Virgin 100MB Vs 40MB FTTC- Which one to keep?

Hi All,

I am in a position at the moment whereby I have both 100MB Virgin and FTTC installed at the same time. My FTTC contract ends next week and I have 4 weeks to cancel my Virgin service should I not be satisfied.

Just to give you a little background I have had issues with my FTTC service over the last 8 months or so which I suspect is due to REIN but BTOR have yet to locate the issue. This has meant my line has been in an interleaved state with latency increasing from 12ms up to 30ms. There are times as well were the line will disconnect completely, when it reconnects my profile drops down from 37Meg down to around 25 Meg and the only way to have it reset is to raise a fault.

The line is used for gaming quite a bit as well as streaming..BBC Iplayer, Sky Go etc so just wondering which service should I keep?

The link below is a screenshot of my ping monitor for both connections;

Click here

Thanks in advance.

Keep the Virgin if your getting a good speeds out of it! its like 60meg faster!

In terms of reliability, I've always found cable to be more reliable than *DSL services. Cable either works, or it doesn't. If there is a fault with cable, it's normally a local 'neighbourhood' issue, so they are going to get it fixed, and normally do so within a few hours.

*DSL on the other hand has this annoying tendency to exhibit a 'partially working' vibe, especially when there is a line fault like you have described. Depending on the fault, it can be extremely hard to locate and rectify.

On the flip side, Virgin could be using more traffic shaping and management control compared to BT (simply for the fact the 100Mb is service is 60Mb faster than BT's 40Mb service, so they are most likely going to want to control customer usage so as not to let anyone abuse their network, which could potentially detriment the experience for other customers). So you may find certain traffic rate limited during peak times etc.

Personally, I would stick with Virgin. But that's my personal view point. Everyone will have their own.

Thanks mixt,

My only concern with Virgin is the possible over utilisation at the local UBR, however I don't think I can risk signing another contract with an FTTC provider only to find the issues returning and being locked into a contract.

In regards to the TBB ping monitor do you know why the maximum latency(yellow peaks) are much higher than the FTTC graph. Is that something I should be concerned about?

Not sure, but first question to ask is - the spikes are happening when you're not using the connection, yes? Cause obviously, they are more likely to happen if you are using it.

Ruling the above out, I would put it down to maybe Virgin prioritising traffic (ICMP ping). May also be the case that it takes slightly longer for the traffic from TBB to reach your Virgin connection compared to the BT one.

I wouldn't have thought this is anything to worry about, but if you are an avid gamer (or use applications which prefer low latency/jitter), it maybe something to take into consideration when deciding on which ISP to drop.

Thanks for the reply.

The large spikes that go right to the top are when I have run speedtests...the other spikes that go half-way up are when I am not using the connection.

Here is a ping test I have run on my Mac using the Virgin connection.

PING bbc.co.uk (212.58.241.131): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 212.58.241.131: icmp_seq=0 ttl=247 time=19.634 ms
64 bytes from 212.58.241.131: icmp_seq=1 ttl=247 time=23.806 ms
64 bytes from 212.58.241.131: icmp_seq=2 ttl=247 time=23.902 ms
64 bytes from 212.58.241.131: icmp_seq=3 ttl=247 time=31.643 ms
64 bytes from 212.58.241.131: icmp_seq=4 ttl=247 time=31.881 ms
64 bytes from 212.58.241.131: icmp_seq=5 ttl=247 time=34.002 ms
64 bytes from 212.58.241.131: icmp_seq=6 ttl=247 time=28.672 ms
64 bytes from 212.58.241.131: icmp_seq=7 ttl=247 time=23.159 ms
64 bytes from 212.58.241.131: icmp_seq=8 ttl=247 time=22.707 ms
64 bytes from 212.58.241.131: icmp_seq=9 ttl=247 time=32.389 ms

--- bbc.co.uk ping statistics ---
10 packets transmitted, 10 packets received, 0.0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 19.634/27.179/34.002/4.829 ms

Nasty. Latency on the VM network isn't great.

The average latency from my extract(27ms) isn't too far off the latency on my FTTC service(25ms).

This is what my graph looks like when I have issues with my FTTC service;

click here

Just as a comparison here is a pingtest on the Virgin 100MB connection;

here


and FTTC:

here

Just 4ms jitter difference which I don't think I will notice!

Milton Keynes, auto-selected - http://www.pingtest.net/result/47974378.png
Maidenhead manually selected to match yours - http://www.pingtest.net/result/47974522.png

and repeated Milton Keynes auto - http://www.pingtest.net/result/47974588.png