Virgin Media
  • andy

    I'm with freedom2surf (and have been since forever) and every now and then I call them up with no specific purpose in mind and they say "gosh, haven't you been with us a long time" and they're ever so nice and upgrade me to whatever their latest fastest thing is. And we thank each other, and say goodbye.

    It's all very civil, in the manner of a broadband ISP run by AA Milne.

  • Fin
    I had a rather crazy Virgin experience. I had V+ installed on a Saturday morning, gave credit card details to take payment, they lost the details, then a few hours after installation realised my bill was over it's limit (as a result of the installation they'd just carried out) and cut off ALL my services. You couldn't make it up.

    Services we're restored the following Monday though and I got £50 off my next bill. Virgin are definitely incompetent but easy to bully for a discount when they do b@lls up.
  • Ali
    What do you use 20Mb for as you only need approx 2Mb for single channel IP TV ?
  • wisteria53

    re needing 20MB, there is me, the husband, three large children (using World of Warcraft, X-Box Online, Counterstrike and who knows what else that's bandwidth hungry) and three other occasional laptop users in the house. It sound like madness just typing it.

  • Ali
    If your gaming what kind of upload speed do you get ?
  • David
    In my head, 1mb per second per person probably covers things. 10 should still do it. Cos of this discussion I looked up the usage of my office of 35 yesterday - peaked at a concurrent max of 1.8mb around lunchtime. Admittedly its general internet use, not gaming or IP tv, but still....
  • Ali
    which does make you wonder why we are supposed to need 100Mb if we get fibre to the home networks
  • unaestheticunaesthetic
    as an occasional student of web development trends, i think that content is only ever going to get more and more "rich" - ie ever-more intuitive, organic, intelligent interfaces, live-streamed video, instant page transfer and the like. internet will take over from tv, and perhaps even from dvd/bluray purchase. if *everything* is available hi-def and on-demand, you'll certainly need 100 mb/s and more...
  • Glyn
    To be a boring economist about it - anyone that promises that much capacity per member is going to go bankrupt fairly quickly. It simply doesn't cost in to build a network that could do this on a mass market level.

    Virgin are already massively in debt and BT have only talked about FTTH trials that are pretty limited in scope. Since an Ofcom decision that went against them last week, there appears to be an attitude that they would rather just take their ball home and not commit to the billions of investment required.

    The other solution is government intervention, but this cannot be a top priority given the extent of government borrowing at the peak of a recession.
  • staplejack
    Do recessions have peaks?
  • Ali
    BT are doing FTTH at Ebsfleeet. Payback for FTTH sits at around 16 years at the moment so it will not be widely available for quite some time unless there is public subsidy or some sort. In Australia it is Government policy to roll it out over the next 5 years or so through a public funded company but I guess they need to catch up as they pay about twice as much as we do for about half the bandwidth
  • Billy Bookcase
    Mine is also Virgin. It's been better lately.
    Almost 19 this morning though after 10pm it's a different story.
  • Ian
    @Ali - I don't need 20mb. Been with Telewest then Virgin for so long they kept bumping me up for free. Started at less than 1mb then every year it seemed they sent me a letter increasing it without charge. I am sure I am overpaying and could go down, but I fixed on a 'VIP' package (their terms not the common use I hasten to add). They guaranteed never to put my prices up for the package. Now it appears I am on 20mb which, I agree, isn't of great importance to me.
  • matt

    All 2MB should have been upgraded to 10MB free of charge by now. If you haven't visit this page

    I'm on 10MB and it's pretty spot on although does vary through the day. I know it's my fault if I'm abusing it by downloading a torrent, but that doesn't happen too often.

  • tosscat

    Are we just repeating comments on these two remarkably similar threads?

  • ShaunG
    Yes
  • Ali
    So have Virgin completed their upgrade, seems pretty crap to me.

    Last time I did a roll out to 2M customers it was three hundred calls in on a week.. ie nothing one well

    Now playing with 500 m journeys on a railway the so I have to get this one right
  • hellojo
    We're on Virgin, supposed to get 10MB, never get anything like that. Getting through to their customer service is a nightmare, especially from a mobile, as we're broadband only. Can't even watch programmes on low res iplayer without them stopping. As far as I could see though, there's no one else we could use without having a phone line - is that right? Any tips on how I can successfully complain to Virgin about the speed and get our bills lowered?
  • krappyrubsnifkrappyrubsnif
    My Virgin broadband was off again for most of the last couple of days.

    I just called the Virgin helpdesk and was, for once, answered by a reasonably with-it and unpatronising person. Here is the latest - there is an 'outage' in this area caused by 'noise on the line' leading to this terrible intermittent service. They have been aware of it since May 25th and have been trying to fix it ever since. It was supposed to be fixed yesterday but obviously isn't. As far as they know, there are 29 customers affected.

