Virgin Media

[Pendragon]

http://www.speedtest.net/result/1096504029.png (http://www.speedtest.net)

Had a visit this morning from a Virgin engineer, the look on his face when he tried to use the wife's computer was priceless. Ubuntu isn't that confusing, honest.

[England4eva]

Things move slow at Virgin, I had an engineer tell me my problem was because I was using a router a few years ago.. sharing a connection was "unsupported" back then.

They rolled out 100Mb/s near you yet Pendragon?

[rudedog]

Very nice upload speeds.... damn you Pen!!! :D

It's always funny to see how these techs work.

[HIS-MOTHER]

Well you got my DL beat but my upload is close to Pen's


http://results.speedtest.comcast.net/result/58794282.png

[Busterking]

Hope you're getting unlimited bandwidth with that, otherwise what's the sense.

Great speed.

[zeroy]

Hope you're getting unlimited bandwidth with that, otherwise what's the sense.

Great Speed - Assuming Pendagron is on this (up to) 50Mb product (http://shop.virginmedia.com/broadband/up-to-50mb.html) then those conditions applies:

1Acceptable use policy: Acceptable use policy (http://shop.virginmedia.com/help/acceptable-use.html) applies. Traffic Management (http://shop.virginmedia.com/help/traffic-management.html) operates from 4pm to 9pm and 10am to 3pm to ensure a consistent user experience. :rolleyes:

[HIS-MOTHER]

Hope you're getting unlimited bandwidth with that, otherwise what's the sense.

Great speed.

noone gets unlimited packages anymore not even in the States when it says "Unlimited"

Comcast is unlimited but has a actual Cap of 250GB. More than enough though.

[Pendragon]

I'm on the largest/fastest package that Virgin can offer here on Portsmouth. Before the end of the year it will be jumping up to 100Mb.

I was talking to my sister the other day, she lives in Wisconsin. She said that my download speed was very good but upload was terrible. Several of my friends in mainland Europe get faster upload or the up and down are the same. I don't think it's a technical issue here in the UK, well not on cable as I am. It's the way the business has grown over here. Everyone talks of download and no one mentions upload. I don't need 50Mb or 100Mb download although it's nice. It's the upload I want, I would be more than happy with 10Mb down if I could have 10Mb up! A steady, constant 10Mb up and down would be all that most people need. It's TBase10 after all it what most work places use. As it is I'll not be getting 10Mb up till I get 100Mb down. Daft isn't it?

[England4eva]

One of the main problems with Virgin is the traffic management policy which covers the whole day (working and weekend) and the majority of the evening.

The only non covered packages are the top tier packages which then slowly find themselves being "managed" as other higher packages come out.. good way to keep people upgrading to speeds which the majority of people don't need as Pendragon pointed out.

For anyone on under 50Mb downloading anything worthwhile from Steam, EADM or the like has to be done over night or early morning as not to effect a good portion of the coming hours speeds.

Either that or go with one of the sharks that charge you for how much you download.

We spent years in the UK trying to get flat rate phone calls for dialup, only to finally get there and have similar limitations put in place on broadband. :mad:

[zeroy]

I don't need 50Mb or 100Mb download although it's nice. It's the upload I want, I would be more than happy with 10Mb down if I could have 10Mb up!

Correct! And in any case, what site is going to have 50Mb to give you? Not many. Then i suppose the download is useful for torrent on multi-threads but ultimately its the Upload you want/need. A high upload means you could run a torrent and game with no latency loss for instance.

[GaSplat]

Nice speed Pen. I won't disclose what I get by on. :o

Back to cable system techs... I called up to complain about the crappy speed and the tier 1 support monkey ran me through all his pre-canned scripts and lists. Finally hit the kicker:

Support Monkey: "Reinstall Windows"
- you're kidding
SM: "Nope, can't pass you to tier 2 until we complete this last step."
- I'm not waiting in the support line call queue again and my computer is slow but if you stay on the line while I do it, I'll reinstall Windows.
SM: "I understand. I'll stay on the line."
- okay, I'll start now.

I put the phone on mute, fired up Half Life (this was a while ago) and amused myself blasting Vortigons and such for 45 minutes - hey, it was their 800 number I called. Got to a good spot, saved and exited my game and took the phone off mute.

- Ok, Windows is installed again. Rechecked everything we checked before the reinstall, and still slow as crap.
SM: "Ok, let me put you through to tier 2"

Tier 2 checked and found I wasn't set up right in their database and was getting a default speed of 56k. :mad: He fixed it in two minutes and I jumped back on line a happy camper. I'd only feel better if they weren't also the phone company and had actually sucked down the cost for my 45 minutes of sitting on an 800 number call while fragging my way through HL. :D