Anyone From The UK Use Virgin Broadband?

[Pielstick]

Just moved to a new flat and it's in a cabled area so I've gone for the Virgin TV/phone/internet package. According to the Virgin website I can get a 100Mb connection here, and it's due to be upgraded to 120Mb in 2013.

My last place wasn't in a cabled area so I went for the full Sky package, which gave me a 6Mb connection. The Virgin package gives me pretty much all the same TV channels and telephone service (don't use landline that much anyway) but the much faster broadband for pretty much the same price as I used to pay Sky. What's more the Virgin package is half price for the first six months.

100Mb in real money is 12.5MB/sec which sounds pretty good to me. That kind of speed will let me download all 20GB of Shogun 2 from Steam in less than 30 minutes!

They're coming to install everything on the 27th so hopefully I'll be up and running with a very fast Internet connection that evening.

Does anyone here use the same service? Any comments on how good/bad it is? I know Virgin throttle torrent traffic (but that doesn't really bother me as I don't torrent anything), and I know that they throttle bandwidth between 4pm and midnight for high usage customers, but again that doesn't bother me as I do most of my heavy downloading overnight anyway.

[Watercress]

I've got Plusnet myself, so I can't really help you much. I have heard Virgin's quite good when you are using the router for more than one computer/device though.

[Pielstick]

I've got Plusnet myself, so I can't really help you much.

I used to have Plus Net from 2001 through to 2010. They used to be a great ISP back in the day. I seem to recall they were bought out by BT, new management arrived and they promptly oversubscribed the service and then introduced the fair usage policy which soon became a download limit. I can't remember what the limit was but I was going through it every month and having my connection throttled during peak times to pretty much unuseable speeds.

I have the 60Mb service...

Thanks for the info. I'm not too concerned about throttling as I do most of my heavy downloading overnight. My wife is always on Youtube (music videos) and Skype but I doubt that will put me anywhere near the limit..

Funny you mention about the "going back to Sky" trick. I was thinking of doing that in a year to see if I could get the bill reduced! It worked a treat when I did it with Sky, and most of my family did the same thing too!

[Ybbon]

I have the 60Mb service. The throttling on 60Mb is by time, so it if you use it heavily between 10am and 3pm there is a limit of Xmb and then 3pm and 7pm another limit, I'm not sure the times and limits but they do have some info on their website. However, I was looking at it the other day as we wondering about lovefilm, with 60Mb the throttle point is 10,000Mb between 10am-3pm - a single non-HD movie is about 700mb so you would need to download about 14 to exceed the limit. They then throttle you later in the day but it resets the next day. For most users, they are not going to hit the limit. 100Mb is higher threshold than 60Mb.

The router is fine, easy to setup, however there was a problem with FTP being blocked and I had to turn something off to let it through.

TV wise yes it's pretty much the same, you don't get Sky Atlantic as far as I know that's the only one. I'm now on XL broadband, L TV and I think M or L phone and cost is £60/m but that was after the old "I'll move back to sky" trick Their customer retention team are very helpful when you say that

Oh, here is the page on their fair download policy: here

[Ybbon]

Works with most of them - I phoned Sky up to see what deal I could get and took it back to Virgin

I had BE and they were very good, but they used BT lines and we never got close to the supposed 20Mb/s on the line, the best would be 6-7 MB/s - which granted is not bad - but not when you pay for more and nothing they did would improve it.

speedtest.net shows 59.53MB/s now - so can't complain at 0.47 off the advertised speed - it's usually slower in the middle of the day but still around 30+ MB/s - I work from home so can test then. The irony is I need to use a corporate VPN which gives at best 2/3 MB/s on my laptop.

[Father Jack]

For the last 2 years I have been with virgin while I studied at university. We never had a problem with it and we had a 100mb connection as well. The are occasionally times of the day when the speed would slow right down, but we attributed this to everyone in the house streaming and downloading stuff at the same time. Often we would download a film in just a few minutes, which was great as I lived in a house filled with drunks and stoners so watching films all day was how we lived.

I do know people who have had enormous problems with virgin though.

[Adreno]

dont you guys have fibre optic internet yet? 60 pounds for that package seems quite expensive to me.. for 60 euro's i get the same tv and phone deal but 600mbit internet up and down.. can even get a 1gbit connection, allthough those are quite expensive and its not available in every place yet..

[Ybbon]

That is fibre optic, I guess we just have to wait for them to get the speed increased.

[Doono]

I used to be on virgin until I moved for work. Which reminds me I need to change my signature lol.

We had 50mb back then, presumably thats the new 100mb with the speed doubling they did recently. The connection was always pretty rock solid and unless the terms have changed since we had it the connection it was completely unrestricted unlike the lower tiers which had time dependant throttling.

Common misconception that virgin media provide fibre to the premises (fttp), it's actually fibre to the cabinet (fttc) with coax to the premises, a similar system to what BT provide with the infinity product except they use your standard copper line to the house instead of coax. When/if BT start rolling out proper fttp Virgins infrastructure won't be as good.

But as an opinion of Virgins product it beats ADSL by an enormous margin, wish I still had it. As of this moment in time my flakey ADSL line has dropped from an acceptable 15mb to a awful 0.5mb and has been like that since the poor weather started last week.

[Pielstick]

I had everything installed and set up yesterday. So far I'm very happy. Yesterday evening at peak Internet usage time I was getting 40-60Mb/s - whilst my wife was streaming videos from Youtube at the same time. Early this morning when things were a bit quieter I saw 76Mb/s. Not bad at all, certainly after only ever getting 6Mb/s in my old place.



I was having a chat with the Virgin installation bloke and he says they're doing a roaring trade with lots of people ditching Sky and moving to Virgin. The only problem he said was it's too expensive for Virgin to go digging up roads and laying new cable infrastructure so their potential customer base is limited to the areas that NTL cabled before Virgin took them over.