Controversial Post - A very happy Virgin Customer

I am a little nervous writing this since I am a very happy Virginmedia broadband customer and suspect I will be flamed down immediately. I am an irregular poster here but do read all the posts here. So why am I happy....

IMG=http://img81.imageshack.us/img81/3423/speedtestvh7.th.jpg

Hopefully the graph above that shows my downloads speeds measured by this site since I joined on the XL service last July explain why I have had periods where the speeds have been erratic especially in October but most of the time the speeds have great.

Upload speeds are consistently excellent which is great for p2p, I can live with the STM since I schedule all my p2p either out of peak times or when it is on during peak times I cap my speeds automatically (Azureus with speed scheduler add-on) and the service is very reliable. I don't do gaming and I have only called customer services once and got a credit for the call. For all my support I use the excellent newsgroups which are enough for.

I fully understand that some people do have a bad experience but I believe the majority of people are happy. Having seen so many negative posts here I wanted to post my positive experiences... Also, to put things in perspective Virginmedia is my fourth ISP (Freedom2surf, Euro1net, UKFSN/Entanet). Entanet was great and gave me a consistent 6Mbps and even though it is the top rated ISP in the UK it simply does not compare to Virginmedia.

I hope you haven't jinxed it for everybody living in your area.

I got NTL when they first brought out their 10Mbit product, which I guess is about 2.5 years ago. I can't say I'm entirely happy. If VM actually had a competitor I would give them a try, but as it is, the service is mostly okay. The worst time was around the 20Mbit upgrades when the whole service was absolutely appalling for weeks. Oddly, I don't really have any problem with high speed downloading, with the help of DownThemAll and such the speed is excellent, which is fortunate for them because otherwise I'd have no reason to stay. Simple browsing, though, can become very tedious at times.

Phorm is going to be interesting. It will certainly be the single biggest factor on the side of leaving but I'm not sure whether my desire to protect my privacy will win out against my complete lack of patience. Especially so when VM launch 50Mbit. I guess I'm hoping they do the right thing.

John.

Agree with the Down Load them All - makes a massive difference. Hopefully I will be able to opt out of phorm or at least find a way of hiding my surfing activities. I have nothing to hide but I wouldn't want advertisers reading my emails or listening to my phone calls so why should browsing be any different! I doubt I will go to the 50Mb service when it is out since the 20Mb is fine for me. To be honest, I could probably do with the 10Mb...

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I am a little nervous writing this since I am a very happy Virginmedia broadband customer and suspect I will be flamed down immediately. I am an irregular poster here but do read all the posts here. So why am I happy....

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You won't get flamed (this is tb, hardly the wild west!) but I'll point out some harsh truths:

1) "most of the time the speeds have [been] great."
You've been lucky!
Over the last few months, I've been reading far more reports of congested UBRs, upgrades provided without capable modems, DNS servers that reduce browsing to a crawl, 'broken' (NTL) network links, extreme modem power levels requiring a tech visit for a fix that lasts only hours and IP ranges that require a proxy.

2) "Upload speeds are consistently excellent which is great for p2p"
Sorry, but 750Kb/s is hardly wonderful and a down/up ratio of 25:1 is far from great for bittorrent. As a comparison, have a look at the upload speeds that Be's LLU offers?

3) "I can live with the STM since I schedule all my p2p either out of peak times or when it is on during peak times I cap my speeds automatically"
On XL maybe but the limits for the slower connections are considerably tighter. I get the impression that STM is being used to 'encourage' downloaders (not just the "heavy" ones) to upgrade to XL to get a reasonable service during the evenings.
Can you guess how congested the UBRs will become overnight if/when the 11-hour a day trial STM limits are extended nationwide?

4) "For all my support I use the excellent newsgroups"
Then you'll probably have noticed the rumours (so far unsubstantiated but from previously reliable sources) that the staff in Liverpool that monitor the support newsgroups and email helpdesk are being made redundant and that they'll be closed down in the near future?

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I fully understand that some people do have a bad experience but I believe the majority of people are happy. Having seen so many negative posts here I wanted to post my positive experiences...

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While I agree with you that most VM users have a decent experience (myself included) don't forget that the vast majority of broadband users happily exist consuming less than 3GB of data a month...
It's when the unsuspecting masses expect to be able to watch a few programmes on iPlayer or YouTube during the evening that they'll notice the problems.