Virgin extends 100Mb/s broadband reach Virgin Media has added five more towns to its list of areas connected to its 100Mb/s cable telly broadband technology. The lucky locations are Cheshunt and Hatfield in Hertfordshire, Cardiff suburb Pentwyn, Treforest in Rhondda, and Southport on Merseyside. Virgin's 100Mb/s service is already available to households in Barry …
...you'll notice bugger all difference, since web browsing doesn't need anywhere near it, streaming music or video (even HD video) doesn't need it and practically all download sites will not let you use it - even those that you pay for often max out at about 30 - 40mbit.
But.... you will be able to go to speedtest.net and get a really nice looking speed figure - if you can find the server that will support 100mbit, as most, and often the 'closest' to you, don't.
So, well worth it then :)
From what ive heard from two early adopters the line looses sync every couple of hours, 1 has been hassling virgin to put him back down to 50mb as he got a sturdier connection before, the other isnt very techie and just recons that youtube loads quicker sometimes, and not at all at other times.
I'll wait til they make it work before attempting to jump on the bandwagon
Good starting point i suppose though
"The service costs £45 per month on its own, or £35 when taken with a phone line, which takes the month total to £47.24. Virgin also charges £40 to connect you to its network and a further £30 to activate the connection"
Or double all of that if you happen to be a loyal, existing customer of 10 years and paying over £500 each year for the pleasure.
Check moneysavingexpert.com and look for Virginmedia
Do your homework and check up on the prices from Sky, etc
Phone Virgin and threaten to leave. They will more than likely offer you a Loyalty bonus taking anywhere from £10 to £30 a month off your bill. I've had a £20 discount for several years :)
Oh dear. I forsee another deluge of Virgin advertising. I get 2 or 3 a week.
No matter what I try, I can't get them to stop sending me this crap.
Yes I'm signed up to the MPS. They get around it by using 'The Occupier'.
I've even sent a load of them back in a BIG envelope with no stamp on it. Still the mailings come and now my areas can get thie 100Mb service ....
My next door neighbour has the 50Mb service. They are lucky to get 8mb in the evenings. Last week it went down to 2Mb...
I get the same problem with the the junk mail, but its even worse for me. They're basically taunting me with their fiber optics because they refuse to run a cable down the street to service the 8 or so houses that lie between 20 and 60ft from the nearest DP. So its a "look at what you could have won" every time they spam me.
BT are almost as bad though, with their infinity promotion. They're servicing every exchange around, apart from the one that I'm on. That and their stupidly priced credit card.
Instead of offering ridiculous "super fast" broadband, perhaps they could use the added capacity to give people the speed they want without any bandwidth caping...? I'm on 10MB which isn't slow by any means, but come 5PM you slow down to 100K a second as every man/woman/dog/etc is trying to get on and and do their thing.
I'm going to try the VM model on my customers: Yes, you paid me for IT support, but during peak demand, I'm going to cap your support requests from unlimited down to 2 per year.
Paris: With all the female referee news... Even she has more brains than Andy Gray.
Not a chance in hell. They want to prove you can get 100Mb on the line by rolling it out to Bumpkintown, North Nowhere, so they can trump out figures stating 100Mb to the modem in marketing blurb. Once that's done, they can roll it out in the kit in London, have massive uptake, contention will cripple it, and everyone will STILL get 1/10th the advertised speed. Until 5pm, when it becomes 1/20th.
Yep, same here.
There are some sites which struggle - like you say, the Beeb is one of them (although only some of the time) but GooTube is the worst for me - but I can max out my 50Mb/s line using usenet so I too don't think that Vermin Media are necessarily to blame... but I'm sure that won't stop people moaning about them on here.
As for exceeding the Fair Usage Policy... I've been known to download a helluva lot yet haven't been affected by their traffic management. Bring on the 100Mb/s...!!!
I do agree, though, that their customer service is diabolical.
I'd had a great time in west London with Virgin 10 meg service being fairly amazing by comparison to any I'd had before. Just moved to the east end and my new place is terrible, I see 50% packet loss so can't even use it to browse a standard website, let alone HD streaming! They say they won't be fixing it until the end of March and knew about it in November, why bother signing me up at all!
with anywhere near the 10mb im paying for. im lucky to ever get 6mb.
on the bright side they sent me an email today saying they have doubled everyone's upload speed. just need to reboot the cable modem. not that i really upload anything and i only really download game updates and demos and some youtube
Virgin arent the only cable company out there. I'm with smallworld cable and have 50mb which *is* 50mb. No caps, no throttling, decent customer service. Sure HD only comes out in feb but you get a PVR and HD for £5 more which isnt too bad. Plus 100mb is being trialled and is rolled out in my area later this year.
Mint!
Buy 10meg & get 10meg is the adage I use here in Bristol. Just no point in more, considering their Tivo box can stream HD with a 10meg connection. Unless of course you have a affection for filling hard drives I guess.
Customer service is indeed pap, but at 1 issue a year on average its not that painful.
Waiting until they bump the minimum speed again myself.
GOOD BITS
I think I get roughly 2Mb/sec upload speed which is supposed to increase to 5Mb/s.
I dont care if I ever get the 50Mb/s inbound if fact I still have some 10Mb/s network cards on some
boxes, the outbound means my web servers ar just as good as those hosted in a company datacentre with a 4Mb/s cct.
OK no fixed IP, no rDNS etc but you cannot have it all for 40squids...
BAD BITS
latency is scary - almost as bad as satcoms - gamers beware unless you are happy with >300ms rtt's.
all http traffic goes through very very slow proxies and some traffic is corrupted - so use those checksum's :-)
DNS is a joke - - unles you run your own DNS server you will see random week long outages as their DNS servers decide to give the http "accelerator" IP address for *any* DNS A lookup!
And yes support is crap - roughly one day a month outage and a friends NThell phone line (cut off by the engineer while doing a cable pull) was out for two MONTHS before they could organise a repair to the cable pull. FWIU she was not the only NTHell customer with a deal line.
They initially charged her for a voice to mobile redirect but when she mentioned getting legal advice they said they would "re-imburse her account" - they part re-imbursed her :-/
They are not called nthell for nothing.
Jacqui
p.s. when phoning support, call the freephone number and if you get an "injun" HANG UP, wait 10 mins and redial. The scots and northeastern call centers are staffed by *people* who give a shit. My mates dead line was made, far far worse by an injun script kiddie who managed to destroy her service when all she wanted was a new feature added WHEN THE LINE WAS RESTORED. Instead the injun removed CLI and a host of other features, including her phone service... Dont ask the injuns anything, just hang up and redial until you get a UK call centre.
Branston will eventually get the message.
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