The Broadband Con ?

Richard Branson's Virgin Media are making a big noise about their petition campaign
"Stop the Broadband Con".

It says ISP's should stop using phrases like " .... up to xxx Mbits " in their advertising and be more open & honest about the speeds their customers really achieve.

I think this is an admirable standpoint bearing in mind some of my previous experiences with a certain un-named national telco.

However I think Mr Branson should really get his own house into order before he starts picking on others.

I pay VM a nice fat sum each month which includes the cost of my 50 Mbit service
and yet I only get around 18 Mbits.

I get the same, any time of the day, regardless of any downloading Ive done and I get similar results from a number of different speed testers.

Mr Branson: Haven't you ever heard that people who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones ?

Have you raised a support call? VM will readily acknowledge that 18Mb is not acceptable for a 50Mb service - they will either fix it or downgrade your package.

I think VM are pushing this because they know that their average speeds way closer to the 'up to' speeds than most other ISPs - kinda easy to shout about it when your service is less distance limited and therefore doesn't see the averages pulled down by the geography :-/

Not sure what kinda of diags you've done so please excuse me if it's old ground - Which router are you using?

I had a WRT54G running Tomato and found my 50Mb crapped out at 35-ish Mb....until testing revealed it was the router limiting my throughput.

Also, have you tried more than 1 computer? I've seen duff NIC drivers limiting speed before too.

sorry had to comment on this.

what is the basis of your claims?

you mean they may give a fix date half a year away and then fail to fix it.

now he could downgrade, but if only getting 18mbit on 50mbit then I expect he would only get 4-6meg on 20mbit as he loses the bonded downstream channels.

Just what I was thinking!

Depends on why he gets 18Mbps. If it's an oversubscribed area then your suggested outcome may well be correct but if there is a power level or noise ingress problem it could be sorted in a week or two.

The VM support forums is a good place to start - not least because there are a couple of stickies giving decent info on doing a quick self check on the modem stats and you don'y have to deal with the abysmal TS over the phone which often leads to a follow on call to the Samaritans

In general cable is faster and more consistent than ADSL.

But then again I only get 8 odd on my 10G line.

I dont know about consistent but would agree has a higher average speed. Once sky have FTTC tho they will blow cable away for average speeds as sky have a backhaul that can cope.

Looking back over my speedtest results on here; it does seem fairly consistent,

Perhaps it's just in my area?

I must admit I get bad results from the thinkbroadband tester. speedtester.net last night was giving a result of 50.2Mb/s but here was giving around 8.5Mb/s.

Ian