I looked at my bank statement the other day and saw Virginmedia had decided to take £47 for a months service.
Enough is enough Virgin, I dont use your TV and I dont use the phone line you just put up the line rental on.
The 50Mb service is adequate but despite all your adverts it does not impress any more.
Too many days of interrupted service, too many days with high Db/Mv something or other and thousands of "correctable errors"making it just plain slow.
Once 100Mb rolls out all the 50Mb connections will get the subscriber traffic managment throttling enabled, the mechanism is all in place.
I dont fancy five hours at 25% of my contract speed as a penalty for using my connection for two hours.
Download a Linux ISO and be no faster than ADSL for five hours ?
No thanks chaps, current policy details HERE
So I’m back to ADSL on a service which peaks at 6mb but simply put, just works.
PS: The Tivo advert with Marc Warren from Hustle amuses me every time, using a con artist to tell you how good Virgin is… Priceless
I’ve been BT adsl for a few years now, quality service but aided greatly by the fact the exchange cab is less than 200m away
They just don’t seem to stop asking me to upgrade to infinity though, I really don’t need that speed, what I have works, leave me alone! Even if I know the reason why is the exchange ADSL capacity is close to maxxed out, as the openreach engineer drinks in my local :cheers:
Used to be with BT, then moved over to TalkTalk on BT line before being moved onto TalkTalk LLU. With being close to the exchange I get a 20 Meg connection…
Then Sky offered me their “Unlimited” for a good few quid cheaper than TalkTalk, so agreed to a switch… they failed to tell me they were switching me back to the BT equipment and not their LLU… and when quized about expected speed was told i would get the incredibly fast connection of 2.5 Meg…
The changeover got canceled, and then TalkTalk price-matched the Sky price to retain my custom… And so far I have to admit I am happy I have stayed with TalkTalk.
Still on Virgin here, since ntl days. Long term they’re more reliable than ADSL when I had it. Think the BT line was a bit dodgy so the ADSL kept reconnecting like the old days of dial up.
On the 10 meg service, download throttle or not, it still works. About the only significant bandwidth usage I get these days is the frequent TF2 updates on steam. No, I don’t play TF2 so I wonder why I even bother…
I was on VM scince the days of NTL also,
I upgraded to the 50mb BB, even from Day 1 I never got full speed,The speed tests always suggested full speed, but it always seemed slow,
After months of upgrading hardware and messing around with settings to try and make it faster,
Just never really seemed that quick,
I had the Full TV package for the kids,
And the basic phone package,
Somehow that was nearly £200 pm,
so i started cutting down, TV, Phone and eventually the BB to 10 meg,
Still I kept getting bills for £200 pm, So I told them im not paying it cut me off,
Called Talktalk, Put me on right away ADSL they said my speed wouldnt be great because the infrastructure is a bit crap here,
but I get good speeds even at peak time, and in fact i was promised 9mb aprox speed,
It seems faster and more efficant than VM’s cable 50mb,
Next time you get an engineer in to look at a slow connection, ask him to run a speed test on it.
You will probably notice he uses a private virginmedia owned speed test system, this is dedicated Sun hardware, clustered to give the best possible response times.
You might make it slightly quicker by opting out of the DNS nanny knows best service as well. This seemed to improve the time taken for COD to find a game to join.
Another area to fiddle with is the DNS search order.
There are two DNS servers 194.168.4.100 and 194.168.8.100.
One is a real DNS server the other is a set of distributed DNS servers, local to your cable end point that uses BGP advertising to pick up any DNS queries.
Be very wary of amending any service if you have any inclination to cancel as you will end up on a new 12 month contract for ALL services.
The contract has to run to completion or you can pay the OFCOM recommended price for early termination.
This was ignored at my first request to terminate service with the rebuf of “The fee is 10 pounds per month per service”, I will be trying again shortly.
Oh and one last point, if you are on a 10Mb service I would stay there as the really old modems dont support the subscriber traffic management throttling service plan I believe.
The only real problem’s I have had is because I missed payment or something along those lines.
The 50Mb service im on is outstanding if not a little pricey and I would prefer something slower but the change in price is very little as I only have the broadband and house phone. All my TV is done by sky for the great price of £33 a month… nice little retention package they have
I wouldn’t mind moving to ADSL with sky but as the MAX speed my house can get is in the region of 3Mb I would rather use carrier pigeon than that stuff…
Not had a problem with them yet touch wood. Currently on the 30MB service and it works very nicely.
Even downloaded the OS X Lion update today (4GB) and it still worked at the same speed after so no problems. Mind, the entire street is pretty empty now so we pretty much get the full whack because students aren’t raping the internet connections
£30 a month for phone, basic TV and 30MB BB doesn’t seem to bad to me.
Until fibreoptic is even HEARD of in this area, im sticking with my free Orange tacked onto my mobile rental. 2.5Mb may not be good, but its free, and there is no real alternative. i MAY just about get 8Mb if i swap to a pricier service, but im not about to pay for a minimal increase. Bloody hicksville!!!
Plusnet have delivered 100% service uptime, a Thompson router and vintage phone lines and its all still working.
Just to cheer me up even further Virgin phoned to have a go at selling me an upgraded TV package.
I told them in the first few seconds there was no hope of that ever happening and said “I would rather set fire to my own feet” but this may not have crossed the cultural boundaries well.
So I said, I’m a bit busy at the moment, I’ll put you on speaker phone so you can tell me about the packages on offer.
Six minutes of sales patter later she clicked that I wasnt listening
So if you get a call from 0800 4089340 please keep them busy for a while.
On the next call I will upgrade if I can pay by Nectar Points
used to have plusnet in one of my previous offices, they were spot on, the support even assisted in setting up the exchange server on the static ip address.
Wire cutters and do the job yourself? Explain to the engineer when/if they arrive that it had to be done when it was booked and you could not wait longer. Very sorry about the equipment, of course.
It really hit home yesterday, three days later when Usain Bolt appeared on the Virgin adverts.
Is this Virgin sowing subliminal seeds or a disgruntled employee discrediting their advertising campaign with Bartle, Bogle and Bogwoppit ?
Never had “down” time with the VM 10Meg service we are on but i will say that of late browsing is getting slower and slower; even using OpenDNS doesn’t help so no idea whats going on, could be that the service is over subed in the area but no way the end user can tell this.
VM Customer Service; don’t be daft rather cut my balls off with a rusty spoon then talk to them again.
