Hi All, Virgin Media have just announced a new trial service of a 200MBit service for 100 of their staff and customers. Anyone here one of ther lucky 100 in kent? It sounds like they're really pushing the technology but does this mean we're just going to hit our caps in 30mins instead of 3hrs? I'll be interested to see where this goes. ItchyD
Pointless on a capped service, no point pushing the boundaries of one technological limitation if the other is living in the past.
That seems mostly if not entirely silly, most routers on the market that I've seen only have a 10/100 interface on the WAN side even if there's a gigabit switch on the LAN side of things.. so I doubt there'd be any consumer level equipment out there that'd do the job. And there's no way in hell I'd use some bundled POS router that came from an ISP, I like my own kit, it does what I like and doesn't fuel my conspiracy theories too much. Besides.. based on the "20Mb" cable I have currently I'm only achieving 8Mb at best and usually only 4-6Mb. I'd consider switching down to 10Mb if the cap wouldn't kill me.. Another thing to winge about is the caps, with cloud computing and on demand video services like channel4 and iplayer, you can easily max out your cap - legitimately.. I remember getting really annoyed when downloading a load of stuff on my xbox, itunes and then iplayer and oh look. Screwed again. Not good for a service that purports to be good for gamers and music downloads. You'd think they'd only throttle you if you were downloading from a source that isn't something where it's expected to have large downloads. [/rant]
running a 24mb virgin connection, and to be honest its pants its all good when i'm actually downloading at the full 2mb/s but the moment its sustained at that rate for about 30mins, thats it, capped and the connection is throttled down to a lowly 5mb connection which translates to around 500kbps which is rubbish as im paying for 24mb, but what can you do eh
I'm on the 10mb connection with Virgin and I was thinking of going with Sky due to the capping. But I also have my phone and the TV package too, so it would be a PITA getting a BT line installed, having to wait so I could swap over etc etc. I can see why they introduced capping to some extent (after having a few barnies with them), but what's the point in having a 10mb service when it's capped after a couple of gigs? I buy most of my games via the internet, and when the capping kicks in as I am DL'ing them, it takes forever.
I know it's not ideal, but why not simply download your games when the cap (9pm - 10am, 3pm - 4pm) isn't in effect?
lol were them capping times come from more like from 9pm in the morning till 12am at night .... and if you do get capped it doesn't come back on till 12.30 am at least ...
Throttling appears to be most of a working day, plus all evening basically in around about way its all bloody day.... I really need to get shot of this bunch of cowboys. http://allyours.virginmedia.com/html/internet/traffic.html
havent had any problems with virgin 20mb here. We have traffic scheduling on a pfsense box so most of the heavy stuff gets done overnight. Our average b/w usage is around 80gb a day. Once you work out how to schedule everything you don't notice the limits nearly so much. Note: we use so much bw as we're a house of 4 students, all who use iplayer, spotify, and transfer an awful lot of setups for various o/s's and testing as well as hosting a few sites. RwD
for the time being. it's been all but confirmed that they will be applying capping rules once the rollout is complete, which is due to happen any time now.
For a second there it almost seemed worth it. I'm still very disheartened with the rubbish speeds I'm getting... it's constantly at a 8Mb best, and I'm paying for 20Mb... Heard something about it happening when their routers/switches/system/pixies have too many connections for one particular 'pipe' but dunno... Just seems a bit pointless to be paying more when I'd probably get the same on a lower package, only real difference would be the caps... Starting to wonder if linking a bunch of 3G usb jobbies would do the job better/cheaper.
im on the 20mb package here and its fine, i pull things down at 2400kbps so what thiers a cap between peak hours, its not hard to wait until 9 pm to start pulling down that 14gig backup.mkv
Lorquis, i had a problem like that when i moved into my new house, i suggest you call them and REALLY stick the boot in, demand to speak to the boss and demand they do something about. by the time i was done screaming at them (3 calls) i got 4 months free internet.
i had a massive routing problem in my area which meant i was getting 4mb if i was lucky. go roar at them and TAKE NO ****! if they put you through to some idiot call center in mumbai, hang up, call the cancellation line (they're british funny enough) and demand an explination for thier failure. cut them down but dont scream obsceneties at them or you'll be the one they hang up on. oh and remember, the general rule of thier caps is between 4pm and 9pm, or when you start taking the piss.
I have not run into any major problems with caps on my 20mb service. It's anoying slowdown but still a decent download speed when thottled. Download most of my stuff in the morning or in the evening anyway so i'm not hit by them as much.
Off topic slightly, My boss just switched from Virgin to Sky and for the same money he's getting the same TV package (3 Packages + free to air ones, give or take a few channels), free evening and weekend calls (including Line Rental), 2mb internet (daughter only Facebook / MSN's so doesn't need a huge connection) but with the addition of an HD box and an extra box in the kitchen. When he phoned Virgin to see what they would do about it / match it they said they couldn't and was told to go to Sky as thats what alot of Virgin customers are doing.
