Virginmedia for working from home?

hi,

I currently have ADSL and its a bit on the slow side. I get around 10MB which is fine for most things, Hd youtube etc but i know the average speed is slightly higher these days, around 12MB?.. anyway i need to work from home more often and I have a decision to make.

1) go with business fiber 80/20

or

2) Get virginmedia business 50MB

Now My exchange was in the last 19, and checking my exchange it says we get VDSL end of october. I get 10MB on ADSL2 so I should get around 50MB on FTTC?.

I know various companies offer business packages, and as it happens I know I can get VirginMedia in this area. Many moons ago I had the residential cable and it was pretty bad in terms of over subscription on my UBR. This was back in the day of 10MB connections with SB5100s.

I think things might have moved on now?, also with the business virgin media packages I _think_ you dont get lumped in with the residential guys so shouldn't feel the pain so much even if the UBR is over subscribed, right?.

Oddly there is VERY little info on public forums on the business connection side of things, plenty on the residential. I've been toying with the ideal of getting 120MB residential and because thats the top tier perhaps it wont be as bad as the lower down packages.

Does anyone have an experiences they want to share please?. I'll be remote desktoping to work, some SSH too.

Edited by deleted (Mon 21-Oct-13 18:03:28)

The speed you get on ADSL2+ cannot be used to estimate the FTTC speeds, that is down to your distance from the green street cabinet sample range versus speed table at http://www.thinkbroadband.com/guide/fibre-broadband....

SSH is really all about latency and no packet loss, which the FTTC will most likely beat Virgin on, and even the 10 Mbps ADSL2+ probably can. The higher speeds are only an issue if you need to move large chunks of data up and down the connection.

Thanks for the reply. I've found some of the stuff I tunnel over SSH is bandwidth heavy. So whilst you are correct SSH in itself is more about latency, the stuff i plan to tunnel in ssh is.

For example I will be tunneling RDP over it for the windows boxes I connect to, and also some X11 stuff from my box at work. Oddly I've found that some things I run on the linux box (mostly Java clients) tunnel poorly over SSH. Hence why I want to upgrade to something faster than vanilla ADSL2.

I've seen that chart for FTTC speeds, considering i'm getting 10MB on an all copper line from house to cab, to exchange then I'd imagine I should get a vastly greater connection where the lions share of the line is fiber (to the cab).

I'm still around 200 meters to the cab, but who knows how the copper's routed to me; as there are a few streets between me and the cab. I dont think i can use "as the crow flies" to estimate speed

Still odd that there is so little talk about the commercial cable solutions VM provide around the interwebs and on here. Either they are really good (and hence no noise) or very few people use them?.

Edited by deleted (Mon 21-Oct-13 18:41:09)

If it was me, I'd be edging for both connections anyway...
Why? When one breaks I can still work, though without the nice bits like static IP etc but can still be productive.

The upload on the 120 should be fairly good, but FTTC will probably beat it and be lower in price, but if working from home everyday the savings on travel mean running the two would make sense.

The business side for all providers is a lot smaller market segment, and there is a tendency to talk in person, rather than on Internet forums.

thanks for the advice. I dont think i could justify (to work) getting both, the whole point being that if its a business package then the turn around to getting it fixed should be much quicker than a residential package. i wont be working everyday, its every now and again. a few days a month if that, its more so I can do work on the servers at work out of core hours on a fast connection.

Sometimes when things break bad (i.e. lose all network connectivity to a server), I have to connect to the Dell KVM at the datacenter and thats one example where speed is a failing in the current setup I have.

The static IP is important for punching through the firewall at work, but thus far i've done without and at a push could do the same.

The issue is upload speed, reliability and a very distant third cost.

It boils down to Virgin Medias ability to supply the 50MB speed they quote, knowing that their network is creaking at the seams (from reading on this forum and others), and if they segregate their business users away from the hordes of heavy downloaders. Obviously their 50MB package is much slower than their top tier package on the residential side, but it should be a better package for my needs.

The other chink in the armour for the vm solution is the inability to run the box in modem mode, which might make things trick if their modems dont support DMZ's,

My current setup has ADSL modem from ISP in bridge mode and the linux gateway at home acting the firewall/gateway. Has worked really well for me so far, with the speed being the only issue.

Edited by deleted (Mon 21-Oct-13 19:58:47)

You might want to consider whether your "up speed" is important to you.

We aren't getting much more than 3 Mbps on our business 50 Mbps VM service, whereas Infinity 2 might well give you towards 18 Mbps up...

Edited by John_Gray (Mon 21-Oct-13 20:41:03)

If I remember rightly 3Mb is the correct upload for 50Mb business broadband.

