again, download overnight and you'd be fine.

Sky in general appear no better really.

 

[SteveOBHave]

SteveOBHave, I'm going to try not to appear overly biased here. I don't work for Virgin but I do use (and enjoy) their services, and have never had a problem with their customer services that wasn't resolved very quickly.

The TV support was fine but the broadband support was abysmal - hang ups, pretending to go quiet etc... that's terrible. It doesn't help the there is no record of the previous call so I have to go through the entire process again starting with "can you remove all the leads from the back of the router..." Had I known I could get through to a UK call centre - which no-one suggested - then I would have.

'Excessive' by what benchmark? Most other providers throttle too, but are slower to boot. Just download overnight like most people and you'd be fine. F1 2010 is hardly a small file.

Excessive by an UNLIMITED statement that, from what I am given to understand, hits it's first throttle limit at 600MB in 1hr. Excessive in that my using Steam to purchase and download games is what I consider to be fair and legitimate use of my broadband connection and rather than having the advantage of getting it direct to my PC in about 15-20 mins I have to wait overnight. If I wanted it overnight I'd buy it online!!! The 'Fair Use Policy' entirely negates the advantages of fast broadband. This is modern times, not the stoneage!!! Do you need more examples? iPlayer streaming, Youtube HD, Quicktime, iTunes TV episode DLs, iTunes Movie DLs - the list goes on and the cable internet from Virgin is not fit for purpose! I didn't change to 'superfast broadband' so that I could use it overnight - I could've stuck with my old BB - I paid for faster so that I didn't have to wait! Is that unreasonable?

You shouldn't have cancelled the tech visit. There's probably something wrong with the signal.

Granted - I didn't want to waste a techs time so I cancelled the visit - turns out I jumped the gun.

Are you sure that's not your router unable to handle the connections? They are now shaping P2P traffic, but only in peak usage times such as the evenings when everyone is watching iPlayer. Again, download overnight and you'd be fine.

Sky in general appear no better really.

The thing is that the P2P protocol is a perfectly legitimate method of distributing entirely legal files and their 'shaping' effectively destroys my internet connection and makes even browsing impossible.

The Virgin Broadband is just not fit for purpose in this fast moving environment. They certainly don't advertise their service as being only useful if you have 'only light usage' and don't use it for, admittedly semi minority uses like gaming... erm oh hang on - a vast number of home users are getting into gaming. Direct to Drive software is a massive market that is still growing at a rapid pace and Virgins policies (which are designed to let them sell their services as guaranteed as long as you don't exceed their narrow limits) can't support it.

IMO of course...

 

[Participant]

I utterly dislike traffic management and shaping myself. I would love to be able to download 24/7 with no speed restrictions. However I'd still rather be careful with when I download that subject myself to ADSL, though I guess that depends on distance from exchange.

What service are you going to use for the internet instead?

Regarding restrictions, these are the new VM traffic management policies for upload-improved areas:

So, for example, if you're on the 20Mb service, you'd need to download 3.5 GB in 5 hours (very easy to do I admit) before you were shaped, at which point your downstream would be throttled to 5Mb.

Personally 3.5GB in the evenings allows me to watch a couple of iPlayer programs and game for a bit, then after 9pm I'll set my torrents going overnight. They might slow down if the network is loaded until midnight, after which point you have unrestricted P2P traffic for 9 hours.

I'm not saying I like it, I'm just saying that for me it's manageable.

 

[SteveOBHave]

I was on 'Be' and I'll be going back to them - never had my service go down, never had it throttled and never had a problem. I just though it might be nice to have Virgin HD TV and properly high speed BB - turns out it's a pointless offering unless you pay significantly more than I am now.

 

[Phal]

I had BE before and loved it but after moving I decided I would prefer 20/50Mbit from Virgin than 10 from BE so I changed.

I have had some problems with Virgin and their customer service is pretty sucky :/ luckily the connection itself is usually pretty reliable.

Pings on games are nothing special, average really.

I would move if there was something better :/ but there isn't

 

[DragonQ]

The new upload speed and throttling arrangements look like a win-win for 50Mbps customers. Even when limited you're getting a faster upload speed than currently and to get limited you'd have to use 70% of your maximum speed for 5 hours or something anyway.

Limits are also higher for 10/20Mbps customers so I can't have any complaints about the new system.

 

[SteveOBHave]

I had BE before and loved it but after moving I decided I would prefer 20/50Mbit from Virgin than 10 from BE so I changed.

I have had some problems with Virgin and their customer service is pretty sucky :/ luckily the connection itself is usually pretty reliable.

Pings on games are nothing special, average really.

I would move if there was something better :/ but there isn't

I've switched back to my Be connection (which luckily I didn't disconnect yet) and the difference is light and day. Rock solid 16Mbps steady - paint me happy.

 

[Swifty55]

I've switched back to my Be connection (which luckily I didn't disconnect yet) and the difference is light and day. Rock solid 16Mbps steady - paint me happy.

I was with Be* for over 3 years but had to switch back to VM due to money issues.

I got a solid 6-8Mbps with Be* and low pings.

VM I've got 50Mbps and low pings.

Right now, VM outweighs Be* for me.

 

[Jayster]

Anyone else now seeing better youtube speeds?

 

[Swifty55]

Anyone else now seeing better youtube speeds?

