stunning
awesome work on the subtitle alliteration! top job!! it's a dying art but always a pleasure to it done well
Virgin Media is banned from suggesting that its broadband is fast enough to spare punters from "buffering" delays online after rival BT complained. The national telco successfully cried foul to the UK advertising watchdog over a telly commercial featuring Olympic track champion Usain Bolt pretending to be Virgin Group's beardy …
instead of moaning at VM about their adverts and buffering. Perhaps you could spend some time sorting your networks out such that VM are no longer able to say "four times faster than average".
Recently got 30mb upgrade from 10mb on virgin media (free?). BT STILL say they can't do Infinity even though they have some cabinets in my area and claim the exchange is 'upgraded', so maximum predicted is about 10mb on 'upto20'. Which means, even on the 'slowed down' , its 50% faster than I might get if I signed up for BT/sky.
Oh yeah, that's probably why the just complain about the ads to the ASA..
Mind you, VM is right, sky anytime+ is now working a treat, no buffering like there was at 10mb :)
I don't see Virgin upping the amount of cabled areas they have.
Nope, all I see is them bitching that people are getting subsidies for roll-out and they're not. Of course, if they were willing to bite the bullet and share access to their ducts (as is required of anyone getting the subsidy) they'd be just as capable of gaining access to that particular trough as the competition are.
We live in a Virgin area, not that it's had any kind of investment since the Telewest days. We've actually still (technically) got a ban on rooftop aerials as Telewest cabled a communal link into each house. The fact that it's broken somewhere along the line (a few years ago now too) and Virgin refuse to repair it doesn't affect the ban, but definitely affects my choice about which providers I'd even consider.
I know people who are perfectly happy with Virgin (at least until they have to use the customer service dept), just as I know people who are perfectly happy with the competition. I guess the answer is to go for what's best in your area. Not good news for Virgin though as they don't even seem to want to expand into newly built area's at the moment, at some point they're going to need to invest otherwise the number of 'virgin' areas as a percentage of the UK is going to continue to shrink
That's the really sad thing about BT and Virgin. BT seem to be more interested in converting Virgin customers to BT than providing existing BT customers with a better service.
Perhaps they are obsessed with subscriber counts rather than revenue? or they're trying to stop Virgin from growing?
Exactly what I was thinking, the ad has achieved it's goal!
That's the way it works these days, company X pushes out an ad that pushes it's claims a little too far, they get told off and the hoo-ha surrounding the banning of the ad generates far more publicity than the original ad!
Well done ASA, I bet old Beardy is really proud of how he manipulated you mugs!
"In a sane world, the point would be that Virgin are now required to launch a second campaign to correct any mis-apprehensions created by the first. Sadly, the ASA don't have the powers of a judge."
Fortunately, BT and Sky are getting their back by using equally mis-leading advertising so VM can complain back at them. I think the current Sky advert (or is BT?) is pushing on-line video/TV and shows the whole family watching different things on different devices at the same time.
But if you look quickly and squint just right you see some text in the bottom right of the screen saying there's a 4GB data cap at the displayed price point. I reckon that means your data cap is going to kick in on billing day, and that's the whole familys "internet experience" up the creek for the rest of the month.
I'm more bothered about their Wifi claims given that the Wifi on the HH3 is shit and unreliable. Hell, I've even done some (proper) testing in multiple locations using different kit, sending them results alongside possible causes of the issue. Does anything get done? No. The recommendation is to buy a new router (which I'd have done anyway, but am determined to stand on Principle given their heavy advertising of the great Wifi)
Now if VM could explain why the 'Fantastic' & 'Amazing' & '3 billion percent better than the competition' doubling of speed that they spent large amounts of money telling me about in January 2012 ('Coming SOON!') has been delayed until August 2013 then I'd be very interested. It's almost like it was a con but that would be a nasty insinuation and possibly libelous as would SCAM and RIPOFF and SNAKEOIL!
All of those claims you just made involve you buying something you don't already pay for.
If you were going to quit, you still can. They didn't sign you up into a new contract with a promise of faster speeds, and if you did sign a new contract because they promised you faster speeds for free, you've learnt a valuable life lesson.
Yeah, but if all your using for is watching video, you won't hit that cap. Even if you do, things like iPlayer remain unaffected IIRC.
Its a moot point though, if you lived in a student infested VM area... my mate was doing better by popping up a wifi hotspot with his jailbroken iPhone (I only mention it was an iPhone cos its predecessor was on that truly unlimited Orange tariff that is no longer available, and he won't give it up)
I'm on Virgin Media (still on 20Mb, waiting for 60Mb upgrade to happen) and when I downloaded latest Mist of Pandaria beta patch which was 20Gb I was getting 2.4Mb/s then within 30 mins this dropped down to 520Kb/s (that's megabytes and kilobytes not bits as displayed on MoP download).
