5punk

TL;DR: Virgin are doubling thier internet speeds. All of them. Gods balls, that'll be some fast internet.

One thing I don't quite get though: They say they will be "at least doubling" the speed of all their packages, apart from the one that is currently 100Mbps, which will be going up to 120Mbps. But that means that their second fastest currently available, 50Mbps, will be going to at least 100, meaning the difference between the two to speeds will drop from 50 to 20Mbps. 50 currently costs £15/month, whilst 100 costs £35. That's pricing that makes sense: about double the cost for about double the speed. But double the cost for less than a quarter as much again sounds like an almighty rip off to me. I cant see them upping the cost of the 50 package to bring it in to line, but that means they either have the top speed stupidly priced, or they have to reduce the price of their top speed at the same time as speeding it up. Which I cant see their executive types loving either. Its going to be interesting to see what they do end up doing.

I wish we could get anything like that where I live. DSL at the moment is max'd out at 6Mbps. Cable can get up to 20 or so in the best circumstances.

I have 1.5Mbps. Annoyingly the town 4 miles away has Virgin's fastest cable. It's hardly news, but we* really should be ashamed of our infrastructure.

*Well, we are. The government isn't.

I'm getting between 13-20Mbps on virgin national in the city centre, but it's been dropping to about 3Mbps at the busiest times, which is a bit of an arse.

Hopefully they'll actually increase the service area as their next move, now they've leapt ahead in speed again.

I could be rong, but I think they are just talking cable, not adsl.

Joose wrote:I could be rong, but I think they are just talking cable, not adsl.

Well channel bonding is applicable to both cable and adsl. But I would imagine it'll be the cable services they're talking about as fitting extra cable in pre-supplied areas is easy, not so much with adsl phone infrastructure unless bt stop being badger felchers.

Joose wrote:I could be rong, but I think they are just talking cable, not adsl.

Almost certainly, as past 24mbit you're looking at line bonding, and retarded money.

I remember the day my mate got a dual isdn line fitted.

We all went round and abused the connection with games of command and conquer tiberian sun. Then his dad got the bill...

I am on cable. Might make up for their shite customer service.

I've found Virgin customer service a big improvement over NTL who they took over from, but that isn't saying very much. At least the support number is free from a Virgin phone line, so it's less annoying when you are on hold for ages.

I'm on 20M with them at the moment, which they offered to up to 30M if I bought one of their new modems - I would guess that's still a prerequisite for increased speeds, but don't know how much if anything they will charge for them, but I could end up with a 200% increase if I timed it right.

The major percentage of my downloads are games over Steam and what I've got now is fast enough for that with most big games only taking an hour or two, iPlayer and similar on-demand stuff through the cable box uses the cable rather than the modem so is much faster anyway. The only thing that is slow are PS3 downloads, but that's because of PSN, not my broadband.

I like how the sign is flicking the Vs to that abandoned building, but I don't think it is holding that mouse correctly.

Dog Pants wrote:

I am on cable. Might make up for their shite customer service.

^ This, got 30mb :}

FatherJack wrote:I've found Virgin customer service a big improvement over NTL who they took over from, but that isn't saying very much. At least the support number is free from a Virgin phone line, so it's less annoying when you are on hold for ages.

They certainly were a crapload better when they first switched, but I've found recently its gone back to just being crap. I don't mind call centres in places with accents, as im pretty good at deciphering them, but there seems to be an annoying trend recently to have really shit microphones at the call centres. Either that or people are sitting several meters away from their headsets. Or whispering, or something. I have to turn my phone volume up way loud to be able to make them out.

Its not just Virgin that has this, I had a similar problem with my mobile contracts helpline a while back too. Speak the fuck up, people.

But yeah, I remain firmly convinced that the only logical reason to not use cable for your internets is because it isn't available where you live.

I found that Blueyonder was cheaper, and would upgrade you quite regularly. Virgin upped the prices and cut back on the upgrades, so from a personal perspective, I think the service is shitter now.

On the plus side, I haven't once been capped or had a letter asking me to stop sweeping the floor.

Which is nice.

On the mention of Virgin, anyone else had some DNS issues in the last couple of weeks, especially over Christmas?
I ended up switching to OpenDNS again because of it. Much more stable.

buzzmong wrote:On the mention of Virgin, anyone else had some DNS issues in the last couple of weeks, especially over Christmas?
I ended up switching to OpenDNS again because of it. Much more stable.

I use 194.168.4.100 as primary (Virgin) but have 208.67.220.220 (OpenDNS) configured as secondary DNS in my router's config, permanently.

I did have frequent DNS issues with Virgin, which I why I set it up this way, been fine for two years in this config though.

