A friend of mine is moving to Reading in the summer (work transfer) and he's looking at broadband in the area. Tapping into Bit-Tech hive-mind to see if anyone has experience with VM in that locale as sometimes VM can be good in under subscribed areas. My experience with VM is don't waste your time with it. He has a similar experience but the 152Mbps speed is tempting over Plusnet's 75Mbps in his area. Sooo anyone? Unsolicited rant but his current VM connection is bad. The ping is really jittery . It bounces between 18-600 on BF3 servers. Didn't let him launch the last NFS game because it couldn't sync or something with the authentication server. Tether his phone and the game launched fine. Tried again with VM, some network error comes up. Now he uses his VM line for downloads (50Mbps or so) and his BeThere/Sky for gaming.
Our VM connection used to be great, and then everyone around us started getting it. Now online the ping is majorly jittery on some games like Fifa (Including times at off-peak where I'm being kicked out of games).
It's all linked to whether your area is oversubscribed or not. When I was at my last house, I had all sorts of trouble, dropping to <1Mbps during the evening, and VM tended to fob me off. However, a guy who worked for Virgin offered to help me out, and discovered that we were heavily over-subscribed. VM upgraded the line after 6 months, and then it was... just as bad. Apparently they'd underestimated the usage, so it took another 6 months to upgrade it again. Then, finally, it was fantastic. Problem is, they just don't tell you that kind of information publicly, so the only way to know is to get an insider's opinion. And even if someone lives in the same general area, that doesn't mean that the connection quality will be the same. I've seen massive variation from street to street in the past.
ISP performance vary depending on where you are based. Brighton is absolutely mobbed with VM users and in the evenings many had problems. Tech support is non existent too. I was a student there for 4 years so had good exposure to the amount of rants and frustration. In the end my house went wit BEthere who are now owned by Sky and we had a lower download rate, but a rock solid 4mb connection that never throttled and dropped once in a year with 6 students hammering it with video streaming/torrenting/gaming/browsing blahdyblah. Pretty impressive.
We've got a fast 50Mbps plus (can't remember exactly what package it is) package here in swansea. I get sporadic patches of 150+ ping on CS:GO servers at peak times making it unplayable for about a minute and then returning to business as usual. Can't complain about download speeds as they are the fastest I've experienced since I lived in a reasonably rural location in Sussex before coming to uni here.
Totally dependant on the amount of people in the area who also have a VM connection. I live in the south of the city (mostly detached or semi-detached houses with big gardens) and my 30MB connection is great, good ping and speedy. My friends who live in the north of the city (which is high density terraced housing) all complain that it's slow and videos buffer. I've never had an issue with their traffic management policies either, I just schedule any big downloads over night. the odd time I've had to install a steam game in peak hours I've not noticed a slow down either.
Its a lottery. I have been with them for 4 years and of that id say a for 75% of that time its been flawless the other 25% there has been a ongoing ping / latency issue.