Yes, 1080p now loads like it should. No idea if it was a VM problem or a Youtube one?

 

[Jayster]

Yes, 1080p now loads like it should. No idea if it was a VM problem or a Youtube one?

Well either way atleast its looks like its been sorted.

 

[cokecan]

it does seem as though VM connections vary almost as much as ADSL connections throughout the country

When I read stuff like SteveOBHave has posted I genuinely do think "what the f!" because I've been on VM for years and not had a single issue. Over them years I've had my various free speed upgrades and also upgraded the speed outright too with a great deal. I've always got what I've paid for in terms of speed, ping, latency and just general line quality has been top notch with only a handful of outages I can even think of over the entire period I've been with them.

As for traffic shaping and capping, out of all of the services out there I think VM's is probably one of the best. A day by day capping policy is MUCH better than a monthly one (or a hidden one as with a lot of "unlimited" ISP's) in my opinion.

They have all the information as clear as day on they're website (it's even been posted in this thread) with when the capping policies are in effect, how much you are capped by and what the cap threshold is. As far as I'm concerned it's your own fault if you get capped, it's not hard to work around the capping periods in majority of situations. People deserve to be capped if they haven't bothered to even check out what a services traffic shaping policy is, especially in this day and age where every service will have some kind of traffic shaping/fair usage policy.

Anywho...roll on Upload speed upgrades

 

[SteveOBHave]

I posted a comment on facebook regarding this bad experience - here's some snippets regarding other peoples experience:

I agree but I can't get anything else in my flat the number of hours I have wasted yelling at those idiots...

I'm on Virgin 20Meg cable and caining it all the time. I have not experienced any throttling as far as I know. I'm vaguely aware of application specific throttling (Bit Torrent) during peak hours.

I was on the L (10mb) plan like Steve and Virgin throttle after 1.5gb during peak hours. Which is the only time either of use our broadband. the 20mb gives you 3gb which is slightly better.

I had Virgin and it was terrible, I tried to upgrad...e to 20mb and they couldnt make the line go faster than 11mb...after months of trying.

we're ditching Virgin at the end of this month. connection drops all the time and its slow as ****

we just signed up to them... bad experience to start with, a sales rep that sold me one thing and delivered another (meant to be max tv package + 50mb) and delivered 20mb and crappy tv (freeview basically) after much debate, and facing BT's... 2 months time to install a line (virgin already in our new place) we opted for virgin....

when ever we are downloading torrents, the internet stops working, so we have to download when we dont want to do anything else, but it does download fast....

we will probably consider moving to BeThere in 12 months time, we were with them in ******* and its awesome, but after you add the cost of a bt land line its about £30/month....

just need to be aware with virgin that, if you change any service, add anything you start your 12 month contract period again..... cheeky ******* they are...... still ****** about them telling me i could have 50meg and tv for £53 only for them to deliver something else.... and then to lie to me and tell me that isn't what i was sold......

if be had a service similar, and it could be delivered in a few days, we would have gone with that.....

So a mixed bag... seems to be luck of the draw really but the majority of people I know seem to have had at least one bad experience with them.

 

[benftl]

@cokecan72, completely agree mate

 

[chronic86]

i totally agree cokecan72 and benftl i've had outstanding service from virgin although in the last week i've been getting a few disconnects and high pings/packet loss its all back to normal now though. just remember that they are tinkering with the upload speeds at the moment, what do you want for free?

 

[SteveOBHave]

i totally agree cokecan72 and benftl i've had outstanding service from virgin although in the last week i've been getting a few disconnects and high pings/packet loss its all back to normal now though. just remember that they are tinkering with the upload speeds at the moment, what do you want for free?

But it's not free...

 

[DreXeL]

I've been with Virgin for years (since the old Telewest days) and have had the cable internet service since it first started as 'High Speed Internet' 512k connection. In all that time I've probably had just a few of hours of downtime in total. I can't really comment on customer service because I've rarely had to call on them. I love my 50mb connection and even with the imminent traffic-specific shaping I wouldn't want anything other than a cable connection.

 

[yashiro]

Every action by Virgin that is marketed as free is always followed by a price increase anyway.

As for the current problems. It has to be related to these network changes. I've had pretty much zero issues since I had cable installed in 2001 (NTL). At the moment it's nigh on useless and takes a lifetime just to browse these forums.

 

[Marky]

I utterly dislike traffic management and shaping myself. I would love to be able to download 24/7 with no speed restrictions. However I'd still rather be careful with when I download that subject myself to ADSL, though I guess that depends on distance from exchange.

What service are you going to use for the internet instead?

Regarding restrictions, these are the new VM traffic management policies for upload-improved areas:

So, for example, if you're on the 20Mb service, you'd need to download 3.5 GB in 5 hours (very easy to do I admit) before you were shaped, at which point your downstream would be throttled to 5Mb.

Personally 3.5GB in the evenings allows me to watch a couple of iPlayer programs and game for a bit, then after 9pm I'll set my torrents going overnight. They might slow down if the network is loaded until midnight, after which point you have unrestricted P2P traffic for 9 hours.

I'm not saying I like it, I'm just saying that for me it's manageable.

So this means the 50mb fibre service they provide will still not be throttled (Downloading) even after the upload update?

Sounds good to me... Why are people complaining?