just calling them now, and the hold music is Mr Rick Roll him self, kid you not! Moving out of student house by the way edit, spoke to a woman, now on hold again and bam! Rick again!
Lol Maybe it's sufficiently bad to make people think, "Sod it I'll just stick with it for another year".
I couldn't help but laugh, hope they weren't recording me. When the lady the other end picked up she was sniggering a little and oddly very helpful! All i said was student house, we're moving out and everything went perfect! Well I've yet to see the final bill, so I shall remain cautious...
I had my broadband connection die on me the other day at 2am. I looked over at my girlfriend and informed her I've been rick rolled.. She made me put it on speakerphone so she could bop her head to it
I am on cable, and loved every minute of it, i loose this connect as of the 30th, Its only 10Mb/s, but when i hit a good server i can reach download sustained speeds of 1.2Mb/s I don't see much point in BB over 10Mb/s even in a house of 4 people its not slow, after all the limit isn't the download, but the upload from the server at the other end.
I sort of agree. I'm in a student house on VM 20mb and I also run a home server that manages that mess so I have a lot of stats on this. Stuff that affects speed is: Ping Packet Loss Upload choking Download Pretty much in order of importance.
Only Virgin at the moment offer fiber optics. If you look at any studies/surveys virgin always comes out on top. 10MB on fibre and u'll get around 7MB at lowest. 10MB with BT and you're looking at 2MB tops! If you want more info i can go into more detail, but really can't be bothered to type it all up right now. i do work for virgin tho, but i don't need to make sales, the speeds speak for themselves!
what about gaming ping? how's P2P gaming on fibre? speed really isn't that important, i can wait, anything higher than 4mbps is more than enough. gaming ping, upload speed are most important.
I'm not to sure on ping, i'll have an ask around in the workplace tomorrow. but what you should do is find you nearest telephone exchange point. because for every few mile you can lose a whole MB off a 10MB line. I'm on a 8MB line and i only get 1.5MB at best! As i live a good few miles from exchange box. I don't live in a city and can't have fast connection And as i work for virgin i can get 50MB (swn to be 100MB) dirt cheap
I'm on the 20mbit virgin, been on this for about 2 years and was on a smaller speed one before that. It's incredibly reliable and extremely fast. I get the absolute full 20mbits which you just don't get with ADSL unless you live practically next door to the exchange or something. Gaming on it is great, pings are decent. I download at 2.4MB/s when it's coming from a good server. I am planning to downgrade to 10mbit though because 20 is overkill for me and I rarely find servers that host files at that kind of speed anyway. The only problem is that the upload speed is pretty poor, but that doesn't affect me much. It's good for general gaming but if you wanted to host your own games or whatever, then you'd be better with Be Internet or something else. I was in the Huxley beta and you could host servers with 10 or more people all playing together, and my upload let me down for that. The only other thing to be wary of with Virgin is the traffic shaping policy. I think most ISP's have it now so you can't really win, but it's worth mentioning. Basically if you download 3gig in the evening, your connection will get gimped in a serious way. They say they knock it down to 10% or something but it feels worse than that because I have hard time even browsing the web. So you have to be careful not to download that much in the evenings. It's usually ok for gaming, just make sure you don't download any huge patches, betas, demos or trials or anything, or wait until after 9pm.
My only gripe about virgin is there hidden costs and general cost of BB, For instance when i first joined, its was the small package of 2Mb/s for £5 a month, absolute winner imho. 2Mb/s on fibre dirty cheap. Then about a year ago virgin put us on an upgrade path, saying that the basic speed will increase to 10Mb/s, wonderful i thought as they were making out it to be free, but you don't get nothing for free ever! My BB charge alone for the last year has been £20.50 with a little knocked off taking it to £13.50, which is cheap, but all the other bits they require you to have takes my service charge to £31.74 a month. Why isn't they a BB provider offering a small DL speed, for very low cost? I know Sky are offering there customers a free 2MB/s BB with limited DL limit, but that's no good. A BB provider would make buckets of money if they were to provide a cheap BB connect be it limited by speed. I would be happy on a 1Mb/s connect.
oh yeah, i need to update that part, i've graduated, moving to Luton. good luck with your degree in Soton O2 or BE is the best option in Soton, from my experience. what kind of upload speed are you getting? MW2 18 player do-able? video chat do-able? rep++ for your advices
I used to work for Telewest Business, second line technical support, for three years. This information applies to Telewest's network; I didn't work for NTL, so I'm unsure how close it followed Telewest. I would assume its similar, as Cable Modems rely on "cable" not "fibre" to work. You'll have to forgive me this post - and I assure you its not aimed at you - as I find the marketing gimmick annoying in its misleading customers tl;dr Its not fibre optic, that's just marketing. Its an RG48 coaxial copper cable from the streetside cabinet to the wall. The backhaul from said streetside cabinet is however fibre optic (AKA FTTC, Fiber-To-The-Cab which BT is also beginning to roll out), which is in fact a PDH or SDH ring, running at 140mbps (PDH) or 155mbps (SDH) - AKA STM1 - connected into a MUX (multiplexer). Said MUX takes multiple cable modem feeds, converting from RG48 on the customer side, and steps up to the STM1 optical standard on the other side. The ring is resilient and self healing, meaning each cab has two links to each cab, one in each "direction". Should the link between a cab fail, the ring heals itself by looping the opposite way round the ring. One station on the ring is then connected upto another PDH or SDH ring, typically at 655mbps, which is an STM4 ring. This ring typically links back to the head end, which is then switched across the IP Core, at multiple ten-gig ethernet speeds, using DWDM on the national Telewest fibre backbone. There were also instances of Ethernet-o-MPLS used to tunnel certain types of data across this network, although I was never privy to such low level diagrams (even though I had an TACACS+ account onto just about any device you might wish to name). Occasionally in a bigger town there'd be an STM16 ring between the headend and all the STM4 nodes. Fast stuff: * STM-1 = 155,520 Mbit/s * STM-4 = 622,080 Mbit/s * STM-16 = 2,488,320 Mbit/s * STM-64 = 9,953,280 Mbit/s BT's network differs in that they use copper to the cabinet, and then copper to the home. VM/Telewest use fiber to the cabinet and then copper to the home, and as the distance to the home from the cabinet can be as little as 10 metres or so the signal quality is fantastic. Hence stable and predictable actual download rates to the home user. /rant over Virgin's overly-enthusiastic faceless marketing bods finished /tl;dr I've used both cable and ADSL based products for personal internet access, and recommended both. I definitely support using Virgin Media for cable access, as long as you have zero requirement for a static IP address. The network is NOT set up to provide them. ADSL, however is. ADSL2+ tops out around 1.5mbps depending on provider. I think the fastest upload that Virgin provide is around 500k. Typically you need 64k per player, so basic maths: 1.5mbps / 64k = 23.472; round it down to 20 or 22 man 500k / 64k = 7.8 round it down to 7 man :/
Well it'll be hard to have fibre optic right to your pc/modem! All virgin exchange boxes are a maximum of 500 meters from every house. With BT you can be anything up to 50 MILES from an exchange box! I know which one i'd be on if i could, but due to a crap location i'm stuclk with BT Virgin are expensive. people don't complain when they buy 3d tv's. Its the best thats why its expensive. I'd understand complaints about price if another company could compete, but they simply can't right now. Edit: just read my above comparison to 3D tv's and i think i might've gone off on one there. you guys know what i mean tho don't you?
Yeah but then some servers laugh at your 10mbit connection. For instance i have 60mbit right now and Steam can give me over 6mb/s down and gog.com can max out my connection with 7.3mb/s
