Virgin Media

LordSplodge · 5 Mar 2010 at 13:13

Virgin Media has a lot of old equipment left over from former Cable Companies. When I got broadband from NTL way back it was pretty dire as they had just taken over the network run by Cable and Wireless (ot was in Nymex) in Derby. I left and went to Pipex but by the time I move back (a few years later) is was very good.

I have had only two problems with my Virgin Media service and they have been fixed fairly promptly and I don't get traffic traffic shaped as I don't go mad during peak hours and thus I get 19.5mbs 24/7. Unlike the "up to" that xDSL gives you...

Other peoples mileage may vary.

Maxi Marra · 5 Mar 2010 at 13:22

I have been with them for approx 8 years and I can not fault them at all. I have V+HD, Phone & 10mb BB and each service has been excellent. Solid 10mb constantly. The odd one or two issues I have had, one phone call and all we're sorted quickly. I once had no internet for 24hrs so they gave me £10 off my bill. Great service.

Tombstone · 5 Mar 2010 at 13:25

I'm on their 50Mb broadband and love it, not had any problems with bills etc

Waza · 5 Mar 2010 at 13:27

beachBOYken said:
is this cable broadband?

Yip

Alex_6n2 · 5 Mar 2010 at 15:20

Utterly rubbish in the beginning for me, got my bills wrong, got my discounts wrong, took the wrong money, couldn't speak to anyone over the phone that spoke English... etc etc

Was ok for a bit but now Bristol is REALLY over subscribed, just like pretty much everywhere else. Connection is terrible, especially over the weekend and come 6pm on week days with huge latencies, bad packet loss and most of the time the entire connection will drop out for hours at a time.

I did get an engineer to visit, even telling customer services I realise that they are oversubscribed and they need to sort it (Which they denied), and he admitted there was nothing he could do because its a problem with their entire network. All he does every day at the moment is drive around telling people the same thing.

Moving to Be* as soon as I can afford to have a BT line installed.

PermaBanned · 5 Mar 2010 at 15:34

They're my ISP, and they're bloody rubbish at it.

From broadband.co.uk:

Download speed : 0.46Mbps
Upload speed : 0.36Mbps

Your local exchange is Killingworth and the maximum theoretical speed achievable on your line via ADSL Max is 5.37Mb which is 1257 percent faster than this test shows you are getting.

From speedtest.net:

And it's not even my line quality:

That said i haven't had any problems with billing and all their packages are unlimited downloads... but this is pretty abysmal.

LordSplodge · 5 Mar 2010 at 15:35

Alex_6n2 said:
Moving to Be* as soon as I can afford to have a BT line installed.

Let§s just hope you are close enough to the exchange...

Dave · 5 Mar 2010 at 16:17

Alex_6n2 said:
Was ok for a bit but now Bristol is REALLY over subscribed, just like pretty much everywhere else. Connection is terrible, especially over the weekend and come 6pm on week days with huge latencies, bad packet loss and most of the time the entire connection will drop out for hours at a time.

Moving to Be* as soon as I can afford to have a BT line installed.

Same for us here in Sheffield, service is generally terrible from about 3pm through until 1am. Packet drop is awful too - when pinging Google I get about 60% packet loss on the line. Occasionally it's fine - I'd be glad to even get the 2mb (from the traffic shaping) though as the speed is usually terrible!

Unfortunately where we are the fastest ADSL connection is 1mb, but if I was living here next year (student accommodation) I'd probably consider it, the cable service here seems hideously oversubscribed.