Posts by Robin Coomer

Cable broadband shines in Virgin Media Q2

More on speeds and throttling...

Further to my earlier post, I'm surprised to see folk who claim they are getting really poor d/l speeds on VM cable. I can't speak for the rest of the VM cable network but I'm on the 4MB service (Newton Abbot in Devon so not exactly at the heart of things!) and I've just downloaded 7 disk images (ISO) for Fedora Linux for a customer's PC - speed averaged 490K (3.920Mbps) for 3.3GB of code. I think this is OK given that I'm doing other stuff at the same time and there are bound to be overheads even on FTP. I started around 5:40pm which I wouldn't think is a quiet time either? Have you all actually checked what is running in the background? I had a customer complaining that their home PC was very slow and their Internet speed on VM (4M) was showing at 190Kbps when they ran an ADSL Speedtest - when I got there to check, Limewire (installed by their kids) was merrily chomping through 3.7Mbps and rapidly filling the hard disk!!! After disabling, almost a full 4Mbps was achieved! It just went to illustrate a) why the ISPs are limiting downloads, b) why children should be supervised and c) make sure you know as much as they do about IT! I've never seen a defrag screen in Windows look so red... ;-) Don't forget also that Windows in particular and many of it's installed apps check the web continually for updates - if in doubt install a good software firewall and you can monitor exactly what's running over the connection. Many machines I see in my line of work are unusable for the first 15-20mins due to various updates... Norton updates for example can be easily 50MB+.

Good to see some others commenting on the premium price too - I hope VM visit here - an occasional FALL in price is great Kudos :-) In the meanwhile, roll on the 10MB upgrade...

An IT support perspective...

I run a small IT support business from home and get to see all varieties of 'fast broadband' on my travels - I have to say however that VM is in my experience one of the better ones. I use them myself now and despite running a small network of PC's (8), servers (4) and a SIGNIFICANT number of large backups/updates/downloads to the workshop for customers, repairs, installs etc have never had speed issues with VM. I've never been limited nor lost service either.

I must add however that their tech support is rubbish and I've seen no end of problems elsewhere when there are clear service issues that they refuse to acknowledge! I guess like most ISPs they are good if nothing goes wrong! I would also like a fixed IP that isn't in the DHCP pool but they can't/won't offer that! Having a 'blacklisted' DHCP address (even though it's remained unchanged since 2005) is a pain because I either have to relay mail from my exchange server through a hosted server or get an unacceptable bounce rate because ISPs don't know how to filter SPAM! I'm generally a happy punter however and even with 4Mbps (soon to be 10Mbps) the connection is largely adequate. My only other criticism would be that they are slow to keep pace with prices and that does mean a premium - I pay £25/month and could get 'up to 8MB' for half that via ADSL. That said however ADSL is contended at the exchange and rates rarely reach the max (if ever)! At least with fibre, I can grab a 300MB file at any time of day and it will download at full speed (around 0.5 MBytes per second)

Most of the customers I encounter that complain about speed either don't understand the difference between bits & bytes or otherwise don't appreciate that someone else in the office/family is running Limewire or similar bandwidth hogs! One of my customers has a site of over 120 users and 9 servers - their internet connection is a 2Mbps leased line which costs the earth...

One final negative: the faster Internet access gets for the masses, the more spam we'll all get! Any idea how much SMTP traffic one infected PC can generate in an hour? I can't help wondering if that's why even with cable, the upload speed sucks whilst the download speed gets ever faster?