hey all, question anyone got any experience or knowledge of which service is better ? basically parents at home get the combo package from either sky or virgin now both are the same cost so only issue is net speed and reliability. SKY unlimited 20mb broadband (live 1.5miles from exchange) or Virgin media 10mb unlimited fibre to the cabinet. which service will give me the best and most reliable speeds ? thanks
What's your bandwidth usage like? If you want to use the full speed for more than 1 hour a day, stay away from Virgin!
well downloading isnt an issue as not alot is downloaded. maybe the odd demo here and there or patch/drivers. i know virgin do traffic shaping, i looked it up its not too bad unless you really heavily download. depending on the time of day if you exceed 1500-3000mb in 5hrs they throttle your speed by 50-75%
I use the 10mb service but I've been told I will go up to 20mb eventually when the get it sorted (I'm an existing XL package user). The service is OK but I do try to avoid ringing customer services unless I'm really desperate. It's incredibly hard to deal with them if you get the Indian call centre. It's like talking to robots. Traffic Management - - operates from 4pm to 9pm and 10am to 3pm on Virgin Media. I did once take a total of 3.2 GB of legal downloads in one day once just to find that later on that evening my speed had been dropped to 2mb (several speed test sites confirmed this). More info about their fair usage crap here: http://allyours.virginmedia.com/html/legal/oncable/acceptableuse.html
The traffic management is a real pain but the guarantee of speed kept me with them, i'm quite far from my exchange and wasn't convinced i'd get the better speeds O2 offered. Do you know any one in your area on Sky or another unbundled service, it might be worth seeing what speeds they consistently get especially at peak time when contention is higher.
3.2GB is ok in a day depends what time you did it. heres the link with traffic management times and caps http://www.virginmedia.com/help/traffic-management.php 10am-3pm - you cant exceed 3000mb or you get 75% reduction for 5 hrs. 4pm-9pm - you cant exceed 1500mb or 75% reduction for 5hrs. 9pm-10am is unlimited completely. thats when you rip it up with demos and er other legal stuff lol.
afraid not and i couldn't find any data on actual speed for my area. the sky guy told my dad we could get 16-20mb but im sceptic since it relies on a BT line and im about 1.5miles form exchange. ive read that people are getting 16-20mb when they live next to the exchange but others having alot less the further out you go.
Quality of cables can also be a factor. My old neighbours (before I moved) had a really bad connection on the up to 8mb BT internet package they had. Our houses were only 400 metres from the exchange at the time. After a lot of messing about they eventually found out the phone cables going into the house were in a poor state and BT finally replaced them. They went from 0.8mb max to 6.5mb average speed. I was on Virgin at the time so I never had any problems. One of the guys I used to work with had a similar problem.
yeah house is about 30 years old so not super old but i doubt any cables have been upgraded or replaced. on pipex we used to get 4-6mb until tiscali bought them and now my dad always ringing me up complaining its slow. did a speed check several times they usally on <2mb now. the other day was 0.3mb. so im not sure on the quality of the line but BT said we could get upto 8mb and only got 6mb at best.
Virgin is ok - I was sceptic when we first moved to it. We got the 24 mb XL package, which did give speeds of 2.0 2.2Mb down. All we did though to avoid the traffic management was to put our downloads on a timer to kick off at midnight. The 3 gig in-the-day allowance was fine for the odd download load, leaving the big things to run over night. Got a screenshot of our smoothwall somewhere with the data counter at 659 GB downloaded in a month, which isn’t bad!
My mums with tiscali and they just got bought out themselves recently so I'm just waiting for the phone calls too.
My rents are with Sky. Fairly consistent 8Mb, tech support are pretty swish nowadays (though there's still a few Indian tech-support gremlins - if you can get past them, it's sweet!), router easily opened up for port-forwarding, all traffic seems to work fine... Router needs the occasional reboot, but with 2 PCs, 3 laptops, and an Xbox or 2 on it, sometimes it can get congested, so I can accept that.
I find Virgin traffic shaping completely unobtrusive if you just set especially large downloads for overnight, and then they don't care (I've downloaded ~100GB overnight before without so much as a polite email from them) I've downloaded 7-10GB in an evening too and didn't notice the throttling. On the XL 20MB package.
If you're willing to go for normal BB then O2/Be* is the best imo, great service, top speed and pretty common at most exchanges.
yeah i have O2 at my flat, its sweet. i pay for 8mb and i get 8mb. but my dad was looking to save some cash cause at the min we have pipex ( VERY POO NOW), BT phone and sky for TV. cost over £60/month seem he went for virgin in the end cause he decided to pit sky against virgin in a bidding war for his service. and virgin won the 3 bundle for £30 Plus £11 on phone rental 10mb net with "unlimited" but he got his virgin HD+ box for free instead of £69 and got reduced line rental to £5 for first 6 months.
One factor you could bring into the decision is that (AFAIK), FTTC has a much higher upspeed than traditional broadband. Plus, if your house really is 30 years old, the copper wiring could be pretty pants. I live in a 16 year old house and my 24MB connection is banked at ~10 due to crappy old wiring, and we're not even that far from the exchange! (Granted, I am living in Dublin ATM, and Ireland is notorious for crappy comm's infrastructure...)
