What ever you do, DON'T choose Virgin Media!

Hi everyone,

In a moment of insanity a few months ago I decided it would be a good idea to sign-up for Virgin Media's 50meg connection - how utterly stupid of me

Unfortunately what was an ok connection for a good while, has now turned into a complete and utter nearly unusable shambles. Oh, and contacting Virgin Media 'support' is a waste of time and money as the 'technicians' can neither speak nor understand English

If, for some bizarre reason, you choose to ignore my warning then here's an example of the connection you can expect:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/6232429/VIRGIN/Speed11thDec2...
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/6232429/VIRGIN/Speed11thDec2...
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/6232429/VIRGIN/Speed13thDec2...
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/6232429/VIRGIN/Speed13thDec2...
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/6232429/VIRGIN/Speed14thDec/...
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/6232429/VIRGIN/Speed14thDec/...
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/6232429/VIRGIN/Speed13thDec2...
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/6232429/VIRGIN/Speed14thDec/...
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/6232429/VIRGIN/Speed15thDec/...


So there you go.

If you're thinking of Virgin, for the sake of your sanity and money, DON'T DO IT!

Of what you can expect, emphasis mine. A nationwide network will always have blotchy patches where they are either oversold or running on bad hardware.

I get ~31mbit/~3mbit all day, every day, with low latency and no packet loss.

My suggestion is to make the most of it while you can - up until last week or so I enjoyed 50.34 Mb/s down & 4.72 Mb/s up all day, every day, with low latency and no packet loss.

Now it's a waste of space

I had 50Mb for nearly 3 years - apart from 3 separate outages (lasting a total of 24hours or so)
I used to get 50Mb on the nose - all day, every day.

I could not fault VM and I lived in between 2 large universities.

It's very much swings and roundabouts.

could you please do this test so i can see something..

if using a windows based pc..

start/run/cmd/hit-enter/ then type pathping then enter virginmedia.co.uk

remember and put a space between pathping and virginmedia.co.uk

then hit enter.. it can take up to 3 min for this test to complete..

could you screen print the results and post them here ? excluding your own 'IP' id


then repeat the above but pathping 'bbc.co.uk' this time


cheers

Edited by djfunkdup (Fri 16-Dec-11 15:19:15)

Can you get FTTC?

Virgin have been bombarding me with junk mail for over 6 months, this is why I won't entertain them, I actually started to set fire to their marketing junk for the fun of it. .. they are too big for their boots

Dont be to hard on yourself, its a easy mistake, been there too.

Similar story here, was all great up near sheffield / doncaster, then went completely tits up. Packet loss for full evenings rendering the internet useless... & when the guy came to install the services, I needed them at the back of the house. The engineer wanted to run the cabling through the loft, which I agreed too as he said he always did it... Half of the loft was floored, the other was not. He came straight through the ceiling. Virgin paid up at least.

Down near London. BT line speeds were quite slow & I thought different area, different setup, prob be fine... was all ok at first, then started getting outages which didn't stop. Felt like an outage once a week in some shape or form. Some nights half of the internet didn't work e.g couldn't get on hotmail. Other nights, speeds too slow to use skype. Some nights nothing... Had an outage for over a week at one point. An engineer came out and said the equipment was overheating at their end but wasn't going to be replaced as it was too costly and the winter months would prevent it overheating for a while.

Absolute joke.

& the superhub GUI constantly crashed. If you're going to supply a router to millions, get it right.

In the end went back to sky broadband in both cases.

& I bigged up virginmedia at first in both cases, as it seemed great. Honestly do not have a good word to say about them now.

& a family member had a mobile contract with virginmedia. For some reason the sim wasn't recognised from day one. Had a new sim sent 3 times and 2 different handsets. Absolutely nothing worked. In all cases the sim wasn't recognised. They asked to leave in the end and virgin agreed on the grounds that they couldn't provide a service.

1 year later, the debt collectors arrived at the front door asking for the full 24 month contract as an upfront payment.

All I can say is, you learn lessons in life. Don't worry about it - move on and don't look back.

I've learnt I'd rather have a stable 1 meg that never goes off than a totally intermittent 30 meg connection.

In practice I get higher than this

Edited by ukhardy07 (Sat 17-Dec-11 01:55:23)

It's worth noting that other people such as myself have been on 50mbit since it was released and get the full 50mbit all day every day.

while there are some bad areas which are either oversubscribed or need some kind of maintenance running, this is not representative of the whole network.

Post your TBQM.

I know this wasn't aimed at me, but this would have been in the week before I moved from Bristol:

http://www.the-crib.co.uk/images/tbqmvirgin50Mb.png


The peaks would have been when I was gaming / streaming or downloading.

Edited by deleted (Tue 20-Dec-11 08:27:10)

Link doesn't work.

