I'll be surprised if it delivers at peak times, but that said, BT/Sky think my 1.6mb service is adequate because there's no exchanges nearby.

The UK average is 3.6mb apparently, well, I think this is down to 50%+ getting very fast connections and the rest getting sub 512k speeds.

Everyone where I live is surprised I can get 1.6mb, they're hovering around 1mb.

Speaking of Virgin though, Cable doesn't exist where I am and virgin aren't cabling any new areas either, so this sucks.

It's going to equate to a split between those who 'can get' fast broadband and those that can't...

"We're in a position of no interference^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hcompetition while we develop^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hsqueeze the pips out of this market.........."

That's better.

Oh, and presumably "Scotland" translates to "some small bits of the less geographically remote parts of Scotland" as well.

Thats what i thinks of the Virgin services, and yes i am presently suffering customer, don't hurry to join this. All you are going to get is disappointment.

Wait for somebody else to start this service, hope everybody will be doing so over the next year

....It is.

50mB broadband would be closer to the mark with a bit of string for the backbone and customer services outsourced from <insert third world country> to <insert name of somewhere else>

The facts, shown time and time again prove you can't have a sensibly priced, well run, unthrottled, profitable broadband service in the UK.

50Mb, great. But they can't even supply 10Mb very well, not even 2Mb. As soon as you've downloaded your daily allowance you're capped to 75% of that speed. Why not first try and deliver a service that is 10Mb 24/7 ?

Nobs will be queuing up to be the fastest on the block. Within 6 months they will be whinging on the forums that they're running at dialup speed for 23 hours a day and have used up their allowances after 20 minutes.

5o mb connections are as useful as tits on a bull.

(Bill 'cos you don't have the bearded Branson)

Still waiting for something to be sorted out since August.

They keep writing to me about a Customer's invoice. Does not affect my credit rating as I am not even a Virgin Media customer. No chance of ever becoming one after this demonstration of their abilities.

What difference will potential speed increases make if their administration continues to be this incompetent?

What sort of Customer Support hides its phone and fax numbers, even on their own letter-headed paper?

How long before Branson stops his brand name being sullied?

Answers on a postcard, please.

I'm with Virgin, I have the lowest tier of BB, 2Mb I think.

Apart from the very occasional large download, new linux iso or something of steam I can't think of any reason I 'need' faster access.

Most downloads are things I start, and then walk away from, they're finished when they're finished. Access to the web, voip, even video on demand isn't going to be affected greatly by faster access, it's already fast enough.

So I can't see any compelling reason to pay for more than the minimum they provide.

... about Virgin Media before, but i'm starting to accept that this is the way things are. Metered / throttled usage is their fault for over-selling, but jumping on your soap box won't all of a sudden provide them with the billions of pounds needed to build the infrastructure required to give everyone their full bandwidth allowance 24/7. Pipe dream, it is. Plus, that kind of allowance isn't economically sound, as for 8 hours of the day you're at work, and another 8 hours you're asleep. That's 2/3 of the day with negligible usage.

What you REALLY want is full speed at peak times. Goodluckwiththat.

I find their 2Mb connection more than satisfactory. Good uptime, no slowdown at peak times, and even when i've reached my daily cap (slowdown in effect) I can still watch the High Quality iPlayer shows.

Those who need 50Mb, fine. Enjoy. Personally, i'll stay with 2Mb. I don't need a Ferrari to go shopping in town or pick up the g/f, and I don't need 50Mb to check my bank account and watch Merlin.

From your FA:

The "XXL" package will be available to about 40 per cent of the 12.6m premises covered by Virgin Media's cable network by the end of this year, the company said.

From their FAQ:

This month though, we'll be able to sign up around 1.3 million homes

Now it's been a while since I've done any mental arithmetic, but I think "this month" and "the end of this year" are the same thing and 40% would be about 5m and 1.3m would be about 10%.

"Virgin Media opens bandwidth choke for 50Mb launch"

"If you've £51 per month to spare" and are incredibly stupic

"Customers who agree to take £11 per month Virgin Media home phone line rental will be offered 50Mbit/s broadband for £35 per month"

£35 + £11 = £46 / month vs £51 / month.

Is anyone actually going to pay £5 per month NOT to have a phone line?

Personally I think it's a good price for the broadband, even if you have the phone line installed and never use it. Of course I remember paying £40 / month for 512k ADSL from BT and that wasn't including the statutory BT phone line.

Can't wait for it to reach my area.

Assuming the upgrade of the dongle3 thing (or whatever the heck it's called) could quite happily handle every man and his dog downloading 40gb blu-ray movies at peak time and at full speed that still negates the fact its fucking expensive as hell.

Cashing in on the fact no one can offer anything half as good as that me thinks.

