Packet loss

How much is this a problem for virgin cable users? I am contemplating switching to virgin - mainly to benefit from the high speeds - But wanted to make sure that packet loss and latency are at an acceptable level before I take the plunge.

Awful - check out their forums.

If it's online gaming you're thinking of then avoid.

It depends where you are, and how many of your neighbours are fighting over the local bandwidth. There are some here who say to avoid Virgin, but where I live (DN4) I've had no problems since I first had cable installed in the 90's under Bradford Cable.

I recently had the speed upgrade from 10Mb to 20Mb, a change of modem, and I get a constant 19.0/1.1 or better.

My Broadband Ping

Those are from today, the peaks on the graph will be file transfers, where I've sent data to my niece. Seems OK to me.

There was an article in the news feed of this website a couple of months ago that stated VM had the worst latency\jitter issues out of all those surveyed.

Remember this... VM are going for headline speeds NOT Quality Of Service.

In reply to a post by drummerjohn:

Remember this... VM are going for headline speeds NOT Quality Of Service.

That deserves repeating so I will do so.. (in bold)

Remember this... VM are going for headline speeds NOT Quality Of Service.

Thanks for all your replies - I lam presently with Be who have very good customer support and a decent quality of broadband service. The main issue is I am restricted to around 12mbps. Also, My line conditions are not great - with intermittent low level packet loss. But given your feedback and the overral impression of reading posts on their forum, I think I might be better staying where I am

Don't be put off by a few people who are very vocal about the very real issues they are experiencing.
Do have a look at the VM forums as well as here to get an idea of the sort of problems people do get and how well they are resolved.
But do remember that VM provide broadband services to many thousands of people and only those few who have issues tend to post to boards like this.
I used to be a Demon customer which is why I still hang around here, and it is always good to see what is going on anyway.
I've been with VM for a few years now and just upgraded to their 100/5 package which is running very well (my TBB Quality Monitor shows a very level graph and PS3/Xbox gaming is great) though I was disappointed to only get 100/5 rather than 100/10, just because I ordered after they realigned their products. (My 100/5 is apparently their old 50/5 package with download doubled and upload to be doubled later this year rather than the old 100/10 package which you can no longer get.)
Probably best to check when you order what speeds, both up and down, you'll get.

Thanks I will bear that in mind - ultimately if I decide to go for higher speeds, Virgin is my only option, as my line goes directly to exchange and BT infinity is not an option. Furthermore I live in Chelsea, where the council has refused BT permit ion to instal cabinets - claiming that they are not in keeping with character of the borough. Enough to make you cry!

Edited by deleted (Wed 27-Jun-12 16:27:33)

In reply to a post by Daemon66:

Don't be put off by a few people who are very vocal about the very real issues they are experiencing.
Do have a look at the VM forums as well as here to get an idea of the sort of problems people do get and how well they are resolved.
But do remember that VM provide broadband services to many thousands of people and only those few who have issues tend to post to boards like this.

That sums it up well - the people complaining on forums are the ones with problems - very rare you hear form people who are happy with their service.re, more so when someone says "you only have to look at the forums to see how many are complaining..." Totally unbalanced.

Yes, every provider has areas of bad service, due to local problems. Quite often this is the users, downloading Gigabytes of stuff, running streaming services - there's only so much you can shove down one bit of fibre at a time and it's not always split fairly to give everyone on that node an equal amount.

Where I live is a major town, I'm in a densely populated area with lots of cable customers, but I'm not being affected by poor service. Check with neighbours, do they have cable broadband? If so, what do their speed tests show? Asking Virgin will only get the answer "up to xx mbps", they will not say "you WILL get xx mbps".

You'll find many users of an ISP have slower connections than they should get but don't notice the slowness because they don't game or download huge files.

Also, not everyone with issues will have registered with a forun like this and will just live with it or call the ISP and hopefully get their issue fixed.