Hi there,

Here's the pathpings you asked for:

Tracing route to virginmedia.co.uk [212.250.162.12]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 10.34.164.1
2 manc-core-2a-ae3-2734.network.virginmedia.net [86.28.65.77]
3 manc-bb-1a-ae12-0.network.virginmedia.net [82.15.206.245]
4 winn-bb-1b-ae4-0.network.virginmedia.net [212.43.163.186]
5 win-dc-b-v900.network.virginmedia.net [62.253.188.166]
6 git-dmz4-css-4b-vip07.network.virginmedia.net [212.250.162.12]

Computing statistics for 150 seconds...
Source to Here This Node/Link
Hop RTT Lost/Sent = Pct Lost/Sent = Pct Address
0 Ste-PC [192.168.0.2]
4/ 100 = 4% |
1 --- 100/ 100 =100% 96/ 100 = 96% 10.34.164.1
0/ 100 = 0% |
2 48ms 5/ 100 = 5% 1/ 100 = 1% manc-core-2a-ae3-2734.network.virg
inmedia.net [86.28.65.77]
0/ 100 = 0% |
3 49ms 4/ 100 = 4% 0/ 100 = 0% manc-bb-1a-ae12-0.network.virginme
dia.net [82.15.206.245]
0/ 100 = 0% |
4 50ms 5/ 100 = 5% 1/ 100 = 1% winn-bb-1b-ae4-0.network.virginmed
ia.net [212.43.163.186]
0/ 100 = 0% |
5 64ms 6/ 100 = 6% 2/ 100 = 2% win-dc-b-v900.network.virginmedia.
net [62.253.188.166]
0/ 100 = 0% |
6 56ms 4/ 100 = 4% 0/ 100 = 0% git-dmz4-css-4b-vip07.network.virg
inmedia.net [212.250.162.12]

Trace complete.



Tracing route to bbc.co.uk [212.58.241.131]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 10.34.164.1
2 manc-core-1b-ge-700-522.network.virginmedia.net [82.8.209.77]
3 * * manc-bb-1b-ae7-0.network.virginmedia.net [82.15.206.249]

4 manc-bb-1a-ae0-0.network.virginmedia.net [62.253.187.177]
5 * glfd-bb-1b-ae1-0.network.virginmedia.net [213.105.175.146]
6 glfd-tmr-1-ae5-0.network.virginmedia.net [213.105.159.46]
7 tcl5-ic-1-as0-0.network.virginmedia.net [62.253.185.78]
8 212.58.239.249
9 212.58.238.133
10 * virtual-vip-231.thdo.bbc.co.uk [212.58.241.131]

Computing statistics for 250 seconds...
Source to Here This Node/Link
Hop RTT Lost/Sent = Pct Lost/Sent = Pct Address
0 Ste-PC [192.168.0.2]
9/ 100 = 9% |
1 --- 100/ 100 =100% 91/ 100 = 91% 10.34.164.1
0/ 100 = 0% |
2 70ms 12/ 100 = 12% 3/ 100 = 3% manc-core-1b-ge-700-522.network.vi
rginmedia.net [82.8.209.77]
0/ 100 = 0% |
3 75ms 10/ 100 = 10% 1/ 100 = 1% manc-bb-1b-ae7-0.network.virginmed
ia.net [82.15.206.249]
0/ 100 = 0% |
4 64ms 9/ 100 = 9% 0/ 100 = 0% manc-bb-1a-ae0-0.network.virginmed
ia.net [62.253.187.177]
0/ 100 = 0% |
5 91ms 16/ 100 = 16% 7/ 100 = 7% glfd-bb-1b-ae1-0.network.virginmed
ia.net [213.105.175.146]
0/ 100 = 0% |
6 81ms 15/ 100 = 15% 6/ 100 = 6% glfd-tmr-1-ae5-0.network.virginmed
ia.net [213.105.159.46]
0/ 100 = 0% |
7 74ms 9/ 100 = 9% 0/ 100 = 0% tcl5-ic-1-as0-0.network.virginmedi
a.net [62.253.185.78]
0/ 100 = 0% |
8 84ms 9/ 100 = 9% 0/ 100 = 0% 212.58.239.249
1/ 100 = 1% |
9 82ms 14/ 100 = 14% 4/ 100 = 4% 212.58.238.133
0/ 100 = 0% |
10 72ms 10/ 100 = 10% 0/ 100 = 0% virtual-vip-231.thdo.bbc.co.uk [21
2.58.241.131]

Trace complete.

Also, take a look at my Broadband Quality Monitor graph:

http://www.thinkbroadband.com/ping/share-large/d3e29...

What a useless mess!

If you are still in the minimum contract term call retentions (150 thinking of leaving) and ask to be downgraded to 10Mbps because I doubt you'll be getting any better a lot of the time and at least it's cheaper.

If you aren't in minimum contract and you have any acceptable ADSL option open to you - same number but tell them to put their cable where the sun don't shine.

Mine was bad (but not that bad) so I downgraded. They actually did resegment my node but it was hardly any better after and I've been told that's that unless it gets worse.

If you wait they may upgrade your local network eventually but don't bank on it being done any time soon.

In reply to a post by Zadeks:

Link doesn't work.

Link worked, image was corrupted....... fixed now.

Jesus, pete_thomson! That 50mb in Bristol is obscene! I guess the sales person in your area was on long leave?

I was really lucky in my area as a quick wifi scan showed mostly Sky routers, nothing obviously VM.

Please bear in mine that the WiFi on the inappropriately named Superhub is so dire you often can't even pick the wretched things up on your own property. When I had one if I was above 10m from it the signal from an AP across the road was stronger.

Fine here, just tested a few mins ago. Always had good quality with VM much better than BT, no complaints at all.

http://www.pingtest.net/result/54322499.png

23ms ping, 2ms jitter, 0% packet loss