How's VM's XL package

I'm considering VM's 20mbit/s deal and wondering how people are finding it. Other than the traffic shaping and the cowboy salesman and technical support, how is the speed and is it consistent... you know the usual things.

P.S. BT phone goes to hounslow exchange if that helps

Well since 20mb is over the cable network its got nothing to do with your BT line what so ever..

Your are in a VM Cabled area arnt you?

Other than that... 20mb is fine. I get the 20mb speed 99% of the time. The traffic management dont really cause me any issues as i can do any big downloads early in the morning or late at night

for me was good for about a week or two and has steadily got worse and now is much worse than cable was at my old address.

it isnt even stable now and the modem keeps dropping.

well that's a whole lot of bad news. we have no other choice for now (new bt line is way too expensive).

hope their honor their 28 trial period if things go wrong (i know they used to have a very poor cs a few years ago but haven't tried them since)

In reply to a post by Seansmit17:

Well since 20mb is over the cable network its got nothing to do with your BT line what so ever..

Your are in a VM Cabled area arnt you?

Other than that... 20mb is fine. I get the 20mb speed 99% of the time. The traffic management dont really cause me any issues as i can do any big downloads early in the morning or late at night

That wouldn't be the 20Mb speed on a 50Mb line would it? LOL


to be fair though I am only on the basic 10Mb package and get the full amount minus the usual latency etc around 99% of the time too - in 2 different addresses.

could you specify your area please? we've just gone for the 10mb package in TW5.

btw, what affects speed on a cable network (ignoring congestion and throttling). distance to cabinet?

I have the 20 meg package... It's very good, been getting 20 meg most of the time. Sometimes it drops speed a little but it's very rare!

Customer service 100 times better than sky max, when I had an issue virgin did something about it unlike sky.

I've never noticed throttling which I find quite weird, I downloaded 20 gb of stuff in one go (from online backup when pc was restored) at 2mb/s - throttling never occured.

I think a really good thing about virgin is that they don't prioritise certain activities. E.g. p2p is the same speed as browsing, ftp etc etc..

You wont regret it I don't think.

I'm in the L postcode area and having worked for vm in the past i can tell you that the uk staff at least go through 2 weeks of classroom training and another 2 to 4 weeks of monitored "grad bay" support in which there are daily meetings and performance reports before they are unleashed on to the world. For those who say vm customer service is [censored] you should back up your rant with reasons why. they have centres in india that dont receive as much training as over here and the staff are forced to only support either VM equipment or software built in to the windows OS (only xp and vista at present). so, setting up your email with outlook express or live mail they can support, but outlook, thunderbird, eudora or any other client is not allowed and any staff doing so fails a twice monthly quality review. Failing several of these will lead to unemployment.

Regarding speed.
there must be quite a few ccna / ccnp people here who can answer this. however distance is not an issue, unlike adls. number of users connected does affect speed though, hence the speed reduction at the weekend, early evening and major holidays such as xmas. A wired connection will be faster than wireless and direct from modem to pc will also be faster.

if you need to call vm with a fault try resetting your modem first by unplugging for 10 seconds or so.

the modem is now stable, the fault causing that is fixed.

However the performance isnt.

Please understand tho the performance varies area by area and although I have read about people in various areas having problems, none of them seem as bad as mine so I am perhaps at the extreme low point possible. There is also areas that have no problems at all.

Edited by Chrysalis (Thu 08-Apr-10 07:38:33)

Have VM given you a date when they'll be adding capacity to your area to cope with the over-subscription?
(And a highly-discounted rate until it has?)