Zen vs Virgin

So Virgin Media are currently laying cable in the road and got to thinking whether it is worth a switch.

My download speed has dropped from the low 70s to low 60s over the last couple of years. The street box is ECI so any hope of getting a speed bump is low to non-existent.

My ping has gone up from 8ms to nearly 20ms and at this point I am thinking the 500mb offering from VM might be a good alternative and the ping is likely to be similar.

Thoughts?

Ping is going to depend on where you live and where you want to connect with.

Here in Doncaster the ping on either isn’t much different between either FTTC or Virgin Media, however if you are further South maybe this will change to negatively impact Virgin.

What do you want from your ISP?

Plenty of speed and no care about jitter or support then head to Virgin.
This is one of their NOCs

Preston

An ISP who cares about their network and who from Rochdale would help, then, hello Zen.

Virgin told me during an outage I needed to press alt+f4 on my Windows machine to select a new route via their network.

In reply to a post by clmfsh:

What do you want from your ISP?

Plenty of speed and no care about jitter or support then head to Virgin.
This is one of their NOCs

Preston

An ISP who cares about their network and who from Rochdale would help, then, hello Zen.

Virgin told me during an outage I needed to press alt+f4 on my Windows machine to select a new route via their network.

Hence the question, I had seem some posts about jitter but wanted to see how bad it is. That is not a pretty BQM, mine is in my sig and looks a lot better.

No major complaints with Zen I did have to push when my line went below the expected minimum as "BT will not raise a fault" they eventually reset fastpath on the line and it has held so far.

In reply to a post by gary333:

Ping is going to depend on where you live and where you want to connect with.

Here in Doncaster the ping on either isn’t much different between either FTTC or Virgin Media, however if you are further South maybe this will change to negatively impact Virgin.

Well I am down in the South West so not sure. I was reading that they have just rolled out DOCSIS 3.1, does this improve the situation at all?

In reply to a post by Skilty:

Well I am down in the South West so not sure. I was reading that they have just rolled out DOCSIS 3.1, does this improve the situation at all?

VM are only rolling out DOCSIS 3.1 for download still 3.0 for upload. This allows them to sell the Gig1 service. My area is not yet upgraded.

I am on the Surrey/Hampshire border. Pings to BBC from my M200 connection:

C:\>ping bbc.co.uk

Pinging bbc.co.uk [151.101.128.81] with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 151.101.128.81: bytes=32 time=18ms TTL=56
Reply from 151.101.128.81: bytes=32 time=18ms TTL=56
Reply from 151.101.128.81: bytes=32 time=13ms TTL=56
Reply from 151.101.128.81: bytes=32 time=15ms TTL=56

Ping statistics for 151.101.128.81:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 13ms, Maximum = 18ms, Average = 16ms

If a gamer you will want to keep the Zen connection for actual gaming and use the Virgin one for the large downloads of patches.

In reply to a post by clmfsh:

What do you want from your ISP?
Plenty of speed and no care about jitter or support then head to Virgin.
This is one of their NOCs

Not sure what you are pinging there, but it could be a core router that is ignoring pings and getting on with routing traffic. You can't measure performance of an enterprise router by pinging it.

An ISP who cares about their network and who from Rochdale would help, then, hello Zen. Virgin told me during an outage I needed to press alt+f4 on my Windows machine to select a new route via their network.

If Zen could deliver 200 Mbps download and 20 Mbps upload, I would jump over, similarly to Openreach FTTP. But neither of those are available here. I used to have 40 Mbps download and 2 Mbps upload with Openreach FTTC, so I jumped to cable.

If latency and jitter are more important to you than speed, then don't use cable. If you want speed (e.g. upload for video calling during lockdown) then cable works quite well.

Jitter will be far less on FTTC than Virgin.

This my graph, I'm just south of Birmingham. There's not been much change for the last year or two:

BQM

Just remember that each person's experience will be different depending on which area they live in.