TW7 area peak time slowness

I wondered if my experience of Virgin Media cable broadband was typical of other users' experiences, so I thought I'd ask.

We're in the TW7 area of greater London, and after we moved into rented accommodation I checked our postcode on Sam Knows, and found that the expected ADSL2+ speed was 6mbps, so I thought "Forget that! At least with Virgin it'll be nearer 20!".

Now, I can maybe reach such speeds in early mornings at the weekends, but as I'm early out the house and late to get back, I only get to use the internet from 7pm til bedtime. I've been experiencing slow speeds, and if I try to open many tabs at once by ctrl-clicking on several links on a page, Firefox opens the tabs in the background and often the pages will fail to load. It's fine if I open one at a time, waiting for each to fully load before opening the next tab, but then it's hardly as if I'm on broadband, is it?

Is it just a hazard of my neighbourhood that everyone happens to be on Virgin Media and so everyone must be running the fibres ragged at peak times? And if so there's nothing I can do about it?

I just ran a speedtest, hope I add the link correctly:

Try changing your DNS servers.

A few areas have some capacity issues and it seems likely that's the case here.

It'll be resolved when Virgin upgrade each area for the 100Mbps download and increased uploads, in the interim brave tech support or post on http://community.virginmedia.com so that they can check the load in the area.

I've noticed similar this evening in Torquay (TQ2)...

http://www.speedtest.net/result/995364698.png

Usually I get at least about 15Mbit, most of the time nearer to the 20Mbit I'm paying for.

I'm not so fussed about the speed, more the slow loading of pages (some pages are timing out). I'm going to try OpenDNS to see if it makes any difference.

Rob