Virgin Media, Readers - an apology Dear readers, we owe you an apology. This morning, we could - darn it, we should - have written up Virgin Media's announcement that the "UK’s fastest broadband reaches one million homes" and drawn the obvious - but erroneous - conclusion that a million customers have signed up for Virgin's 100Mb/s broadband package. Many of …
to throw at the virgin fans.
Virgin almost went better than BT by stating their top package would not be capped in any form whatsoever during a watchdog interview but a couple of months later went back on their word.
Pity really as i would of probably started recommending virgin had that been the case.
Recently I contacted VM a couple times about upgrading to the 50MB service. I was told out-right that they have no plans on introducing any traffic shaping or throttling on their 50MB service and that it would cost me around £57/month all in (including my TV and telephone package). I called back only a week or so later after seeing on their website that they have announced throttling for file sharing ports only to find that it was also going to cost me £64/month and not the £57 I had been quoted.
The file sharing doesn't particularly bother me, its the fact that I was told one thing then they did another, on top of it costing me more money than originally quoted.
Surprisingly enough I cancelled the install and have stuck with my 10MB service instead.
When i am sitting in the lounge watching TV, I am "ready" to go and make a cup of tea in the advert break.... but that does not mean i am.
Since no-one cares what lies are spread about broadband in the name of its take up, (unlimited connection and up-to etc), it is not surprising that it has become the norm for people like Virgin to say whatever they like, no matter how far the perceived understanding is from the truth.
I wonder if we could get that term recognised in law "Perceived understanding" .. it would start to make people say something you understand not just something that is technically 'true' in their eyes.
I'm not sure that many common home routers will cope with 100Mb/s throughput, so the value is limited to those prepared to spend even more on something decent, or stick to a single PC.
So far 10Mb/s has been adequate here, although it would be nice to have uploads at the same rate (they did increase that recently, to give them some credit).
Virgin's peering is crap and can't even fill a 10Mb connection with anything that isn't already cached in their local proxies. This "up to" maybe "ready for" perhaps, with a following wind 100Mb connection is the ISP equivalent of building a 12 lane freeway from your house to the New Cross one way system.
Is this related to the slime who knocked on my door at 8pm yesterday asking me which telephone provider I used?
When I asked him why he wanted to know he said he was selling Sky.
At that non-sequiter, I said goodbye and shut the door.
Is Sky sold over broadband lines? I thought it was a satellite thingy?
I had a Sky salesoik turn up on my door last month - I was specifically targeted as I had Virgin Media broadband.
Strangely, he was able to tell me that their 'upto 20mb' service was more than the 'almost always 10mb over fibre' service I had from VM, but when I asked about contention ratio and a couple of other things he professed ignorance of 'that techie stuff'.
AFAIK Sky broadband goes over the same plain old telephone service that BT supply for everyone else.
They claimed they could offer me 20M broadband to match what I get from VM (which always returns at least 19M when I do a speed test).
Except that I already know that the (now unused) BT line into my house struggles to do 4M because it's pretty much a bit of string between two tin cans.
And their £20 a month saving is slightly offset by the fact that I have to pay BT line rental in order to use Sky's service.
The nice young lady couldn't figure out why I didn't want to switch to a much worse service in order to save maybe £10/month at a push.
Even funnier, she told me that "everyone else in the street" was switching to them - like that was a reason that I should - but really struggled to answer when I asked if that included the two houses that had just installed cable in the last month and the guy who happens to be a VM engineer (being a small street that made almost 50% VM customers without even asking about the other houses).
I told her she should probably go away when she tried to tell me that one of my immediate neighbours "definitely" had switched and I had to explain that I doubted that as the house was empty because the landlord is in the middle of refurbishing it.
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