Virgin Media Broadband (non cable)

Given that Virgin Media hasn't been with us that very long (and accurate data isn't largely available), I would like to ask what people think about the speeds for non-cable enabled area broadband? I'm currently with demon and I'm thinking of changing. For the past year, tests via thinkbroadband.com have shown me speeds of up to 2.8mbps... even though I have a connection of 7.6mbps!

Thank you.

Edited by whthdk (Sat 24-Feb-07 14:12:30)

My brother is very happy with VM(cable) but he lives in the Bristol area.Other places may be different.

A lot depends on the exchange and whether Virgin Media connect you via IPStream or Datastream, we do see people complaining more about large swings in speed between peak and off-peak times with Virgin Media non-cable (old name Virgin.net)

The 2.8 when connected at 7.6 may be done to the IP Profile setting which you can check via www.speedtester.bt.com but NOTE that site is busy and works best around breakfast time

I've had a lot of problems with Virgin.net. Their ADSL Max service was running at dial up speeds last November and I was advised to switch to their 2Mbps datastream product. I've been reasonably happy with this until this week.

I'm of the opinion that Virgin Media's advertising campaign has borne fruit and the new punters are now clogging their bandwidth. My 2Mbps service is now running very erratically, and at peak times it's running at about 400kbps.

I've just spoken to one of Virgin Media's managers and, even though he couldn't come straight out and say it, reading between the lines, he seemed to confirm that they are having contention issues with their services.

It's typical of Virgin that they are selling bandwidth that they don't yet have online, and in the process frustrating existing customers.

My advice would be to ignore the hype and look for an ISP other than Virgin Media.

Have a look at the Virgin boards and I doubt you will find many happy customers - I appreciate people only post when they are unhappy but it's the type of posts that is worrying - lack of bandwidth seems to be a very common theme.

I'm an ex Virgin customer btw, albeit a long time ago.

Blue

Edited by deleted (Sat 24-Feb-07 20:02:12)

I am not expecting it to be anything special ultimately it will have the same limitations as other forms of adsl and just be another adsl provider.

Virgin was very bad up till a couple of weeks ago when the service slowly started improving.

At one stage a month ago peak time speeds on 'up to8Mb service) were down below 100kb at times.

However last night I was still getting 750kb+; not brilliant but still perfectly usable for most applications.

2 to 3Mb this morning, not too bad at all.

However, remember that a lot of ISPs are having this overload problem, so be careful if you are thinking of switching, you could end up worse, and be bound to a 12 month contract.

Mike.

Thanks all for your comments. Very useful. I think I'll wait and compare a few more.