Happy with VM broadband

Just a post to say that for quite a while I've been happy with my VM broadband. 200Mb package seems to be a solid connection. The only niggle is that it is still quite expensive and not much cheaper without a phone line. Why VM still think that most households should still have a land line is crazy in today's age of mobile phones.

Well done VM.

I agree that pricing and the redundant landline are issues for VM.

Its interesting in that the new FTTP areas with Project Lightning are done minus telephone line.

The inclusive pricing changes at end of month may trigger some changes, or they may not.

Virgin want customers to buy bundles from them - they aren't interested in Broadband only customers hence why they price it the way they do.

As Andrew mentioned, the changes to pricing coming at the end of the month might make Virgin appear to be worse value that they are. Vodafone pushing Fibre without line rental is a good thing (despite the fact we know it's just included in the price now). I tweeted Virgin about their prices:

My Tweet:
@Virginmedia you are in our area, but currently waiting for a decent broadband only price. £32 is a bit steep when Vodafone offer it for £25

Their reply:
We can't sell steak for the price of mince though! Our bundles and prices can always change and we aim to have one to suit all customers needs so please keep in touch, hopefully we can tempt you over one day

Tbh I'm not interested in 200mb (or even 100mb) a basic 50mb service is all I require. If they sold that for £20 per month then they'd sign up plenty of customers.

Do you know when BT are changing theirs?

If they think their service is Steak, FTTC is Venison and FTTP is caviar

Mince is ADSL and they are all the nasty stuff you get in Corned Beef.

No comms yet, but guess would be on 28th once existing offers end

As in next week?

I thought you meant a price rise and not a price change - sorry

Out of interest, how does your connection perform on a proper speed test like the one from Thinkbroadband? Speedtest.net masks the issues a lot of people have with Virgin i.e. terrible single-thread speeds which affect most real-world applications.

It's a bit of a postcode lottery - it's not a problem for some places but cripples performance in others, and Virgin just bury their head in the sand over the affected areas. Over a year after complaining of getting about 10Mb/s on a '200Mb/s' connection, nothing has been done where I live and so I switched to another ISP.

I wouldn't be so quick to assume the ThinkBroadband speed test is particularly good. Their results do appear to be very conservative and show severe single thread download restrictions for me while other speed tests, steam and other game company downloads have no issues, FileZilla always shows good speed for each individual transfer. In fact my connection appears to be pretty much excellent if measured by anything other than ThinkBroadband.
I do however think I'm one of the lucky few on VM.

In reply to a post by MrSaffron:

Its interesting in that the new FTTP areas with Project Lightning are done minus telephone line.

Should have telco in those areas in the not too distant.

I'm making no assumptions; TBB works fine on other ISPs both myself and friends have access to and the test itself has no inherent issues with single thread performance I'm aware of. TBB staff monitor test results and you can see published results of the tests in their monthly reports.

But don't just take the results of one test - try basic web browser file downloads, FTP transfers, other speed tests that do check single thread performance (many don't). Examples include speedof.me and dslreports if you manually set the number of threads. I've repeatedly found TBB's results to be fully representative of download performance.

Steam, Origin, etc use many download threads so bypass the problem.

Just for comparison, here are results from my own BT and Virgin connections:
http://www.thinkbroadband.com/speedtest/results.html...
http://www.thinkbroadband.com/speedtest/results.html...

But like you say you could be free (or mostly free) of the problem - some do get solid performance on VM which is why it's such a strange issue. But that VM test above is supposed to be a 200Mb connection on Virgin...

Edit: Just realised the BT test was from after midnight so not a like-for-like comparison. Here's another from peak time to show it's not a cherry-picked result: http://www.thinkbroadband.com/speedtest/results.html...

Edited by deleted (Mon 14-Nov-16 22:38:58)

In reply to a post by watercooled:

But don't just take the results of one test - try basic web browser file downloads, FTP transfers, other speed tests that do check single thread performance (many don't). Examples include speedof.me and dslreports if you manually set the number of threads.

Yep, that's what I said, I use many different mechanisms to transfer files from game downloads and to/from my office and other locations. Every one gives me a better result that TBB reports. I also use FileZilla a lot for secure ftp, it does multi-threaded but reports the speed for each thread. I have no idea why there is such a discrepancy though, just wanted to point out that TBB are not infallible.

There was a very informative exchange between Virgin Media and Ofcom over testing of the 200 Mbps service back in 2015, the summary being the three threads used by the SamKnows system was not testing the full capability of the 200 Mbps service and that more threads were going to be added.

Of course tbb is not infallible but then no company is infallible, as one of the few to offer a single http download test with no accelerators we will often be going against the grain.

filezilla = threaded
steam = extremely threaded (typical game download for me is at least 20 connections to steam servers)

@Daemon66: Of course, it is wise to use more than just one test when you're trying to diagnose a problem. I just provided TBB as an example, but in my case it matched up with pretty much every other test/download I tried. I'm not sure why it would be an outlier in your case, but there are a load of reasons from the wider network to something going on with flash player or security software for example.

