I agree, Im in Preston and have had poor speeds from my UBR (UBR4) - I had a tech who was looking into a tv fault look at the broadband systems and he confirmed it had 'High TX load' but had no further details like an upgrade date etc.

Retested this morning and getting between 10-18Mbs on various speedtest sites inc transfers from Virgins own servers - ie gamefiles etc

i think their causing the problems in a lot of areas themselves and blaming it on network rebalancing

It could also be some extremely heavy user going away on holiday for a week.

Considering a single channel on a UBR is around 40mbit, a few user(s) taking the "No Download Limits" to the extreme could have a pretty serious effect on several hundred, maybe thousands of customers connected to that UBR. The current design of the network really isn't meant for these high speed. The low bandwidth of a channel + a high amount of users don't really mix.

This is something that will be helped alot by the DOCSIS 3 rollout If/when that happens but we all know this will cost alot of money which is going to be difficult for VM to rack up.

In the mean time, they have to try and keep the current network balance by whatever methods they can on a somewhat limited budget. Same with alot of ISPs right now

luck of the draw I guess. On the bright side there is alot of talk about the FTTC at the moment.