Virgin Media - Stay or Leave

Right, for the past 5 years we have been with Virgin Media. The first 2 were fantastic, excellent ping's to gaming servers etc. After that they shot up to 200MS ping times for about a year in which I moaned and moaned at my dad to change package. But he insisted we stay with Virgin as they were so cheap and it did what he wanted it do. Now in the last year they have been acceptable, not like the old 20MS gaming ping's but on average 50-100MS. So I at least do not get kicked from servers.

Now just recently my brothers have gotten into ringing all of their friends mobiles with the landline so our Virgin Phone bills have shot up. Fortunately I have now earned enough respect from my father that I am allowed to choose our broadband package. He is going to get seperate line rental for the phone. His one condition is that once we change I never moan at him again, so I need to get this right and make sure I do not jump ship to an ISP whom is potentially worse/the same as what I am getting now.

I thought I had this sorted as over the last week I have searched and searched and searched. I came up with 3 possible ISP's. Zen, Fast and Aquiss. All of which seemed reputable and I remember when I tried to convince him to change broadband 2 years ago these ISP's were the top back then. So it is good to see some consistency.

So whilst I was at work I had my dad ring up Virgin to obtain our MAC and hand in his 30 days notice for the package. And yup, he gets a ruddy sales man on the phone whom is offering him massive reductions on bills and insisting that our exchange will be upgraded to 24MBP's in the near future. (Latter of 2009) As well as new Virgin packages in July which are supposedly very good value for money.

My dad has still however, left the choice in my hands.

But now I do not know what to do...2 Years ago when I moaned about 200+MS Pings I was told by tech support at Virgin that upgrades were due in 3 months time. I was told this every 3 months for a year! So I am reluctant to believe this guy my dad has just spoken to. Especially as I have just spoken to the virgin technical support myself and they have said there are no plans for upgrades in my area any time soon? Everyone at Virgin seems to have a different story and so I have no idea whether I should stay and hope for the best. Or jump ship, and potentially land paying more for worse broadband and my dad saying...well you had your shot. Put up with it etc.

Any pointers?

P.s. I am insanely sorry for the life story above. Sort of gives you an insight into how worried I am about this situation though. (If you had been nagging your parents for something for this long and you have everyone telling you different things it is very very worrying!)

Reasons for ISP Choices:
#1 Aquiss - Seem to have the best website/price combo. As well as advertising specific gamer packages so if I had a problem with it I could argue with them easier that it is not working quickly for gaming. Virgin always told me "We do not support gaming, we can check your line for faults if you get less than dial up speed though" So I was stuck with my high pings with no real fight back.

#2 Fast.co.uk - Seem to be highly rated on the web. Also their Head Office is based in a village about 4 miles from me, so I could go and knock on their door if unhappy with the service?

#3 Zen - Seem to be the best of the best, pricy though, does not seem as personalised and by the looks of the forums they have trouble monitoring bandwidth correctly...which could be a big issue for me. But they seem to be the biggest and the best. So maybe they are the safest choice for future upgrades.


The main thing is though, I play PC Games and need my line back to the way it was!

<30MS!!!



And a final note, since speaking to Virgin my pings seem to have improved over the last 2 days from 80-100MS to bbc.co.uk down to 40-50MS. More food for thought...

Sorry I did not mean to post that as Anonymous

/Claim above post.

Thanks

Ben

If you tell us your exchange, or better still look it up at samknows and post the link to the result then we can confirm your shortlist or possibly suggest something better.

The Virgin guy is probably talking about BT rolling out WBC (ADSL2+) at your exchange, so several ISPs would probably be able to supply that as well. Sam also shows the current planned WBC date.

Do you know the connection/sync speed? Or better still the router stats. Have a look here if you don't know how to get them.

Hey thanks for the quick reply,

Exchange is "Liphook". And wow, 21CN PSTN switchover target: Q4 2009. Maybe the man did have some truth in his words. Not quite WBC, is there much of a difference between PSTN and WBC? (I will google it in a second actually)

ADSL
Type Interleave
Status No Defect

Downstream /Upstream

Data rate
7616 448

Noise margin
10.3 22.0
Output power
19.8 11.8

Attenuation
22.0 14.0

The router I have at the moment is a Belkin F5D7633UK4A.
I also have a Netgear DG834PN.

