Potential sharp practices from VM

I'm currently getting Virgin's cable broadband and TV service (which is fine), but I have to move house (landlord issues).

Am moving literally across the street in London, but into a cable blackspot.

This means switching to Virgin's ADSL service, they say... does anyone have any experience with moving out of a cable area? I really don't want Virgin's ADSL service, but they're insisting that I either buy out my contract or sign a new one for their (I hear) terrible ADSL service.

This seems sharp because my options are pay a significant sum of money or sign a new contract, with no option to see the current one out paying for the services they can provide.

Also, an addendum--does anyone else know of Virgin black-spots in otherwise entirely cabled areas? This is South London, and all the surrounding streets have cable--it seems to just be one section of two roads that's throwing the availability checker.

If no-one wanting it during original roll-out you can get areas with no cable, and no obligation to provide service.

The terms will be in the contract, only if they are not is it sharp practice, i.e. one should check the various exit clauses when signing up.

If you have a mobile phone with 24 month contract, and want to end it to go to another firm, it is normal to have to pay the remaining months, so how is broadband different?

In reply to a post by sebFlyte:

... does anyone have any experience with moving out of a cable area?

Yes. Bye bye broadband...

Next month we're moving back to one.

On your point about sharp practice, as I see it Virgin don't need to let you downgrade to ADSL, they could simply force you to pay to end of term as the contract was for services at a particular address.

Given the quality of VM's services it wouldn't be unreasonable to imagine they could offer shorter contracts, but since they don't you end up rather stuck with it.

Virgin ADSL services don't have a particularly good reputation on here from what I read, and you're best going for an LLU option which I assume you can get being in London.

There are lots of cable blackspots - a little facetious to say "half the country is one" but where we used to live once, the entire town was cabled, except for the 500 or so house estate we lived in. It's very hit and miss - seems any sniff of a wayleave or permission problem means an area is skipped.

You could email [email protected] - from what I read last, they may cable a street if the cost is < about £350 per home and there are enough enquiries.

If you're in an ADSL blackspot as well, there might already be a waiting list of people who've emailed them already.

From what I've read the Virgin Media ADSL service isn't very good, they're just reselling BT's network I think, I'd look into your best options for your area, use samknows.com to search your exchange and find what LLU providers you can get.

Reselling, if you can call it that....resell implies BT Wholesale is managing end to end, where in actual fact it is not.

It may be BT Wholesale DSLAM and BT Wholesale backbone, but from the BAM and onwards it is under Virgin control, and it is the purchase of BAM's to reduce contention that does not appear to happen.

In short don't tar all IPStream products with the same brush, many Virgin National customers have gone to other providers and had a better experience.

It could be suggested that it is in Virgin's interest to ensure its ADSL product does not perform too well.

Broadband is different because the agreement goes both ways; I have an obligation to pay them, and they have an obligation to provide me with services.

If I could get cable on the other side of this street, I'd have no problem honouring the contract. The issue I have is being effectively forced to sign a new contract rather than (a) moving the current one or (b) being given the choice for both parties to void the agreement as the services they agreed to provide can no longer be provided.

Thanks, have done. Much appreciated!

And yes -- this is a very odd little blackspot. It's one tiny island of darkness (maybe 20 houses tops, probably more like 15) in an area that is fully cabled for miles in all directions.

Oh well.

And in response to those suggestion LLU services, I fully intend to switch to Be as soon as I'm released from Virgin's clutches; unfortunately that's over a year away as (according to them) I need to sign a new 12-month contract to get the ADSL service so I don't have to pay a huge cancellation fee on this contract, and that won't start until they've managed to get an engineer in from Openreach to sort out ADSL at the new property.

In reply to a post by sebFlyte:

Broadband is different because the agreement goes both ways; I have an obligation to pay them, and they have an obligation to provide me with services.

And this is different from any other contract how ?

