Possible to break contract without paying fee? Should I try?

I suppose it's a little wishful thinking, and my family is 2 months into the contract with them but I can count 2 mornings when I've been unable to use the internet before going to work (the router page was completely blank, as in no IP, no DNS servers, nothing), with the most recent being this morning.
Also, I've tried running namebench to find speedier DNS servers for me to use but it reported that Virgin's own DNS servers were the fastest to use. Having switched to Virgin Media's backup DNS server on one of my computers (the router is non-modifiable) has not improved things either.
After I get home from work in the evening I often find slower speeds when browsing web pages even if I'm the only one online, via WiFi or via ethernet cable. Also I find that any time of day, I'm usually lucky to be able to open multiple tabs concurrently in the background without all of them failing to load at all.

I just ran tests at Pingtest.net, Speedtest.net, and ThinkBroadband's very own, and I will post the links below for your perusal/amusement
Pingtest
Speedtest
ThinkBroadband

What I'm wondering is, whether there is any way to break the contract and go for a good DSL supplier like Be or Zen, without having to pay Virgin Media a cancellation fee? Also, what are people's views, on whether the service I described is worth attempting to cancel or am I just spoiled rotten after spending my final year of uni at a dorm equipped with Ask4 Broadband 20 Mb down / 2.5 Mb up, which was lightning fast all hours of the day? (it was actually faster than my 100 Mb fibre broadband in Tokyo, when comparing browsing webpages hosted in the USA or Europe)

Well with the recent traffic management that they never told us about I believe you can try and go for a change to the T and C's without the 30 days notice they do. You had 28 days to cancel at the start but I guess you had to give it time.

I personally am just going to download until I am cut off. They cannot charge me then I'm sure

Are you sure you're on cable and not ADSL?

Whichever it is you'll not get out of the contract based on poor performance as no ISP issues any guarantees.

===

After looking at your speedtests it seems you may well be on cable but your upstream is abysmal. It's typical for congestion to show up first in the upstream on cable. Alternately you may have a local cabling problem - what are the modem stats showing for upstream and downstream power levels.

Edited by kwikbreaks (Thu 18-Nov-10 23:08:27)

you have 2 cop outs.

1 - they recently introduced a change to your detrmiment, the traffic shaping which allows you to reject that change and cancel contract.
2 - you have problems on your service that are within VM's control to fix, however they have to fail to fix these first.

If you want to try and cite poor performance for break of contract, you need to give them the opportunity to put matters right first. It sounds more like a technical actual fault (power or SNR issue) than congestion.

Alternatively, telephony and broadband companies are forever changing terms and conditions; you just need to get one of those changes which is detrimental to you and you can cancel without penalty.

In reply to a post by MarkHampshire:

Alternatively, telephony and broadband companies are forever changing terms and conditions; you just need to get one of those changes which is detrimental to you and you can cancel without penalty.

...and possibility of amending the details of traffic management has always been in the contract...

Price changes are a very straightforward one for a contract exit.

That, and changing the hours of free calls..

I do wonder if leaving a term in the Ts and Cs which allows for traffic management changes could actually be viewed as an unfair and unenforceable contract since such changes may well be materially detrimental.

It may be so but would you want all the possible expense of challenging corporate lawyers? VM would reject your termination and if you stopped paying theyd just pass the debt on to a collection agency probably destroying your credit rating. Sure you may win eventually but would the stress be worth it?

I used the BT free hours change to ditch their cunning "free calls" trap and cancel the 12 month rolling contract I'd inadvertently entered so I could move to cable without penalty when it became clear that their useless engineers had as much chance of winning a Nobel prize each as fixing my carp phone line.

In any case there is no proof that the problems the OP is seeing are anything to do with the shaping - he has an abysmal upstream speed which as I said is either an indication of congestion or a cabling fault. Until he posts up his modem stats it's impossible to guess which. It could also be his own kit of course.

Edited by kwikbreaks (Fri 19-Nov-10 08:14:35)

In reply to a post by kwikbreaks:

Are you sure you're on cable and not ADSL?

Whichever it is you'll not get out of the contract based on poor performance as no ISP issues any guarantees.

===

After looking at your speedtests it seems you may well be on cable but your upstream is abysmal. It's typical for congestion to show up first in the upstream on cable. Alternately you may have a local cabling problem - what are the modem stats showing for upstream and downstream power levels.

If you consider the fact it's pretty much useless during the day to be aceptable that's fine but I don't. As for being the OPs equipment maybe BUT I have been asking people all around south yorkshire about their services and the majority get what I get. I know the 9 cabled houses in my street do. As does my dad who lives 200 miles away.

Yes ofcourse it's our equipment.

Also the ofcom rules have been breached. If you want to see how nip over the to 50mb broadband support forums and take a look.

20MB customers HAD the opportunity to leave when traffic shaping and management was introduced, I should know because I took it. But 50MB customers were not told and should have been.

Yes I would consider getting a whopping 3.1mbps on FTP right now ( usual port 21) a big problem. Maybe I am just one of those " fussy" people. But luckily so are the thousands of other customers speaking up!.

I had 5mbps ADSL aswell as this line and the ADSL was faultless all the time. It had clear limits. Even VM don't know what their limits are.

And if someone was disconnected by VM for their usage and they chased them for the money via debt collection you havew 2 choices. Request the debt be sent back to VM or accept the debt collectors and pay them. The lodge a claim against VM in court and then send the baliffs to them. Not many people realise the baliffs can work for the public too

TLDNR