Thanks for the reply

I was on upto 8meg service for years, got steady sync at 5+meg down for that period. No problem with Skyping across continents and gaming, and youtube streaming was smooth. Solid DL speeds for game patches and stuff. No issues whatsoever.

Since July I'm stuck at ~2meg after some radio interference from someone down the street is blocking my ADSL signal. I've been forced back to the world of buffering video, slow web page loading, and ping skyrocketing when anyone else in the house is loading a web page. Ironically, last time I had speeds this low, youtube was streaming at ultra-low res so I didn't get buffering from that anyway!!!

BT aren't bothering to investigate/fix it, and O2 don't seem to be interested in chasing it up despite probably 20 or more phone calls about it from me. Worst part is that at the cabinet BT OpenReach tells me the sync speed is 9meg. House is 500m from the cabinet. Sigh.

Thanks so much

Thanks a lot for the info

I'm moving away from Virgin Media as their throttling, terrible latency and jitter, abysmal streaming media peering (as I write this I'm getting 70KB/sec from YouTube) and £30/month subscription are simply not acceptable in 2012.
I've *never* had a good experience with VM for gaming, not even from day 1, and I attempted to get thing rectified for about a month or two initially but gave up when I didn't see anything changing. I bought ADSL with Be for gaming and forgot about it.

Now that FTTC has arrived in my area I'm moving to Sky. A few friends also went with Sky FTTC and say it's excellent, and despite halving my theoretical bandwidth, my throughput and latency should be usable.

I'm in the RG12 postcode area, by the way.

I would suggest you ask your immediate neighbours who have VM for their view. Maybe ask them if you could run a few speed / latency tests. (for the price of a pint).
Make sure they are using a wired connection to their router / modem.

My experiences of VM are very positive with no problem with HD stream from iPlayer or Netflix. Online games play well and no problems with Skype.

It is very much down to you local network segment and how utilised it is.

It is certainly true that a good ADSL line will give better jitter but mine is typically < 7ms.

Some say its good, other say its bad, my personal opinion being on Virgin Media 100MBit, when its good its good, when its bad its terrible. When its good i can connect 4 computers all streaming video while im playing games, and everything is good. When its bad i cant even google. Gaming is out of the question. As other posters state. its very area dependent and its worth going on the virgin media forums to see what news there is for your area, search your post code or town name, and see what error posts there are. For my area there are currently people talking of issues.