Holy smokes thats terrible. Odd that its so bad compared to the 120MB residential package. which is why i'm thinking of going down that route.

Shame they dont offer a 120MB cable solution for home office use.

I thought it might be at least 50/6 infact i thought at a minimum cable upload was 10% of DL speed, this is almost 5%

In reply to a post by MrSaffron:

If it was me, I'd be edging for both connections anyway...
Why? When one breaks I can still work, though without the nice bits like static IP etc but can still be productive.

That's why I had both virgin media 120 Meg and ADSL2+ 16 Meg (backup) with both connection. (waiting for FTTC to go live next year)

In reply to a post by MrSaffron:

If it was me, I'd be edging for both connections anyway...
Why? When one breaks I can still work, though without the nice bits like static IP etc but can still be productive.

This.

Go with a 'consumer' grade service for one of them, as a general household connection and take a business service for the second one so that you can either expense it if employed or claim back on your tax return if self-employed.

It's a solution I would take here if it were at all feasible, but isn't right now (no Virgin Media, no FTTC, no second line available).

I think it's all about calculated risk. I work from home from time to time and have the VM 60mbps service. Get solid speeds, no congestion on my network segment and luckily touch wood there have been no drops in service.

I don't use the superhub for any routing functionality, I just stick it into modem mode.

If you're only working from home every now and then, and feel you may benefit from the 120/12 speeds and have your own good router then that's the way I'd personally go.

The VM network is more vulnerable to issues than xDSL networks due to its shared nature.

I work from home every day so there's no real calculation to be made for me, I'm just hamstrung by circumstance.

Until this most recent address xDSL was way more stable for me than VM.

A MASSIVE thank you to everyone who has taken the time to respond. I'll take on board your comments and I think In the first instance i'm going to go for Fiber. Perhaps if I can justify the cost some sort of backup connection with VM.

Cool. Please be aware:

In reply to a post by c9550927:

I think things might have moved on now?, also with the business virgin media packages I _think_ you dont get lumped in with the residential guys so shouldn't feel the pain so much even if the UBR is over subscribed, right?.

Afraid you do get lumped in with the residential guys. Their congestion is your congestion.

Why on earth do they do that?. I was under the impression the business customers are isolated (via some sort of QOS implementation), so whilst you share the same UBR the throttling won't affect you. then again I thought the upload was far more generous than a measly 3MB, thats seriously disappointing.

Some areas are business only, some are residential only.

I had to have a manual order put in at a previous address as the address was business only.

You don't have the same throttling levels but congestion affects business users in a similar manner to residential.

Yep, it's 5% at the moment - 60Mb is 3Mb upstream.

Which (unless they don't count ACKs, which I doubt) means that if you're running flat out on the downstream (unlikely, I know) you won't get much upstream at all.

I keep toying with dumping the VM broadband and going to PlusNet fibre. But I don't do enough upstream-heavy stuff from home to make it worth jumping into another minimum term contract.

I work from home when I'm not out and about and have the 120MB package. I do quite a bit of work using WebEx's to do demos/training and the 3 months I've had it I've been very pleased. Having a decent connection means I'm not moving the mouse and waiting for the remote computer to catch up.

At the moment I'm working on our software via secure VPN that is using a database based in our office in Worcester and it's a little slower than if it was sat on the same PC, but it's still quick enough. The connection from the Worcester office I think is slower than I have.

I've also kept my 9MB Sky ADSL2 connection as a back up - and on the two occasions where VM has been unavailable (had a dodgy connection at the cabinet) I've just switched over the ethernet cable into the Sky box and been back in business. Don't have fibre as an option on my exchange (Northampton) so cable is really the only option I have for decent speed.

I have VM 120/12 and BT Infinity 76. When I work from home, both work fine with RDP over VPN, Webex and so on. My FTTC connection is a solid 50/9 (aluminium and distance won't give me 76/20) and my VM connection is a solid 120/11.

For VM, the IP address is static provided that you don't turn the modem off. There is the odd occasion when by reason of some upheaval at the VM end, you get moved to a different line card or UBR. This is very rare and I suspect that such an event can be managed by your IT support when requested.

But I agree with Igni - take a BT business service as an additional line so you can expense it. In any case, unless you do this, your BT connexion will have a noticeably dynamic IP address.

Thanks for all the replies.. turns out fiber won't be coming to my cabinet though the exchange is enabled. Open-reach eventually confirmed its not economically viable.

So I'm proceeding with VM with no backup, the setup would have been fibre +VM and ditching the slow ADSL line, but as stated there is no fibre.

I can always go into work if VM goes down so there's that.

Thankyou everyone for taking the time to answer, its appreciated.