Bend over...

http://allyours.virginmedia.com/html/internet/traffic.html

The limits themselves are bad enough, but my worry is how they're going to actually do it. I foresee plenty of packet loss/delay and unhappy LFS users. If that's the case, I'm screwed - I switched to cable a while ago due to a huge myriad of problems I had with ADSL, and no other company operates anywhere near here in Brighton.

"Hello Mr. Branson, I'm your cosmetics assistant. As part of my new contract, I'll be upgrading your nose at an extra cost of £x a month, however, if you smile for more than 3 minutes between the hours of 8am and 8pm, an arsehole will appear on your forehead. This will persist for 4 hours after it is initiated."

The broadband in this country is a bloody disgrace - Much is being said about the speed increases in recent years but it's always veiled - there's no company you can trust not to screw you over a few years down the line.

I've been looking for an excuse to ditch them for about six months. To be honest I probably don't come close to those kinds of transfer thresholds, but screw them anyway.

tis a disgrace had so many many problems with these with poor customer services it's a -><- .

Hopely I will be leaving these soon or shortly and go back to ADSL .

I don't see a problem here, currently we pay about £20 for 8mb connection with Virgin Media. So an increase on speed but a slight limit at peak times for people downloading too much seems fine, it will probably improve your connection to LFS rather than make it worse.

The customer service is a complete mess, but thats NTL's old system and hopefully Virgin will fix it. Of course if my service gets worse I will ditch them. The last time my internet went down was when a 3 year old NTL connection box thingy decided to self destruct, and it was repaired in a few days with a new box, so I think its worth the extra money for the reliability.

Oh lovely lol, so you can be someone who downloads alot and pay for a good connection whilst only getting half of what you paid for. My mum pays £10 for a 2mbit connection ("Size M" to Virgin Media), I do like my music, and I download episodes of programmes from the TV (only cos the ads get cut out), there's going to be a 350mb download limit in that period before the connection is halved, I'm guessing that would play havoc with multiplayer games huh...

My way of seeing it is this... they rack in the money while the rest of us don't get what we payed for.

I have to say I've had very few problems with the broadband, but their telly service is crap. And the last time I moved house was an absolute nightmare and it took a week of phone calls to get adequately reimbursed for it.

I don't know exactly how long they've been doing this all over their network, but they've been trailing it over large parts of it for a while, and I've certainly noticed in the last week that things have drastically gotten worse. I've been experiencing periodic packet loss (upto 60% in some instance) to their gateway devices, and dropping connections left right and centre. As usual the setup I have here was blamed despite replacing the router (with a spare for such eventuality), hooking up a multiple different PCs and OS' directly to the router - mostly conforming to their requirements for "support". Something that's always worth it is telling them that you don't have Internet Explorer - it doesn't run natively under certain OS'.

Quite frankly I'm all for migrating away right now also (having been a reasonably happy customer for over 5-6 years), with the exception that our entire setup here is:
1. All Virgin Media - phones, internet, TV
2. Migrating would be a huge pain in the arse as certain other members of the household use their @blueyonder account a lot and don't realise that they'd loose that - guess who'd get the shit for that
3. The CAT5e in the house all stems from one point - the loft, which isn't where I could get BT to put a point in and quite frankly I don't feel like running another huge cable myself through the house

Over the course of the day, I could piss through the XL limitation in the equivilent time it takes some people to have a crap, shower and shave in the morning.

I am not happy.

Unfortunately you get this everywhere in the UK, be it in terms of how much transfer you get with colocation or rented servers, or actual throttling on home connections now.

We will be ditching them soon. We have Tv, telephone and internet with telewest (Sorry, virgin media. ) and it used to be great when telewest was in control, but ever since the switch, its aload of bullpoo. The main problem we have had since the switch is somehow, our telephone line keeps on getting switched to other peoples houses, so that whatever calls THEY make, it goes on OUR bill!! This has happenned about 7 times ever since the switch, and yet, they refuse to drop the extra charge put on our bill from the problem. One provider we are looking at is Sky. We have sky in all the bedrooms upstairs, and when i had a problem with my box (could'nt pick up channel 4), my dad rang them up and asked what was wrong and it turned out to be a faulty cable which my dad was willing to repair himself, but instead, they sent out a new box, cable, reciever AND a freindly man to fit it! Thats why i love sky!

Screw you Virgin media!!

Frenchy

Certain other members of my household are considering Sky also, however given the sheer number of people in my area alone that have moved across (I currently count 3 sky wireless routers in the area with the sky "tag"), I wonder if they're going to get growing pains.