In reply to a post by sebFlyte:

If I could get cable on the other side of this street, I'd have no problem honouring the contract. The issue I have is being effectively forced to sign a new contract rather than (a) moving the current one

It does not seem unreasonable to ask that the term on the replacement service is that of the service you currently have. Now according to your other post,

In reply to a post by sebFlyte:

I fully intend to switch to Be as soon as I'm released from Virgin's clutches; unfortunately that's over a year away as (according to them) I need to sign a new 12-month contract to get the ADSL service so I don't have to pay a huge cancellation fee on this contract,

this term is longer than the ADSL term you are being asked to sign, so they are offering even better than the term you are already tied to.

In reply to a post by sebFlyte:

or (b) being given the choice for both parties to void the agreement as the services they agreed to provide can no longer be provided.

Virgin can provide the service you contracted them to provide. You asked them for cable at your current address, they can still provide cable at your current address, it is not their fault that you intend to move from that address. If they had unilaterally decided to decommission the cabinet(s) serving this current address and said we can't provide you service any more, would you then be saying, "OK, no problem, you just do that and don't worry about my expenses to find another connection." ? I think not.

In reply to a post by sebFlyte:

Broadband is different because the agreement goes both ways; I have an obligation to pay them, and they have an obligation to provide me with services.

I am sure it is the same as ADSL supplies in that it is specific to the property supplied and not specific to the product.

If it were different Virgin would be obliged to give you fibre wherever you moved.

EDit. Spell checker got it wrong...he said diffidently

Edited by Sadoldman (Thu 28-Oct-10 16:44:10)

In reply to a post by MrSaffron:

It could be suggested that it is in Virgin's interest to ensure its ADSL product does not perform too well.

It could also be suggested that buying insufficient capacity for the user base is in the interests of every ISP that has a lengthy minimum term and doesn't mind a bit of churn. I'd certainly suggest that appears to be the business plan adopted by many ADSL ISPs as well as Virgin National.

In which case it is a case of profits before capacity, or is lack of capacity a reflect of the low prices charged?

I suspect with some it is just a case of taking their customers for a ride although with others it is plain stupidity - how many times must the all-you-can-eat for pennies model come crashing down?

Allowing blatantly untruthful advertising of "unlimited" services is possibly the biggest cause of problems - doubly so if there really are no caps and it all gets left to contention (e.g. O2 Access until recently).

on the CF site ignition stated that VM's unlimited service is now the most restrictive out there for peak time traffic or at least will be when all this is implememented.

(a) FUP/AUP letters been sent out. No fixed limit to trigger seems to depend on how heavily subscribed/utilised local area is. So if in a heavy usage area the letter will probably come at lower usage.
(b) STM - throttling all traffic after downloaded so much during peak. also for upload but the limit is much softer.
(c) Traffic shaping - soon to come for p2p/nntp traffic during peak time, will be on all the time regardless of usage. Will be upload and download.

The new 100mbit service wont have STM but will have traffic shaping, the 50mbit service will have STM for upload only.

VM in some cases (like my area) have created their own problems, heavy usage customers causing high loads on local UBR is a result of them selling cheap all you can eat services and with packages designed to attract students, 9 month contracts.

I have always said an isp should provide capacity to provide what they selling even if its expensive and then after that base retail prices on a model that can make profit on that. Instead it seems to be the other way round, marketing sets the price and spec of product and then the capacity budget is based on that regardless if its enough or not.

I would say VM should go cap for peak and unlimited for off peak, but even off peak I now have overload on my local UBR, so seems in some areas like mine they dont even have enough off peak capacity for what they selling.

The phone line to my house had a fault which the muddy booted brigade seemed incapable of fixing after repeated attempts so my choices are limited. If VM cripple their products to the point I can't use them how I want then I will cancel though. Maybe I'll take up knitting to pass the time.

I don't bother visiting CF these days so haven't read Ignitionet's comments but right now on 20Mbps I've never hit the STM threshold and as I don't use torrents or NNTP it may be that the shaping won't bother me - it really depends on what protocols they degrade.

the shaping can go one of 2 ways really.

