Thinking of switching to VM's 50mb - any good?

I used to be with NTL/VM for my internet over a year ago but got sick of the slow speeds and constant disconnects, with telephone support as useful as a chocolate fireguard.

Having started working as self-employed, sometimes from home, I decided to keep the home phone with VM, cancel the broadband, and had a new BT line installed for ADSL with Be Broadband.

My ADSL looks to be going down the same line, with frequent disconnects and less useful advise from Be - they obviously don't want to get BT to look into it at my end or the exchange. I've done the usual with a new modem, best filter and cable available, and one of those BT faceplates that use the test socket - this has reduced the disconnects, but when you need to use it for business, it gets annoying waiting for your internet connection to come back up frequently.

So - my question is - is VM worth looking at again on the new 50mb service - assuming VM will come out and maybe upgrade the line from the box in the street to my house?

What's the deal these days? I heard they were voted as best improved service on some poll - have things changed for the better or can I expect a slow, shoddy service with plenty of traffic shaping? Can I expect a 1.5mb upload?

I don't transfer massive amounts of files each day, but I am a web developer, so I just want a reliable and fast internet connection.

Would really appreciate your advise!

The 50mb has a 1.5mb - 1.7mb upload.

Im on the 20mb and speeds are good for me, the 50mb does not have any limits or taffic management... YET.

Virgin Media 20Mb
Results from http://www.speed.io
(Copied on 2009-07-01 21:34:46)
Download: 19465 Kbit/s
Upload : 820 kbit/s
Connects : 1094 conn/min
Ping: 22 ms

You may well have seen the problems i´ve had latley but to be fair it´s been the first time in a long time.

Yes the 50mb is 1.5mbps up it´s fine for me. The speeds are fine but sometimes SNR or power issues cause it to [censored] out. In most cases virgin need to send out an engineer to look at it and sometimes they are from networks rather than install.

On the whole I am happy with the service and VM always explain it to me in terms I understand which helps.

For the price which I am sure is too cheap I do enjoy my service. I would say go for it. They still offer 28 days money back guarnatee.

Edited to spell Guarantee right, Hotel keyboard is naff

Edited by pcoventry76 (Sat 04-Jul-09 14:39:21)

The way VM were talking the other day it might not have. They said it was designed for home networking etc so how can they limit that?

In reply to a post by pcoventry76:

The way VM were talking the other day it might not have. They said it was designed for home networking etc so how can they limit that?

By putting that crappy upstream on it they already have limited it. They can do it the same way they limit everything else, the whole 'home networking' thing is just PR. When they feel like it or when they don't want to increase capacity on the network it'll get STM'd.

"assuming VM will come out and maybe upgrade the line from the box in the street to my house?"

The 50Meg product works over same cables as you had previously, so if the reason for disconnects was the cable itself rather than some offer issue you will still have that

Andrew Ferguson, andrew@thinkbroadband.com
www.thinkbroadband.com - formerly known as ADSLguide.org.uk

Yes they did mention something about if you constantly upload at 1.7 you would [censored] out the network.

They also said that their onlkine storage would never give me more than 100k/sec upload. Erm okay i get 202k/sec upload