Hmm, well all i can say is that with sky, its great. Customer service is 9/10, and the quality and prices are a certain 10/10. My only complaint against them is that they can make a mess, when they came to fit the boxes, they had to drill through the ceiling (so they could run the cables through the loft into the aerial) but they kinda drilled wrong and made mince meat outta the corners of the wall, but we sorted that soon enough. The only good thing i find about Virgin is the internet. Its 8mb and download limit is way to much for what i use it for

Frenchy

/me bends over.

well.. i guess they had to join all the other isp's in that sort of thing eventually....

but i think the thresholds they are showing is way too low.... and how can you tell if your inside their top 5%? what if they just want to give you half a service and have a solid excuse...

oh well hopefully it wont be as bad as it sounds.

Quote from the_angry_angel :

3. The CAT5e in the house all stems from one point - the loft, which isn't where I could get BT to put a point in and quite frankly I don't feel like running another huge cable myself through the house

I've heard you can get the internets over the radio now.

I always make sure my desktop box is wired into the router, but the rest of the house is serviced by wireless. The only time I really need to guarantee a good connection is when gaming, so that works out fine for me.

Quote from thisnameistaken :

I've heard you can get the internets over the radio now.

Cheeky Unfortunately my PC isn't near any phone points, and the majority of transfer I do would take years over wifi

Quote from the_angry_angel :

Cheeky Unfortunately my PC isn't near any phone points, and the majority of transfer I do would take years over wifi

Well, I move house a lot (I'm renting, I get bored, what can I say...) so these days when the TelCo turn up I just get them to wire into my office, plug the phones and internets in there, and let the rest of the house work wirelessly.

I see your point though, if you don't have a... point.

If you were going to switch to DSL they'd charge you a £75 or whatever "installation fee" anyway, so you might as well get them to give you some sodding sockets, make 'em earn it.

Despite what I said previously, I would definately switch service if the alternatives offered something that was remotely hassle free to switch to. To get BT I would basically need to rip everything up and pay them god knows how much for new lines that meet their poor standards. Most of the decent broadband providers run though a BT line...and like I said a BT line isnt cheap to get.

As for sky...well I don't like their blatent monopolising and I am in full support of Virgin Medias decision not to put up with it. I have lost Sky One and the movie channels...but tbh I don't like Lost on season 2,000,000 of 24, and I've seen the Hulk already (3 hours of utter crap) Also you might want to read the small print on their adverts, Sky claim to be one of the cheapest but read the small print and you find out that unless your Barry from Manchester who lives at number 23, you actually get one of the most expensive.

Looks like Virgin are on the slipping slope.

They lost the rights to Sky, now this, I wonder what will be next, the planes? Richard Branson beard

Quote from The General Lee :

Looks like Virgin are on the slipping slope.

They lost the rights to Sky, now this, I wonder what will be next, the planes? Richard Branson beard

They actually didn't lose the rights to Sky, they refused to pay the amount of money Sky were demanding. Basically if Sky sold 1 pence sweets, they would cost £100 and you could only 'borrow' them for a year.

I knew that, I just forgot what the story actually was.

Have you seen how anti-Virgin the Sky ads have gone...

300 channels (circa) for £24...

... Thats £27 cheap than Virgin Media.

All sorts of adverts like that. Surely there must some law against it.

To be fair Virgin Media are doing the same, not in their TV adverts but on the channels Sky stopped them getting, they show a display talking about why Sky is in the wrong, and a website link to register your complaints about it...although the Virgin Media adverts were done before all of this happened. If they update them I suspect Uma will break out her yellow jump suit and start attacking Sky logos with a sword.

Quote from ATC Quicksilver :

To be fair Virgin Media are doing the same, not in their TV adverts but on the channels Sky stopped them getting, they show a display talking about why Sky is in the wrong, and a website link to register your complaints about it...although the Virgin Media adverts were done before all of this happened. If they update them I suspect Uma will break out her yellow jump suit and start attacking Sky logos with a sword.

See, if they'd just removed all the Sky content and replaced them with 24-hour Uma channels, I think I could probably deal with that. Shall I give them a ring?

Don't be silly, Uma isnt that great and Kill Bill is a terrible film. Replace all Sky channels by offering Motors TV for free

Quote from ATC Quicksilver :

Don't be silly, Uma isnt that great and Kill Bill is a terrible film. Replace all Sky channels by offering Motors TV for free

I'd go further and say she's a shit actress, but that doesn't necessarily mean I wouldn't happily stare at her for hours on end.

Quote from ATC Quicksilver :

Don't be silly, Uma isnt that great and Kill Bill is a terrible film. Replace all Sky channels by offering Motors TV for free

Oh dammit! i'l miss Motors TV!.

Anybody on virgin media broadband have issues with traffic shaping causing disco's from the master server? I'm considering ditching tiscali/sky/bt for a vm package (it's cheaper for starters) - I can live whatever tv I get but want to get back to actually being able to have a race in the evening...

I know that in a lot of cases it works out more expensive, but I have just switched to a BUSINESS package...
Main advantage is that between 5pm and midnight are hardly 'peak' times for business users...so my connection actually IMPROVES at these times