Back in the real word you sharen't get a penny more off me until you lift the fair usage bollox. And even then you sharen't get an approved nod in your general direction until you fix the crap speeds during peak time.

And then of course you sharen't get anything off me because quite frankly 20mb is more than enough to fulfill my pirating needs. And believe me I'm a BIG pirate whore.

so you can hit the patheticlly low bandwidth cap and be gimped even quicker! why dont virgin roll out a better sevice on their existing plans before overselling more

– a clear indication of the quality of the service they intend to provide. Stop chasing headline figures and FIX YOUR FUCKING NETWORK.

At least Virgin are trying to develop the broadband product, admittedly to those lucky ones (unlike me) who have cable, whereas what are BT doing... their product development seems to have entirely stopped in 2002 when ADSL Max came along.

Tim#3

so 50mb.. wonder how long that will last... Also Vmedia have been giving all new customer ambit 256 modem which are capable of running DOCIS 3 (50mb and higher)..

Also intresting part as well in Sandwell Area of Midlands they have changed all the TFTP address as well...

Virgin can't even serve the 8MB customers they have - they've got awful peering to other networks and dreadful QOS.

Why would anyone think they can run a 50MB service?

It's like driving a car where the engine can deliver 300 break horsepower but the wheels are blu-tacked on.

You've got to be kidding - i'm still planning on getting a BT line and BE internet installed then say adios to VM.

Other countries do manage to deliver what's on the box. Where I live I pay for 4Mb and get about 4.2, whenever I want it. So it's not true to say that it doesn't make economic sense.

I don't even think I've got a cap, but if I have I've never reached it.

I know it's been said before but they should be made to only advertise what they can guarantee to deliver.

For crying-out-loud why are there so many people on here moaning about Virgin Media's Customer Services? They give you a modem, a box with flashing lights on and an Ethernet socket to the Internet. Occasionally the cable light may flash and you're off-line but it's always working again later. How hard can it be that you need to ring them??

I pay 10 quid a month for the 'unmetered' sky package. Its not that fast due to poor copper/aluminum mix in the local loop, but i dont mind, its not capped.

What i would mind is paying 50 quid a month for 50Mbit and then still getting capped.

There seems to be a hole in everyones maths when it comes to internet speed (everyone being ofcom).. the amount you can download IS A PRODUCT OF THE SPEED.

A download rate of 8 Mbit/s is about 1Mb per second. There are 3600 seconds in an hour so the download limit is 3.6 GB / hour.

The artificial limits imposed are taking advantage in confusion between data transfer speed and the amount you can download. And it seems to suit everyone in the industry to keep this confusion going so they can charge more for giving less.

And according to the website, the upload speed is slipped in the small print as "up to 1.5Mb".

The ratio of ~192kb/s upload speed to a ~6mb/s download speed is absolutely rubbish! I know that most people don't need much of an upload speed but please.. this is just ridiculous. I for one won't be upgrading to this.

Some examples to VM's 50MB/1.5MB: lyse.no offer 50MB/50MB, Ucom.jp offer 100MB/100MB and Verizon.us offer 50MB/20MB.. this seems alot fairer to me. All UK isp's seem to suffer from poor upload speeds, I think it's about time this changed.

No. They won't. I have a very stable ADSL connection, a phone that I pay little for, and cannot get satellite TV (I live in an old Edinburgh tenement - no dishes for us) but Virgin won't just sell me the cable TV. There is no option on the website and apparently you have to get a supervisor to approve it. Pants.

For the package price one could also get 2 BT Phone lines and 2 22Mbit DSL lines which would give you load-balancing and failover, plus a pick of numerous suppliers for the DSL of which there are sufficient who don't throttle.

This doesn't include TV but your options there are a Sky Basic package - the same channels at the same price, Freesat - less channels but free, Freesat HD - less channels but free and some in HD, or regular terrestrial broadcasts - FREE!

Yes, the short piece of fibre between you and the exchange may be running at 50Mb/s but I doubt that the rest of the line is up to it.

Most of my mates are on Virgin and are moving to the provider I use as I get 7.2Mb/s out of an "up to" 8Mb/s line (which will be upgraded to "up to 24Mb/s" in the new year). Thats probably because no-one has heard of cutyourbills.net ;-)

It doesn't matter how much faster the broadband speed is going to be your favorite site will still send you the data at the same speed even those sites that are throttled because they too popular.

As for P2P you may have 50mb download but the guy on the other end will still have a cr@ppy upload speed.

Bunch of useless goits... If you hit the top 5% of users during peaktime on ADSL, then you get capped for the entire next weeks worth of peak time (thats 4pm till 12pm and 8am till 12pm on the weekends). It wouldn't be so bad if you could see this mystical top 5% but nope, one week you download 20gb and your fine, next you download 12gb and your capped. Service is shocking and I really cant wait to get out of their service...