Speedtest gives me 10M now, when it used to average 8M not so long ago, but it has been as high as 16M (though that was News throughput, which compresses well). I was capped a couple of times when sweeping, but I don't do that anymore and it was only ever for a few hours, no nasty letters. On my Dad's BT broadband earlier this evening - around 2MB - it was pretty horrible, but I don't think it's just the raw speed that's a problem, as we were just loading regular web pages. At work I think the whole office shares a single 20M Be connection, but the page loading delay is insignificant.

Latency is the big issue for gamers, but it does impact regular browsing as pages seem to take ages before they even start loading. I get 14ms here, which is almost as good as the weirdy satellite/radio broadband I used to have before which I selected and kept based on that stat, plus my unwillingness to have a BT phone line.

Joose wrote:One thing I don't quite get though: double the cost for less than a quarter as much again sounds like an almighty rip off to me. I cant see them upping the cost of the 50 package to bring it in to line, but that means they either have the top speed stupidly priced, or they have to reduce the price of their top speed at the same time as speeding it up. Which I cant see their executive types loving either. Its going to be interesting to see what they do end up doing.

It's fairly in-keeping with their general pricing as far as I can see - if you want the absolute best, and just check that "give me da bestest" box without particularly checking what you get, they ream you. The 100 package is a limited availability based on your area anyway, so it was a choice between 20 and 50 for most - and the price difference was too much for me to justify it.

Then, the 100 in some areas kind of muddied the waters, as well as the 20->30 upgrade offer if you bought a new modem. Now, with supposed doubled speeds it get even more complicated, the 2x30 package looks pretty appealing over the 2x20 one, with the 2x50 and 100+20 looking less like good deals in terms of speed/cost.

Of course, actual speeds have still yet to be determined, and they only really guarantee that you will experience actual average speeds better then the quoted speed of the next package down - so perhaps only equate to [no guarantee] for 2x10, 20 for 2x20, 40 for 2x30, 60 for 2x50 and 100 for 100+20 - which as the observant will note is pretty much what we already paying for as promised by the current quoted max speeds! The only improvement (following this logic) is that the higher-end packages now achieve actual speeds closer to their previously-advertised ones.

FatherJack wrote: Speedtest gives me 10M now, when it used to average 8M not so long ago, but it has been as high as 16M

Wait, are you on virgin cable or virgin adsl? Because I've been on cable in...four different places now, and one of the things Ive always liked about it over adsl is that I've always got what I paid for, according to speedtest. I'm on the 50M now, and according to speedtest I'm actually getting 51. When I was on 20, I used to average about 19.5. If you are on cable, getting half what you are paying for, I would put money on something not working right somewhere along the line.

I am looking forward to 100mb speeds :D i hope they also double upload rate as well. And i also hope that they don't use this as an opportunity to sneak in download caps etc like they did last time they did a speed upgrade....

Joose wrote:

FatherJack wrote: Speedtest gives me 10M now, when it used to average 8M not so long ago, but it has been as high as 16M

Wait, are you on virgin cable or virgin adsl? Because I've been on cable in...four different places now, and one of the things Ive always liked about it over adsl is that I've always got what I paid for, according to speedtest. I'm on the 50M now, and according to speedtest I'm actually getting 51. When I was on 20, I used to average about 19.5. If you are on cable, getting half what you are paying for, I would put money on something not working right somewhere along the line.

^ this
I reliably get ~49 of my 50mb.

At my parents house they used to get half speeds, it turned out the old NTL modem they were using couldnt handle the increased line speed and was a bottleneck. Routers can also be a bottleneck.
Try plugging a PC directly into your modem (ensure firewall etc is enabled), and run the speedtest again. If still b0rked, get virgin on the case.

I'm almost certain this is my fault, then. I'd kind of assumed that half-speeds were the norm, and since it's mostly fast enough, I haven't investigated, but I guess I could save some money by dropping to the lower tariff.

My setup is a little convoluted, as it dates back to when I had two internet connections, one coming in upstairs by my main PC the other downstairs and across the house by the TV. As a result the data (now) travels from the Virgin modem downstairs, up the stairs to the dual-WAN router (which I used to have to use for two connections, but really don't anymore) and into the PC. I also goes into another PC, back down the stairs to feed the Playstation and other stuff via a cheap switch, into a cheap wireless router which the Wii runs off, and into the office in the front room with another wireless router and a few PCs.

It's probably not ideal.

I do get a line quality of A at http://pingtest.net/ but accept that some of my internal devices may well be letting me down, so the PS downloads being slow might not be PSN's fault after all. The Virgin modem looks ancient though, so it may need replacing, I'll shove a laptop up it and see what I get.

My money would be on the router. I had serve connection issues, rang support, and their fix was to turn off the firewall function...

dual wan router eh? what make/model? they may list throughput speed capability.
in any case still worth seeing what you get straight from the modem before fiddling with anything.