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

consistent among customer base I meant.

its defenitly not a consistent good performance across all of VM's areas, far from it.

sky LLU customers for the most part only have varying speeds due to line sync speeds, when they have FTTC it will blow VM out of the water.

Me too. The TBB speed tester isn't reliable for the 50 meg service. Maybe not for cable as a whole but maybe that's going too far as I haven't researched the totality I'm implying.