I have a 10 Mbit/sec connection with Virgin and have been a loyal cable customer for over 10 years. Currently and frequently I cannot even obtain 512Kbits/sec and downloading email, for example, is a painfully slow process.

So my question, already voiced above, is what about the rest of us? Will we be banished to an ever poorer service as a result of preferential treatment to the higher speed and bandwidth users?

I am a steady user but not an excessive user and would very rarely hit, or even approach, the published limits before shaping/throttling is supposed to kick in. It is clear to me that Virgin infrastructure is not adequate for reasonable current demands, let alone future demands.

I'm inclined to think that Virgin's 20Mbit and 50Mbit services are a bit of a gimmick at the expense of a satisfactory service to customers on lower speeds which really should still be more than adequate for most users, but are not.

I'm an expat living in Sweden and I have a 100Mb/sec connection from Bredbandsbolaget (one of the larger ISPs here in Sweden) for 320sek per month (£26.60 - using the latest conversion from google). Just another case of rip-off Britain I suspect. I can't see how they can justify prices that are more than double the price of a country like Sweden where most things normally cost slightly more than in Britain, not more than 50% less.

Quote:

"Berkett said upgrades to Virgin Media's broadband network will pave the way for consumers using the internet while watching TV"

Like when I use my laptop while watching TV ?

So a 50MB line which means you will reach the cap even quicker and then be down to a slow crawl same as the rest of us.

When the hell are they going to get round to being able to supply the bandwidth they "claim" to offer on the normal services instead of just headline grabbing.

I guess this means they can oversell what little bandwidth they have even more and complain that people ...shock horror... actually want to use what they have paid for.

No different to buying a pint in your local and being told you have to share it with 5 other customers as the pub has sold more beer than they have.

As they will be incompetent enough to screw it up somehow, not to mention the fact that they still seem to be friends with that spyware company...

Except, they haven't. STM is still applicable to 50Mb, even if their network could cope, which it can't.

As with everything else Virgin do, the end customer is going to get ripped.

"For crying-out-loud why are there so many people on here moaning about Virgin Media's Customer Services? They give you a modem, a box with flashing lights on and an Ethernet socket to the Internet. Occasionally the cable light may flash and you're off-line but it's always working again later. How hard can it be that you need to ring them??"

Because VM's customer service is total shit. As for ringing them, did that 3 months ago, service still fucked. Q.E.D.

VM can offer 100Mbyte a month for nothing.

As far as I am concerned the moment they move off their fence and adopt parasitic Phorm and their spyware webwise crap I will be off.

(Sooner if these 50Mbyte users use up all my tunnel!)

Paris because I am sure she would agree. Bigger is not always better.

My entry level VM 2M connection is always 2.0Mb/s. I've never hit a cap and the one time I called customer service (Scientific Atlanta STB failed) they promptly replaced it with a nice new Pace STB.

VM are far more likely to deliver a viable 50M service than BT, who can't even provide digital TV in some parts of Birmingham - even though they are still selling it.

My 20MB service always runs at 20MB, I never hit the cap during peak times and my speed is that of what is advertised - so what the fuck is everyones problem?

People just moan for the sake of moaning, I think some need to get a life and get out the house than sit in front of the computer crying when they hit a limit and their speed decreases!

I'm going to go for Super Awesome Broadband when I win the lottery, it's only £60 a month and totally unlimited

What's the upload speed - still something stupid like 256K

Nigel

Despite living in West Sussex's capital city of Chichester along with around 30,000 other residents, there's no cable here at all.

I get a bit sick of all these VM adverts telling me to get their wonderful broadband and TV when it's not even available here! Grrr!

what an apt name for the CEO of a bunch of Berks.

VM is a virtual isp , they virtually work, but never in practice.

Me , I never want to use an ISP that traffic shapes, port blocks,

randomly caches stuff, shags around with DNS,

and can't supply a static ip .

So that means I never again want to use virgin media.

Getting 50MB/s of Virgin Media will be like being given a

Bugatti Veyron by your local Traffic Cop, whilst he's waving

his speed gun around. You can try and use, just wait

until we catch you.

It's quite ironic really how a company called virgin, will screw

you over.

Paris, well at least I can dream of being screwed over by her.

I am now about to sound like the old codger in the Life of Brian ( by monty python team) who's been chained up on the wall for years.

"Jon , you lucky BASTARD, you don't know how lucky you truly are, never to have to have dealt with a bunch of useless berks, be grateful that you have to use broadband supplied by someone other than virgin-on-the-ridiculous"

some of us moan because they have found Virgin to be a completely useless bunch of berkish fucktards.

If it was an article about Pipex ( of a few years ago ) or O2 broadband I would be singing their praises.

As it is with Virgin the experience was so bad , I can't . ( