New to Virgin

Moving house very shortly and new property is not with BT....all wired up for Virgin though.

BT wanted silly money to install a line unless i took their broadband etc etc

So, reluctantly, i have left BE and joined the Virgin mob.

What should i expect?

I recently phoned Virgin Media customer services and it reminded me why I left them 5 years ago.

Seems impossible to get to speak to the same person twice if needed.

I agreed a verbal contract at one price but they inputed a higher cost into the computer, then denied ever given the lower price - they soon gave me the original price when the original recording of the call was replayed.

Customer experience score - less than 0/10

Expect fast speeds to start with, then as you use it they'll slow you down. Then a fault will arise and apparently the technical support is useless so it won't be fixed, forcing you to switch.

Oh and if you are a heavy downloader, your connection will be slowed down in the space of an hour.

I'd say cancel with Virgin and go with Sky. It's reliable, cheap, unlimited and not managed.

In reply to a post by Xplosion:

Expect fast speeds to start with, then as you use it they'll slow you down. Then a fault will arise and apparently the technical support is useless so it won't be fixed, forcing you to switch.

Oh and if you are a heavy downloader, your connection will be slowed down in the space of an hour.

I'd say cancel with Virgin and go with Sky. It's reliable, cheap, unlimited and not managed.

In the years I was with them I never experienced anything like this

I have been with Virgin Media now for over 6 years.

The service is on the whole, very reliable. I had my speeds doubled a while back and I do generally get download speeds of between 90-100Mbps.

I called them to question when the upload speed was going to be doubled as I was still only getting a maximum of 4.8Mbps. I mentioned that I was considering a move to BT Infinity because of this. This resulted in me being connected to a UK support representative who was able to run tests through a remote connection via my laptop. The issue was down to my Upload package not being changed on their system, when they doubled my download speed (if that makes sense.) Anyway, all sorted now

I must admit that on the occasions where I have spoken to the support people abroad, it can be frustrating.

However I am happy with the service I get from Virgin Media.

In reply to a post by pete_thomson:

In reply to a post by Xplosion:

Expect fast speeds to start with, then as you use it they'll slow you down. Then a fault will arise and apparently the technical support is useless so it won't be fixed, forcing you to switch.

Oh and if you are a heavy downloader, your connection will be slowed down in the space of an hour.

I'd say cancel with Virgin and go with Sky. It's reliable, cheap, unlimited and not managed.

In the years I was with them I never experienced anything like this

Well I've known a bunch of people who have.

You are probably referring to the publicly advertised traffic management. New customers will be on the new products which reduce speeds to half rather than the old ones which knocked you back 75%. If you take 100Mbps and exceed 20GB in the morning period or 10GB in the afternoon/evening period you'll be slowed to 50Mbps for 5 hours which is still double anything Sky deliver on ADSL and pretty close to the Sky fibre maximum.

Of course if it's P2P you are talking about then that is managed within published hours and you probably won't get anywhere close to headline speeds regardless of download volume.

http://www.virginmedia.com/images/STM_30Mb_above_400...

VM is very much a curates egg. If you are in an area that hasn't been oversold it's very good apart from the inescapable jitter. If you are in an oversubscribed area it's hell and may well stay that way for months. Some VM peering links are run very hot indeed - sometimes into packet loss territory.

In reply to a post by Xplosion:

Expect fast speeds to start with, then as you use it they'll slow you down. Then a fault will arise and apparently the technical support is useless so it won't be fixed, forcing you to switch.

Oh and if you are a heavy downloader, your connection will be slowed down in the space of an hour.

I'd say cancel with Virgin and go with Sky. It's reliable, cheap, unlimited and not managed.

You summed up my experience absolutely identically in both of my houses.

My latest experience with virgin was the super hub that needed daily reboots and was a general nightmare. Virgin were convinced that this could not be the issue and 5 engineers or so later let me go. I have to say that even in modem only mode it's a piece of junk.

Other property there was absolutely insane packet loss which meant the internet was unusable entirely.

Both connections were absolutely great WHEN they worked.
Traffic management never bothered me too much they're very upfront about this.

With virgin when things work it's brilliant although their hardware such as the super hub is setting you up for failure.

If the users in a fibre area then go for infinity, sky or another provider. It's a no brainer. Otherwise VM is a good idea for high speed.

Some people seem to have had bad experiences with Virgin - and remain very vocal in their views. If VM was as bad as some make out, they would have no customers.

I started with Bradford Cable many years ago and have gone through many years of good service, only the occasional blip. The worst was 10 days of slow speed due to a problem they found hard to track down.

I'm not greedy, demanding unlimited/uncapped access, and I am a happy customer. Not quite as rare as some would have you think. I have TV M, BB L and Phone L, which suits me fine.

