News Virgin's broadband claims "misleading"

Oh well. I get 20(18-20)meg pretty much 100% of the time. Most people are out in the day, and even at peak periods my speed never drops below 16meg, which is a lot better than anyone I know who is on another ISP. We never have downtime. The only problems we had with them was a change in tariff after virgin took over. But they eventually gave us a month free so I can't complain.

The throttling doesn't bother me, I used to be a bit naughty and download a lot of things, but I have since stopped. My brother is usually downloading a ton of coheed tour and interview videos (not sure of the legality of these as none of them seem to be released on dvd, if they were he would own them), but he never gets close to getting us throttled. Some days I am playing online on my xbox and in party chat with mates all day. While surfing the net in between games.

But I cannot complain about virgin, one thing I will say about them is that the customer service isn't always great. If their service was as good as the customer service for their mobile phone network then you wouldn't be able to say a bad word about them, I emailed at about 1am asking a question about coverage in my area as I was having signal problems, I got a call back the next morning telling me what my options were, I could try another few phones, I could cancel the contract there and then or I could wait until the end of the 28 days and they would ring me back to ask if I was happy. I chose to cancel, I received a full refund (minus shipping) and got about 40mins and 300texts free as they didn't change me anything for the contract.

 

not really, i didnt get samuel l jackson to shout that people are definitely guaranteed to get that, rather that is what i get. My parents have virgin cable and they've never had a problem with that so i'd happily suggest that thats a good service too, its never gone down, unlike my own Be service

 

well the optic cable does not go all the way to your home it only goes to the local switch thing ( usually a green box ) that feeds your street plus as someone has said a little bit on normal web usage gets you throttled back for a month ( regardless of time ) if you exced their allowance to you not really unlimited is it??? but I am now with sky adsl never been happier. maybe they should stop paying hollywood clebs for their adverts and put it into their network.

 

Same here, we have been with them for over 5 years, maybe more, and not had a single problem with them apart from road works going through cables and them giving us a faulty modem, but apart from that, I get full 10mb when not throttled, and for me, the customer service has been very good.

Like stated, depends where you live.

 

QFT.

2Mb customer's are being bumped up to 10Mb for "free" (all prices are going up by £2/month coincidently) from 1st May. But it's capped to 75% speed for most of the time.
Still my 2Mb line is capped to 50% at the moment, so I'm being upgraded from a 1Mb line to an 7.5Mb line in a month or so. Not too bad, I guess.

 

I've been a Virgin Media customer since they took over NTL (which I was with since 2002). We're now on the 20MB XL Broadband package (along with V+), with no complaints. The only disappointment is that upload speed is poor - and the 50MB option isn't much better. Their customer service is great each time I've phoned - far better than NTL's was.

 

fixed

 

Can't really complain about that

 

been on c&w up to virgin i have never had any problems with speed i been on 10 then 20mb and both of them have been 99.9% up (1 dead modem over 5 years and only loss service for about 2 days total)

the only problem i have had is with 50mb service with massive packet loss and 2mb speeds for 5-10mins times (still doing that) norm does it evey 1hr but can be randome

 

+1. Start Azureus, 2 seconds later, all web browsing speeds go to crap.

 

I couldn't even find the smallprint on the Virgin site, evil company IMO.

 

I ditched Virgin broadband last year. I got sick of paying £25 per month with poor upload bandwidth (50 - 60kb upload) and very severe torrent throttling. I signed up with o2 instead and pay £12.50 per month for 8mb with 130kb upload with no throttling. A friend of mine also followed suit and ditched his virgin in favour of o2.

Another friend of mine is ditching his £24 per month BT (also severe torrent throttling) in favour of o2.

Virgin broadband is not good at all.

 

I've got no problem with torrent throttling but the virgin service I have in Edinburgh is downright shocking. It's supposed to be a 20mb service and I haven't seen anything above 4-5 mbit. The Sky service I have in Ayr gets 7 mbit most of the time with maybe a bit of slowdown on Saturday and Sunday to 5-6 mbit.

Virgin traffic in general is pretty damn poor http traffic seems a lot slower than ADSL. I can't really do any work from home because it's just crap. I'd be shot of them in a second if it wasn't a rented flat.

 

I believe all ISPs should be forced to advertise their minimum capped speeds, because for example virgin customers on the 20mb package are only guarenteed 5mb if they use it 'too much'.

 

Overzealous? It's perfectly fair. Download during peak periods and get capped for 5 hours. Other ISPs would cap you for the rest of the month (Orange, for example).

 

Virgin do clearly advertise the speeds on their website. http://allyours.virginmedia.com/html/internet/traffic.html

 

Having worked for Virgin as a brand the way the group and it's entities are run simply aren't in the best interest of it's customers, but bransons pocket

 

Virgin cap at different times. There is no set peak time capping. That is why I got sick of it and switched.

O2 don't limit torrents at all but I choose to impose my own limiting at peak times by automatically cutting my torrent upload bandwidth down by half.

 

that's more likely the upload maxing out and affecting your web browsing. i leave utorrent for days on end with no impact on browsing cos i've set it to limit upload speeds at certain times.
i agree that the upload speeds are terrible though but all in all i've been a pretty happy virgin/telewest customer for the past 7 years. certaibnly offer a better service than anyone else i know has got from other ISPs

 

We have Virgin TV Broadband and Phone, and the broadband is the best of the three.

Average download speed = 7.94mb/s, but regularly drops to below 2mb/s
Average upload speed = 0.48mb/s

We lose the broadband service, a few days a year and that is the 20mb advertised service.
We specifically asked the sales man if there was any download limits, fair usage policy, or throttling, he told us that there wasn’t, so he lied about that.

The TV service is even worse, drops out for weeks at a time, and when it is working, the picture and sound quality is appalling.

The monthly bill is never correct; we spend several hours a month sorting it out.

The call centre helpline is incompetent and pointless.

The phone service is the worst though, people ring us, but the phone never rings, and it’s not the phone it’s self. A couple of months ago, Virgin disconnected us without telling us, sold our phone number to BT, who issued it to one of their customers. When we rung Virgin, they claimed that we never had our number, and only after threatening them, they told us that it would take two weeks to get our phone line and number back. So for two weeks we were stuck with no home phone, stuck using mobiles for two weeks, we never received any compensation, or even an apology. What we did get on the next bill was a charge for calling someone in Zimbabwe for several hours, which we never made.

Sorry about the rant, we just hate Virgin Media.