Rant Virgin Twotting Media

move to sweden and get 100mb up and down without throttling for the price we pay here for a lousy 8 or 10...

 

That's one point i do agree with. Aside from telling you what they change, they should also tell you what your options are.

Legally, you are within your rights to not agree with the change and leave. They'd be hard-pressed to find a judge who wont allow you to discontinue a contract that is changed from one side
The option to offer you an alternative "pay more, don't get throttled"- type subscription is obviously entirely up to them.

Basically, they make you an offer, all you can do is A) agree, B) dont agree. They are tossers for not telling you this.

The only reason they can offer that is because they have insane overcapacity on the network there. They have the capacity anyway, so they might as well let their customers use it. This does not mean that they are fair or realistic prices in other countries though.

 

What you mentioned is throttling to 75%. What Virgin will do is throttle by 75% to 5mb.

 

Yet another reason to tell VM to ****-off!

See my sig for their future plans.

 

bah i hate it when i agree with yorkshiremen....

count yourself lucky, the fastest internet connection i can get is half a meg because i live too far from the telephone exchange to get anything else. I cant even get sat internet because my house is listed and you arent allowed to put a dish on it...

To be honest tho i dont have too much of a problem with throttling during peak hours, or download caps as long as they arent puny (which a lot of them seem to be)....

Too many people seem to think they have a god given right to torrent at their max connection speed 247-365

If if is such a problem tho you are well within your rights to cancel the contract as they have unilaterally changed the terms...
( while not a great thing for cable internet as there is no other choice, but when mobile phone operators change their terms its great as you can cancel your contract and start a new one with a nice new handset before your 12/18 months are up )

 

At least they tell you about it though. Now you can set up the schedule in uTorrent to avoid those times.

 

Exactly.

I don't see what the fuss is unless you are piping out the connection to lots of people, in which case you should be paying more than a single customer who doesn't clog up the lines at peak times. (ignoring non-paying customers LOL) From 9pm til morning you have plenty of time to grab whatever you want. At those speeds it doesn't take long to get anything really, apart from ridiculous amounts of warez

 

I'm simply amazed at all the people who are perfectly happy with Virgin's rediculous throttling

A 75% speed throttle is insane. don't forget the already pathetically slow upload speed gets a 75% throttle as well, it's not fun trying to restore files to my website and watching the FTP transfer suddenly crap out at 15kb/sec or something silly.

If it wasn't for the fact our BT phone line is of shocking quality and can't reliably hold a connection above 2mb, i'd be off like a shot.

Bring back Telewest, the service was orders of magnitude better back then

 

i've decided to change from virgin to O2 when i move house in august. It's been rated highly by all who have used it and even after flicking through the propaganda at work i'm impressed.

Plus the staff plan means I get the top package for lowest package prices *kerching*

 

the only problem is what your 'phone line will actually support, the most that my mother can get (who is with O2) is 4Mb. I regularly get 14Mb plus with VM cable ...
Of course if 4Mb or so is enough then it's great vfm.

 

I too have no sympathy

I just wish they would have a better way of getting rid of torrent wh0res that sweeping everyone.

So when i download a big file now and again I get capped :/ How is that fair?

 

virgin = monopoly imo.

i am on them and they suck ****ing balls. i cant even play my xbox between 7pm and 10pm, the lag is so bad. and on a 20 meg connection, utterly ridiculous. on the rare occasions our connection gets throttled, it acts more like 64k ISDN from BT home highway back in the day, not 5 meg. WORST COMPANY EVER, SCREW BRANSON FOR BUYING IT UP AND RUINING A DECENT CABLE SERVICE!!!

 

He didn't. He sold off Virgin mobile to the ntl:telewest group, who then got to use the Virgin brand. They did get some new managment in however, and I believe one of the heads is an American who headed capping over there. That *******.

 

my bad. i still dont like them.

 

I think the intention is to stop heavy down/uploaders from crippling the service at peak times causing this situation.

 

/hugs sky. 16 meg line (we get about 10-11) downloaded 40GB+ last month (as a combined household), absolutely no problem.

best of all the service only cost £10 ontop of our sky package.


I’ve been with VM, BT & Tiscali (worst of the lot), so needless to say I’m very pleased with sky's service!

 

BeThere/Be* offer upto 24Mbit/s for £18 no throttling at all or limit. Be* is now owned by O2, but they only provide 20Mbit/s max.

 

maybe the solution is the isp's get off their collective backsides and increase the capacity throttling is just plain wrong after all you buy a car, only then to be told that between the hours of 4pm and 9pm only bike users are allowed on the road no so why pay for something that they are not providing I.E. a constant unthrottled broadband connection.

 

i'm on be broadband, they're the best i've ever had. its supposed to be up to 24mb/s, however i only get about 12mb/s. But thats still better than my old one (newnet) which was up to 8mb/s and i got about 2 to 3 mb/s

The service seems reliable and they don't complain despite me easily transferring 80GB+ each month

edit: We used to be on tiscali (before newnet) and they were the worst of the lot, service constantly down and eventually they sent me a letter saying we were using the connection too much and other users were suffering as a result (i checked and we were using less than 10GB/month, the limit on a cheaper service was 20GB/month) and we would be throttled. The connection became completely unusable. In the letter they also said they'd sent us 2 prior warnings, which was complete bollox. So I got extremely pissed off, rang them up and got us disconnected straight away.

 

meh no sympathy tbh your only restricted for half the day. I've been with ntl(now virgin media) for about 5 years, when it was ntl the service was fantastic now its a bit naff. But then there are more and more people getting broadband and the UKs network hasnt had any substantial upgrades recently. So for them the only way to provide everyone with broadband is throttling etc, maybe when bt find a money tree and create a whole new fibre network the throttling will stop.