Customers of Brit ISP Virgin Media have downloaded an extra 325GB since March, though we can't think why Virgin Media has published post-lockdown broadband usage figures that, unsurprisingly, point towards massive spikes in data consumption as Brits work from home or look for something to do online. On average, Virgin Media customers are downloading an extra 3.4GB per day. Since the start of March – which predates the official UK …
for VM to increase its prices as soon as they are allowed.
Why?
Boss: We are carrying lots of data now. That demand means popularity means... we can increase our prices. Those numpties who use our service won't want to their net access to be throttled back now would they?
Make it so!
I'm not saying that is the case but my neighbours have been finding their bit of 1990's NTL copper coax straining under the load since early march.
"That demand means popularity means... we can increase our prices."
I'm not saying they won't do that, nor trying to defend them, but, in their, ahem, defense, they did do a free (possibly temporary) upgrade to 100Mb/s for any customers still on historical or special lower speed packages. They also, at least temporarily, added a significant number of channels for free to the lower tiered TV packages. This was a limited time upgrade and I note that most of the "free" channels have now dropped off, but even well past the announced cut-off date, not all of them have gone yet.
So, I definitely give them a thumbs up for doing something for their customers. Oh yes, my wife, on the lowest, cheapest SIM-only deal got loads of extra free minutes and GB data for a while, even though in her case she didn't use it what with being at home all the time anyway.
A former (non technical) colleague of mine recently sent me a WhatsApp asking what a Boolean search was. I explained and asked why he wanted to know/where it had come up. He said he'd seen it when doing a search on a porn site. He very much liked the idea he could make his searches more relevant.
I think it is more like 10%. We had 100 down and 10 up. In April I switched to 200 down and 20 up. Not for the download speed, as 100 is plenty for us, but the upload so that two of us could have video meetings at the same time with a bit of overhead. The last speed test I did gave us about 22 up.
Best wishes,
Bob
I checked early on, and found a half-hour Skype video call used half a GB downstream (and was presumably symmetric, though I didn't monitor the upload). Then a film in HD, plus half a dozen episodes of whatever cartoons my son's watching. It all adds up.
I think back in slight terror to the first broadband package I ever had, which had a 10GB/month limit.
Work stuff is slow, but it's not my connection (I have a mere 30Mb/s over ADSL) that's the bottleneck, but rather something between the far end of the work VPN and the actual server.
I've found that learning how to use robocopy has been very worthwhile.
>I think back in slight terror to the first broadband package I ever had, which had a 10GB/month limit.
Major difference between fixed-line broadband and 4G/5G home broadband is unlimited tends to mean upto 1TB for £20~30 pcm rather than 100GB for £35 pcm...
Until circa 5 years back we managed with Three's 15GB/month 3G mobile broadband, then the village got FTTC. This last month we consumed circa 330GB. Mind you we have 2 adults using zoom etc, 2 teeangers on Teams multiplayer Xbox games etc. plus the films, I suspect at this rate it will only be a few years before that 1TB p/month cap starts to become an issue...
I've had nothing but problems with my landline and broadband service for the last 4 months.. and that's just since I discovered the issue... the ISP confirmed the problem had existed for 11 months before that and ignored it.
It took 5 weeks for them to actually fix the problem with the broadband speeds... which had deteriorated from the 70+Mb I was getting to under 30Mb with real world speeds dipping into the mid teens.
but they failed to do anything about the noise on the landline... which then had to be reported again and again... and it took a further 2 months to resolve that. With openreach coming out 3 or 4 times and replacing the wires from the exchange to the cabinet, recrimping all of the connections to the home and the block up the pole... and then replacing something called a 'conk' (no idea on spelling) at the exchange itself.
On the bright side... I've not actually had to pay anything for my service for the last 4 months.... which is nice.
Might be worth paying the extra for Zen internet. Their strategy appears to be that you pay such crazy-high amounts that they can afford to employ people that know what they're/you're talking about. This results in faster and more accurate requests to the Openreach engineers.
I originally went with them to spite BT but now the wife works from home is be crazy to move... despite the prices.
conk= concentrator for voice service but more likely the DSLAM which provides digital service. Head end kit which Openreach have no control over and rely on the ISP to provide a fault free service. Bugger to diagnose because the ISP insists its a network fault (Openreach) despite all tests being green, after repeat reports they eventually send someone out to actually fix the fault. The end result is that the OR engineer has a shitload of black marks on his record . Yes Im an ex OR broadband engineer who got pissed off at Sly,TalkTalk etc. and left.
I'm somewhat suprised, given that Vermin's terrible routers seem to block so many things, like VoIP working properly, VPNs working properly. We have business customers on their atrocious service. Every few weeks we get a letter from them telling us about expected downtime for maintenance between 0100 and 0600, and every time, it spills over till 10 or 12, or requires a 'router' reboot.
Oh and every time we set the router to 'modem only' mode, so that we can use it with, like, a business router, not their POS, the settings revert after a few days.
When I had a VOIP line over virgin i had to change the DNS server on the ATA as the Virmin poisoned their DNS lookup against their competitors. Never use their backroom services since.
Now their router does just that route.
DNS services and DHCP from a rasberry Pi. Via PiHole.
5Ghz wifi on a TPlink mesh and 2.5Ghz (IoT) on BT Access point.
Thankfully Disable DHCP and wifi haven't reverted.
"Oh and every time we set the router to 'modem only' mode, so that we can use it with, like, a business router, not their POS, the settings revert after a few days."
That must be something special about the business grade one then, or it's borked. My home one has been in modem-only mode since it was last replaced/upgraded some years ago and has never reverted back to factory settings.
"with network traffic in Wales increasing by the lowest amount of all the home nations – namely 10 per cent. The ISP didn't hypothesise about the reason why"
It's because much of Wales doesn't get much of a connection (says me with a fancy fttp connection and a view of the mountains, so we're not all suffering)
I must say I feel quite lucky with my connections at home - mobile I get around 400mbps with 3 on 5G, and home WiFi is 200mbps FTTP from Aquiss.
I've been quite impressed with them, any issues I've had have been immediately sorted by someone who knows what they're talking about. Compared to my previous experience with BT and Virgin... I left Virgin at the end of my contract, and they honestly called me 25 times a day for 2 weeks offering a special discount to come back. They eventually acknowledged my complaint, said it was due to a system error and sent me a cheque for £2.50 as a "goodwill gesture"......
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