That's how good VM's traffic shaping is. Over 80% reduction. Took bloody hours to download because of that.
That sucks. I downloaded well over 100Gb from steam at about 75MBit/s one evening last week over BT infinity. No reductions in speed at any time.
For the first time in my life I actually have a decent internet connection, how long before they oversubscribe it?
Get your bits and bytes right FFS....
KB = Kilobytes
MB = Megabytes
Kb = Kilobits
Mb = Megabits
No good trying to put up an argument if you don't understand the differences.
100Gb & 75MBits/s < What's that? You downloaded 100Gigabits at 75Megabytes a second??
"Get the full 24MBit" < No, I assume you get 24Mb/s, which equates (VERY loosley) to 2.4MB/s
"20Gb I was getting 2.4Mb/s" < I think you mean you were getting 2.4MB/s (on a 20Mb/s link)
"it drops all the way to 15mb... After downloading 7gb.. (3.5 depending on which time ).
So basically still 'flipping fast'"
you are kidding right?
I am on BE, Get the full 24MBit, constantly, day and night, no traffic management, no traffic shaping....no matter how much I have downloaded....
7GB LOL, I have downloaded more than that in one afternoon downloading my backups from on-line storage services!!
I always thought that when you play a video and it says 'bufferring' it is actually 'caching'. Bufferring is when you can't play the content as fast as it is streamed and so it needs to be bufferred somewhere until you catch up - i.e. buffers protect you from something too fast to handle - so the need for buffers indicates a good network, not a bad one.
Perhaps my understanding is wrong - feel free to correct me (and I know you will :-)
A cache speeds something up by retaining the most frequently used information in memory or unchanged information in memory.
I don't therefore think it is a cache, but a buffer to cope with fluctuations in transfer speed to stop starvation of data.
They are all buffers, we also have "pre-buffering" to load up on slow incoming data before playing it back fast and the dreaded "buffer underrun" when burning a CD, whereby the buffer holding data to be written awkwardly was found to be empty when the laser hit the virgin plastic area, resulting in a coaster.
> the need for buffers indicates a good network, not a bad one.
It most certainly indicates a shunt from a data sink to a data source where both are working at differing rates and someone wants to temporarily cover up this ugly truth.
I was happy with plusnet, but headed to VM because I wasn't prepared to wait decades for the fibre upgrade to occur and let me have more than 2meg broadband.
whilst I'm aware many punters have problems, installation was a doddle, even phoned and came early, fitted no fuss and last speed test I carried out got me 47.5 on a 50meg contract...we've had 2 outages in 18 months for about a hour or two each. would love to join in the moaning against a big corp, but so far so good...
I've not seen that one for a while but doesn't that one relate to the iplayer/4OD/etc services built-in to the STB TV service rather than the broadband everyone else has to use to get those services?
Please, correct me if I'm wrong. I've got a VM V+ PVR so rarely see adverts at less that 32x speed :-)
"It's an expensive mistake for VM, which spent a whopping £52.6m on marketing costs in its first quarter."
It would have been an expensive mistake if they'd been fined that much money for running a 'misleading' ad (i.e. lying through their teeth) but they weren't.
If, however, they had been, perhaps these lying liars and all their lying friends would stop lying to us.
Looking forward to the future of advertising: "buy our cake, it's cake".
"Lying through their teeth" is a bit harsh, the cable broadband service is genuinely very good.
Easily the best ISP I've had, I'm normally into rabid forum wars after the first month or two and I'm two years in.
Blessed relief after a seriously aggro minus-net experience a while back.
So phone them up.
I downgraded from the 20Mb "old-L" package to a 30Mb "new-M" package, they were round to fit my new modem within a day or two. This despite my area being marked as due for the doubling upgrade months from now.
My broadband bill is now £10 cheaper than it was, my broadband is faster, the caps are less silly, the new modem was free.
Fascinating that BT made the complaint , their latest advert suggests that 10 or more people can be connected to their WiFi router simultaneously, and stream video. I count 9-11 Spanish bints entering the flat . The implication being the WiF router could get around the limitations of WiFi bandwidth... a similar claim to VM's claim to ending buffering by use of their service. Might the ASA (Absolutely Supine Authority) employ some pointy heads to review ISP adverts?
They're able to take Virgin to task on broadband speeds. Big whoop.
Last year, during the AV referendum, they had no power over any of the adverts. Thus, it came to pass that British turkeys vote for Christmas because they believed that AV would result in dead babies or soldiers!
Moved from 'business' ADSL to Virgin 18 months back. ADSL was always a bit hit and miss with big downloads, when there wasn't a line fault that is. And we're under a mile from the BT exchange.. While sometimes not perfect, streaming video is massively better with Virgin. What is craxy is that Virgins V box is less reliable for video that their broadband.. Your mileage may vary.