I don't suffer reduced speeds because neighbours are downloading P2P stuff, it's a constant and solid speed 24/7. I don't work for VM, they're not paying me to say this - but I'm happy to do so

There's only one thing I could fault them on - on-demand picture quality, often pixelates. Told this is down to demand and available bandwidth, may improve in the future - but hasn't made me call Sky or any of the others.

I could jump to BT or DigitalRegion for similar costs for phone/BB, but would then lose TV - may as well stay as I am...

Just to balance my previous post. My sister has virgin media for around 5 years. Not one single issue. She doesn't have the superhub though and I think this is responsible for a few issues.

& a neighbour had an unsecured virgin connection for about 10 years. Every time my laptop accidentally connected to it over mine it always worked fine. I sometimes wouldn't realise for about 5 hours that my laptop had gone on the wrong one! Really naughty but an honest mistake.

I've not had a great experience but to be honest on the first occasion I gave them no chance to resolve things and just left. 2nd time around I did give them chance but absolutely everyone in this area moans and moans and moans about virgin. I don't have a friend around here who hasn't had at least a few free months on virgin this year. It's commonly bad around here probably due to massive student take up.

The network is built up of telewest, blueyonder etc etc. So some parts of the network are far better than others.

I forgot to mention - I have the superhub. Having read horror stories about it I put it into modem only mode the minute I started to set it up. Partly because I believed the tales about the coverage being poor, partly because I was too darned idle to want to change all my wireless devices to a new router. Much easier to leave the existing Belkin N one in situ, it works just fine.

Maybe I'm being unkind to VM by not giving that a chance ?

In reply to a post by TMCR:

Give it a chance. Set it up with your own SSID and see how long it lasts.
On r30 firmware it would crash and then reset to the default virginmedia.... SSID.
The router would crash. Only option was to turn it off and on. Then everything was default as if I had held a pin in the reset button. Great... When this became an almost weekly occurrence I got mad.

Just out of interest. Try to access the superhub interface at 192.168.0.1 or 192.168.100.1 after the superhubs been on for 10+ days. Betcha it doesn't work anymore without a reboot.

It often stops working after just a couple of hours even! This was a big bug bear of mine as I don't turn routers off and like to access the settings every so often.

There's a few more annoying issues but I honestly don't remember them

The firmware on r36 introduced a buggy usage meter... Go into the usage meter just for laughs. It has been reporting e.g. 50gb download in 5 minutes. Not really possible on 30Mbps.

Anyway I'm glad to be rid of that thing.

EDIT: Virgin blamed my area and faults in this area on the reason why my superhub was screwing up, so I'd be interested if they were right.

Edited by ukhardy07 (Thu 16-Aug-12 01:42:45)

Had the SH since May now, no issues to report at all. It's been on R36 a while, still can't find anything wrong with it.

One of these days, when I've nothing better to do, I'll try setting the router up and see what happens. I doubt thats going to be anytime soon though, no need to...

To be honest mate. It's working good for you now. Don't mess as it can only get worse. If it ain't broken don't fix it

recently joined VM
Mix feelings can not say is bad because when it works is great service may even better than fttc

Dont worry too much about modem/equipment and faults because with any internet connection from time to time may occur faults ... but here some basic factors

Pros
you get the full advertised speed everywhere while with fttc if cabinet is far .... half speed out of the 80/20 may apply
Modem if keep turn off frequent will not affect line like fttc
No phone line need to have but just the broadband
28 days to change your mind and leave them in the case you have speed and traffic problems

cons
during peak times IF(i say IF you are unlucky there is a chance) your area is busy speeds may go down and also for the same factor on line games may be hard to play with out lag (that may develop by time and not necessary when you join them )
All VM packages have Traffic policy(depending the speed package)...if you very heavy downloader or if watching many movies(not talking for just 1-2) on line is not the best choice it will cut your speed which still you leave you with enough but this may affect latency

Lucky for me the area is been upgraded and is not traffic congestion at the moment but had before

Edited by deleted (Thu 16-Aug-12 03:03:46)

I always wrongly assumed that FTTC would be like VM in that the advertised speed was the actual speed for everybody.

Virgin sell 100Mbps and give you that. That's a real breath of fresh air as you mention. It can't be easy for them to achieve this.

In reply to a post by ukhardy07:

To be honest mate. It's working good for you now. Don't mess as it can only get worse. If it ain't broken don't fix it

That was my thought in setting up the Superhub the way I did - just connect it, swap to modem only, plug the Belkin router in and everything works as it used to, but faster.

I'm not looking for gaming speeds, P2P running 24/7, or any heavy use like that. I listen to radio streaming, do some bits over VNC for a charity, and it all just...works.

What is this "inescapable jitter" you mention?

They way cable upstream works makes jitter (variations in latency) an absolute certainty. Take a look at the TBB latency monitoring carts in http://www.cableforum.co.uk/board/12/33675644-think-... to see what I mean. It's a monster thread so I linked to nearly the end as IPs have changed for many of the early posts and they no longer show anything. There are some Infinity charts in there and they have virtually 0 jitter.