360 seems to connect better wirelessly to the Belkin? But anyway that is a different story

Good news and bad news.

You have an excellent line.

21 PSTN is the actual telephone service. The line above it is the WBC date, which is the ADSL2+ 24Mbps service.

So you are stuck with ADSL(1) as there are no LLU suppliers there. Your short list looks good to me, but you need a good idea of how much you download in a month to help you choose the right package. Things can get pricey, especially if you exceed your allowance.

Other possibles are IDNet (very similar to Zen but a few recent troubles it seems), and Newnet if total download and upload is under 20GB as they are cheaper (but I doubt very much if you are under 20GB).

Other possibilities in a couple of months may be an Entanet reseller such as ADSL24 if things get sorted during April as it is hell in there right now, and O2 Access which is also a very bad place to move to at the moment as they are gaining customers rapidly and not got the new kit needed yet to support them.

Remember that getting out from the Virgin connection is a lot more difficult because of the phone bundle. If you get it wrong with those on your short list then you can move again easily as they are only one-month contracts

We have 3 heavy users, into games and browsing the web. Not so much BBC iPlayer. Then the 2 parents whom just like to check their emails to the best of my knowledge.

Currently I have just installed a bandwidth monitor on to every pc and will monitor them over the next week. So long as we average about a GB a day between us we should be fine... With regards to exceeding the allowance, Fast and Aquiss are O-K, both will just cap us to dial up speed with no extra charges, however I may top up if necessary. Zen I have not had the oppertunity to speak to yet.

But my final questions are,
#PSTN/WBC - So from what we see on Samknows, does that suggest the chap at virgin may have been telling porkies?

#Latency - Good line? That sounds good. Does that suggest that if I move to another supplier I should receive a better ping most of the time? 6-12pm are the top priority really. As the chap at Virgin explained that no matter which supplier I was with, I would always get the same ping as it is using the same exchange at the same times. At which point I just went along with everything he said until he let me off of the phone. As I completely refuse to believe that. I thought it was to do with each individual ISP's contention ratio and the style of traffic management they use at peak times?

#ISP Choice - Aquiss's website really sells itself in terms of presentation to a gamer. However if you do suggest otherwise, which would it be? Price is not to much of an issue. As my dad will pay £20 towards Broadband and I will pay the rest. He will then take out his own personal Line Rental with whomever he wishes.

http://www.aquiss.net/broadband-gaming.php

Speaking to Aquiss, during peak times depending on network performance they drop download speeds from say 8MB's to 2MB's. So everyone's ping's are still fine however we just download slightly slower. Virgin seem to just let everyone on at whatever speed they can get resulting in high ping's and slow downloads and massive packet loss

(The guy at Aquiss may have just been a good salesman but he seemed pretty convincing)

Thanks again by the way Rob, your input tonight has definitely proven invaluable!

The guy at Sky could just have been confused about the difference between 21CN PSTN and 21CN WBC like you were. It's amazing how little some of these guys are told or learn for themselves. (I'm being generous to the Sky one and many others. A few are excellent).

It's also possible that they are LLU-ing (putting their own equipment) in that exchange later in the year, I don't think there are any published schedules, though Sam seems to know ones like Be/O2.

Being tired I had actually misread Aquiss as AAISP. AAISP is worth a look at - they have a 3-way split on the day, peak (very small) off-peak quite big and night (unmetered).

Aquiss are an Entanet reseller but currently trialling a new supplier. I haven't seen those gaming packages before. As you say, they look good. If you have been on the phone to them I suggest you ask if those are the new Merula packages or Entanet. Entanet at the moment are bad news as I said, unless thing improve dramatically at the end of the month when their packages change and they have apparently promised more capacity.

You are obviously aware the speeds for the Aquiss package are 8128/448.