@Mikey
I disagree with you Mikey, I live a few miles from Winnersh and I used to be with NTL.
The service overall was good, but they had a recurring problem with the DNS, they would go down for hours at a time, and I remember having an entire evening wiped out because of it.
Admittedly it didn't happen too frequently. But it did happen and it was fatal.
If you're trying to run a business then it's a very serious issue indeed.
I got around it by using OpenDNS. I was IT literate enough to work out what was going on and so solved it easily. But most net users aren't techical experts. These outages are still going on today, and affect hundreds of thousands of users, and it's not acceptable.
Having been using the net for nigh on 20 years, NTL/Virgin are the only company I have ever used which have this kind of issue. it's not good enough.
And as for your comment about not guaranteeing 100% uptime, who cares about guarantees, it's the actual uptime that matters, and Virgin Media is the worst of any ISP I have come across.
Mikey, you're being far too generous with Virgin, when I compare them to other ISPs, their performance is not good.