Sorry, but that still doesn't explain what it is I'm supposed to be looking for. I'm just puzzled because you seem to indicate that it is something negative and inherent in their network that I don't think I've ever experienced on my VM connection.

The TBB monitor shows latency - http://www.thinkbroadband.com/ping/monitors.html

Variations in latency are jitter and on the graphs is the blue and yellow area. A typical Infinity chart will be predominantly green with just a smidgin of blue/yellow. You virtually never see that with a cable chart - there is always a noticeable blue and yellow area. Sometimes very noticeable.

All cable connections have jitter. The technology makes it inevitable. Moderate jitter up to (say) 10ms is relatively harmless above that it can cause issues with time sensitive apps such as voip streaming and gaming.

Edited by kwikbreaks (Tue 21-Aug-12 13:40:05)

In reply to a post by kwikbreaks:

The TBB monitor shows latency - http://www.thinkbroadband.com/ping/monitors.html

Variations in latency are jitter and on the graphs is the blue and yellow area. A typical Infinity chart will be predominantly green with just a smidgin of blue/yellow. You virtually never see that with a cable chart - there is always a noticeable blue and yellow area. Sometimes very noticeable.

All cable connections have jitter. The technology makes it inevitable. Moderate jitter up to (say) 10ms is relatively harmless above that it can cause issues with time sensitive apps such as voip streaming and gaming.

And it looks like this.

Interesting, I've now looked around at a few Infinity graphs and I see what you mean.
Also, interesting is that Infinity seems to generally have a higher minimum ping but I guess that may simply be the way the networks are connected.
FYI, my graph typically shows green to around 10ms, blue between 10ms and 15ms and then yellow spiking up to about 50-60ms, only very occasionally going any higher than that: Graph
I'd love to know why the blue bit isn't just a line, which is what I'd expect if it was a mean, rather than some undefined range.
I've never had any issues with gaming or voip. In fact my son reckons our connection is one of the best in his Xbox gaming circle.

For VM yours looks quite good. Here is mine - http://www.thinkbroadband.com/ping/share-thumb/0f1e0... - that's a current snapshot and will change each time viewed - any really horrible bits will most likely be because I'm hammering the download - as of today there is some heavy downloading running up to the start of the morning STM period and an outage I've only just noticed by looking at the chart around 4pm which may or may not show in the log.

The reason the blue isn't a constant line is because it's the average during each sampling period not an all time average.

===
The log shows there were issues at the time and a complete outage. What caused it is a mystery - possibly some engineer fiddling with the taps to do an install nearby. Modem power levels unchanged but I do seem to have changed upstream channel.

Edited by kwikbreaks (Wed 22-Aug-12 20:11:09)

No, I meant that if each vertical line is one sampling period then I'd expect only one average to be marked per vertical. Having looked at the graph in more detail I can see that it isn't just one sample per vertical line so you have a range of averages for the sample periods - doh! Though it might be nice to have the option of viewing all the 864 sample periods, showing min, avg, max and fails.

oh dear.
i also just moved house and signed up to virgin, 4 miles from the exchange so didn't expect sky to be much use to me here.
VM rep insisted there was no shaping or restriction on the connection "it's unlimited, you can do what you like", seems he was talking out of his behind, so, besides the usage limits and congestion what else can i expect?

It's impossible to predict.

Until last night there was a peering issue which hit just about everybody over many routes which VM have at last fixed - or at least circumvented as their solution was to turn off the route in question so that will almost certainly have pushed up the loading elsewhere. That is unusual though as in the main congestion on VM is very localised so I may have a sweet connection but the guy a few streets away may have one that's almost unusable. The real problem with VM is that they are very slow to fix congestion issues.

IMO most people do reasonably well most of the time. I've had rubbish and good. On balance I find it OK. That may not be the case if I were a keen gamer though.

thanks, kb. I guess I'm going to have to accept that along with the increased speed (over sky llu), there is a price to pay

In reply to a post by Xplosion:

Expect fast speeds to start with, then as you use it they'll slow you down. Then a fault will arise and apparently the technical support is useless so it won't be fixed, forcing you to switch.

Oh and if you are a heavy downloader, your connection will be slowed down in the space of an hour.

I'd say cancel with Virgin and go with Sky. It's reliable, cheap, unlimited and not managed.

I have had no such problems. I have had a virtually faultless 8 years with VM and have always got the advertised speed or better. (The one exception being the recent peering problem.) Currently I always get 104.4Mb on a 100Mb connection. 24/7. I have never been traffic managed to my knowledge. Perhaps that is because I think it is antisocial to cane your connection by downloading torrents during the peak period. This would apply whatever ISP you may have. Even BT Infinity's purpose-built network can't handle maniac down loaders.