VM can choose to classify unknown traffic as non p2p/nntp and as such a lot less will be shaped. Or they can classify it as p2p/nttp and more will be shaped.

I hate shaping however since my area is so overloaded I am curious if things will improve when it is turned on.

The problem is for me BT services are so poor in my area even a poor performing VM is faster and more stable than BT services for me. If VM are aware of how bad BT is in LE3 this may be influencing what their urgentness in rendering congestion.

If the area is overloaded then throttling back on protocols using a lot of bandwidth should presumably improve everything else.

Unless of course instead of there being approximately sequential downloads adding up to (say) 100TB over the evening you just end up with parallel downloads adding up to 100TB over the same period and umpteen folks cursing the shaping. If the shaping doesn't reduce the total download over a given period then it will achieve diddly squat other than annoying VM customers. It depends if significant numbers rape their connection throughout the evening.

Look on the bright side though - if VM shape and throttle enough everybody with decent BT possibilities will move on and ease the congestion...

in theory yes, but shaping can go wrong, marking traffic incorrect etc.

Interesting. I left ADSL just because ISPs were having problems.

In reply to a post by Chrysalis:

in theory yes, but shaping can go wrong, marking traffic incorrect etc.

Judging from posts I've read about successful circumvention of NNTP shaping simply by altering ports and issues with WoW which they said wouldn't be impacted but is that's clear. I don't think setting up the kit properly is trivial and I suspect it will be a few weeks before things settle down. Once that happens none of the circumventions will work but the gamers will stop moaning.

I personally think that VM may have shot themselves in the foot on this though - you don't need 50Mbps and certainly not 100Mbps for surfing, gaming or iPlayer even with several users - the only need for speed is fast downloads. If neither are significantly faster than the 10 or 20Mbps products when used on commonly used downloading protocols there is more reason to downgrade or leave completely than upgrade. With all day shaping 100Mbps looks to me like a product with no purpose other than willy waving rights for VM and the folks who take it.

Part of the complication is those attempting to circumvent the systems, which mean attempts are made to identify this circumvented traffic.

End result could be that rather than protocol restrictions it becomes IP based, e.g. if overseas VPN in Russia become widely used then all IP traffic to Russia may be throttled. Substitute which ever country is the favourite one this week for anonymous VPN links.

All I'm saying is that if VM are successful in their attempts to restrict P2P and NNTP speeds they will almost certainly alienate a fair percentage of their premium product customers who took it because of the supposed lack of restrictions.

In addition I'm not convinced it will produce much in the way of benefits for others - all that will happen is that at any given time there will be a much larger number of P2P/NNTP connections running at a lower speed than would otherwise be the case. I can't see many deciding to move to schedule downloads only or just not bothering because stuff takes longer to come down.

from what I read port 443 has been used to circumvent. Also tho someone using port 8095 on the tbb speedtest found it throttled down, if it was nntp/p2p only that shouldnt have happened. There has also been an issue with WoW been traffic shaped.

I agree VM have shot themselves in the foot, many areas dont need this shaping, so they have upset many customers without a need to.

I agree, I pay a premium for 50mbit for fast download speeds, you don't need more than 1mbit for VoIP or watching youtube or basic browsing, you need more bandwidth to make the large downloads move faster.

If they throttle to the point where I'm only getting the equievelent of 10-20mbit then I'll just drop my package to a 10 mbit one, because what's the point?

If they want to control traffic on the network then ideally they need to give users allowances per month on/off peak an we buy additional bandwidth to top up, as long as that money is invested into infrastructure to keep everything top speed then everyone is a winner.

The system that entanet had before they went to poop was actually very good for a long time, heavy users simply had to buy more bandwidth, or have a higher package to start with, it's a business model that scaled well.

The usual trick of averaging out low/high traffic users across a network doesn't work on premium packages because most people that take them are high bandwidth users.

I was OK with the STM they added to 50mbit so far, it's a good allowance I suppose, looking at it realistically, but then with throttling on top of that for torrents etc, that's a double whammy that might add up to pretty poor performance for a premium product.