@MrSaffron: I'd argue that even using three threads is not completely representative of real-world download speeds, let alone more! They should at least provide a single threaded test separately and explain the difference to readers IMO. I did provide Samknows with some feedback on their testing methodology and how it can mask issues such as this. There's no use having 200Mbps available with 50 threads if, like me, you get <9Mbps on standard file downloads so even 500MB GPU drivers end up taking closer to 10 minutes rather than the 20 seconds or so you'd expect with 200 meg! It's really not nitpicking is it?

I don't suppose you have a link to that dialogue between Samknows and Virgin (assuming it's public)?

@Chrysalis: Yeah, I found the same with Steam, speedtest, and the like, so at least huge game downloads were quick (although even they started struggling to get over 150 just before I left as it was getting so bad) but unfortunately things like equally-large PS4 downloads and Windows Update/Store were painfully slow, with games taking upwards of 12 hours for example - quite a departure from the expected ~40 minutes!

I have a few friends/relatives in the same area still on VM and have been able to test their connections. According to hostnames, they're all on the same CMTS chassis but different line cards, and all are affected just as severely. I just wish I could get somewhere with VM on the issue!

Also, sorry for going off-topic on your thread, hope you don't mind discussing it!

Edited by deleted (Tue 15-Nov-16 19:26:24)

The snippet is buried somewhere in the Ofcom 2015 speed test analysis

In reply to a post by watercooled:

@MrSaffron: I'd argue that even using three threads is not completely representative of real-world download speeds, let alone more! They should at least provide a single threaded test separately and explain the difference to readers IMO. I did provide Samknows with some feedback on their testing methodology and how it can mask issues such as this. There's no use having 200Mbps available with 50 threads if, like me, you get <9Mbps on standard file downloads so even 500MB GPU drivers end up taking closer to 10 minutes rather than the 20 seconds or so you'd expect with 200 meg! It's really not nitpicking is it?

I don't suppose you have a link to that dialogue between Samknows and Virgin (assuming it's public)?

@Chrysalis: Yeah, I found the same with Steam, speedtest, and the like, so at least huge game downloads were quick (although even they started struggling to get over 150 just before I left as it was getting so bad) but unfortunately things like equally-large PS4 downloads and Windows Update/Store were painfully slow, with games taking upwards of 12 hours for example - quite a departure from the expected ~40 minutes!

I have a few friends/relatives in the same area still on VM and have been able to test their connections. According to hostnames, they're all on the same CMTS chassis but different line cards, and all are affected just as severely. I just wish I could get somewhere with VM on the issue!

A couple more examples of 'real world' download speed using a single TCP/IP socket.

Operating system updates. A recent IOS update for an iPhone of mine took 40 minutes for the download - Only VM comment from the guy who rang me after I cancelled - "ouch!"

The Sky box downloads the content onto the internal HD. The playback commonly catches up causing the box to indicate 'end of recording'.

I think sony psn downloads are single threaded, but not entirely sure.

windows update is definitely single threaded.

so those may give you a clue if tbb is accurately reporting single threaded performance.

In reply to a post by Chrysalis:

filezilla = threaded
steam = extremely threaded (typical game download for me is at least 20 connections to steam servers)

Yes but FileZilla reports the transfer rate per thread so the single thread speed IS shown and it is generally higher than what TBB reports.

There is a solution we drop single thread testing like the majority of the world and stop reporting on the peak versus off-peak stuff too e.g. http://www.thinkbroadband.com/news/7546-uk-broadband...

Its not like the variations are anything new, have been there for years as our data shows when you view the historic trends.

its funny that only VM customers claim its broken

Is that true? I don't really look in many other forums on this site so I have no idea, it certainly seems broken for me but one swallow ...

I'm another user experiencing awful single thread speeds on Virgin Media, almost everything is affected apart from Origin/Steam and speedtest.net. In my experience it's definitely not the TBB speed test which is broken but something within the Virgin Media network.

The problem first appeared about 12 months ago. Before that a single thread download could easily utilise the whole 200Mb, and would reach the same speed as multi thread on the TBB speed test.

Now i'm lucky to reach 50Mbps on standard file downloads, even though speedtest.net happily shows 200Mbps+.

Pretty much.

It is showing slow single thread speeds for Zen Internet, but they are fixing a network issue that resolves that.

In reply to a post by MrSaffron:

There is a solution we drop single thread testing like the majority of the world and stop reporting on the peak versus off-peak stuff too e.g. http://www.thinkbroadband.com/news/7546-uk-broadband...

Its not like the variations are anything new, have been there for years as our data shows when you view the historic trends.

Ughhh don't even joke about it!

Yeah I've heard about the problem with Zen - the difference being they know it's a problem and are working to fix it. That's nothing like the 'we don't see any problem here' stonewalling attitude of VM.

Whilst I still have my Vivid 150...

Vivid 150 SpeedTest.net
Vivid 150 ThinkBroadband


Sky Fibre Max SpeedTest.net
Sky Fibre Max Thinkbroadband


Thinkbroadband 1GB Download

This last graph shows the VM download first followed by the Sky.

Clearly the Thinkbroadband test is truly representative of real world conditions.
My BBC iPlayer downloads also show more than 5:1 speed difference.