    No idea when it will be fixed - if ever. At least they took my mobile phone number and promised I'd get a call from an engineer.

    Could be a call to the disconnection team next. I understand that BT is pretty good. Is anyone from Virgin listening?
  • injoke

    if there's one thing my two years of virgin media taught me, it's ONLY deal with the disconnection team.

  • underscore_cue
    Someone else (on the other thread I think) mentioned BE - I'm with them as well, and they've been excellent with me, I had to deal with their customer services a few times to move house and they were super, often it would just ring briefly and then someone would pick up straight away.

    I'm paying for 'up to 20mb/s' and it works out at 13.5 consistently, which is apparantly very good using the equipment they supply.

    According to the Be members forum, if you use a splitting face plate for your phone plug rather than an inline adsl signal splitter then you can expect 16-18meg/sec.

    There has never been an outage, and best of all the upload is 1.33 meg/sec wheras all of the people I know on other providers are getting 0.5 or even 0.33 - this means that transferring a 700mb avi to a mate by ftp is a 2 or 3 hour job instead of an overnight one.

    There is no MB limit and they never throttle the connection for downloading torrents.

    The only disadvantage is that you have to have a BT line, and BT were total cunts - they've messed me around once in this flat and once in my last one, and just ringing them is an ordeal as you have to hold for an age (in one case 45 mins) an I was once told "I'm, tranferring you now to the department you need" and then it just went to the continuous number unbtainable tone - and this was after I'd been on hold for a long time to get to speak to the first person. I was so angry....

    btw the serice I'm on is 17.50/month but you can get cheaper deals if you accept a limit, or 8meg connection
  • Ali
    BE is owned by O2. So O2 use the same physical infrastructure. So if you’re an O2 Customer I think you can get a deal. Both BE and O2 get very good marks for Customer Service but remember have very few Customers and charge quite a bit.
    BE use ADSL2 which is what BT are about to roll out and provide for no extra charge to it’s current Customers.
    The face plates do generally work by taking out some of the frequencies in the internal circuits of the house if you have you Router connected as part of your telephone extensions. In house circuits can reduce you speed in quite a large way so to avoid that it is always good to have the router on the first socket.
    Speed on non Cable Networks is determined by the distance from the exchange to your house ( ie not as the crow flies but how the circuit is run to your house) and the amount of interference you get in the background. The signal is effectively a “radio wave in a wire” so is open to interference from mainly electrical sources. Try running an electric drill near to your router wiring and watch the speed fall.
    Finally Sky have high upload speeds on it’s Max product as well as up to 16M down load but you can’t buy standalone Broadband. They are also about to migrate all their telephone customers onto their own network away from BT so it will be interesting how well they do that.
  • staplejack
    BE gave me a 'free day's broadband' for my birthday and discounted the bill accordingly. Small beer, but unprompted and indicative of their commitment to service.
  • underscore_cue
    I'm an o2 customer for my mobile - I heard that BE got taken over by o2 but noone told me about this special deal! What is it? Can I get money off my BE bill because I'm with o2
  • Ali
    The point I was making is that if your already an O2 Customer you can get the same quality of service that you would get from BE by using O2 i.e. same network etc .
    If your in a contract as a BE Customer you probably can’t get the discount as you would have to move to O2 once the minimum term is up.
    All about O2 bundling you in to make it harder to leave see http://broadband.o2.co.uk/home/index.jsp?cm_mmc_o=7BBTkwCjCPyzEp%20PyBzp_zEpCjCH0zgfCjCBn%20_yBzp%20_zEp up to 20Mb
  • underscore_cue
    thanks v much for the heads up Ali, I've been with BE since 2007 so I'm def out of the minimum term.

    It looks like the same speed of connection is cheaper through o2 than Be, whether or not I go for this bundling in deal - and presumably they're using the same equipment at the exchange so I'd be foolish to pay more, and I might not lose my connection for a few days if I switch.

    Is anyone here with o2? Is there a limit on volume of data, do they throttle the connection if they feel you are using too much bandwidth...

    I've emailed o2 to ask but I was hoping someone on here is with them and knows from the customers perspective what they're like.
  • phantom_user

    This is an interesting twist on the whole broadband speed issue for us poor misguided BT customers:

    BT accused of iPlayer throttling

    BT Broadband cuts the speed users can watch video services like the BBC iPlayer and YouTube at peak times.

    A customer who has signed on to an up to 8 megabit per second (MBPS) package can have speed cut to below 1Mbps.

    A BT spokesman said the firm managed bandwidth “in order to optimise the experience for all customers.

    I know who I'd like to throttle..

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