What is the real upload speed?
I have read it's up to 5Mbit

Depends if your area has been upgraded yet. If it has you get 5 Mbit if not you get 1.5 Mbit.

How can I find out if my area is enabled or not?

Edit: Nevermind. The list is http://shop.virginmedia.com/content/dam/allyours/pdf...

Edited by deleted (Wed 27-Apr-11 17:22:34)

Usenet is only throttled on the NNTP and NNTP SSL ports. On other ports it does not seem affected by throttling

I get 6.2MB/s from Astraweb via port 443, and I hit nearly 15MB/s (effective) on headers due to compression.

In reply to a post by Darkness123:

How can I find out if my area is enabled or not?

Edit: Nevermind. The list is http://shop.virginmedia.com/content/dam/allyours/pdf...

That's an old list - here is the up to date one:
http://shop.virginmedia.com/content/dam/allyours/pdf...

THe service is good but it is severely throttled for Usenet and P2P.
The Virgin Usenet is useless really hardly any retention.

Try Giganews Diamond service, comes with a boat load of free add ons and half price at the moment, almost 1000 days retention and 50 Connections.
I would check the upload speed as you might not live in a 5Meg enabled area at the moment.

Its a reliable service but I would consider if you really need 50Meg, if you are getting it for Usenet then you can only really use it at full speed after midnight and between 10am and 3pm.
You do have no real limit to how much you can download unless it is excessive to the point of you downloading more than a whole street.
Your upload speed is regulated to a max of 6000MB between 3PM and 6PM, if you exceed this usage then you will be throttled to 65% of your max speed for 5hrs.
Some people think that using SSL will get you around this policy but it doesn't really work and Virgin are now monitoring port 563 so it wont be long till they tie this down as well.

Thanks for the information.
I won't be uploading. I just wanted to know the speed.
Their Usenet service will be good enough. I don't really want 500+ day retention. 1 week is okay.
Thanks

I have not found throttling of P2P to be very serious at all, I regularly use bit torrent at close to line speed about 6MB/sec down, even in the evenings.

The new upload is being rolled out, once you're on the new upload the STM restrictions change a bit, the 50mbit package gets 5mbit up but you get an evening cap of 6Gb of upload, that's the only cap the evening DL has no cap and the daytime for both has no cap.

I don't know if the VM Usenet servers are any good I've never connected before, I do know that many users have got around throttling by forcing usenet traffic over SSL (port 443)

They claim that P2P throttling is at the network level evenly for everyone but I've never really seen this as an issue, others seem to think it's slow, does anyone know why some people are seeing throttling and others aren't?

Some people think that using SSL will get you around this policy but it doesn't really work and Virgin are now monitoring port 563 so it wont be long till they tie this down as well.

True, SSL doesn't work on port 563. I think they are just restricting everything that goes through that port. However, SSL on port 443 does work. When I change from 563 to 443 my usenet downloads go from 700 KB/s to 6 MB/s. I don't see how they can ever stop that without restricting encrypted web traffic as well or by restricting well known IPs of usenet providers. The latter does sound like it would be quite expensive to implement though.

Thanks everyone.
I have ordered Virgin Media now. My slow speed has been annoying me for a while. Now I will get 50MB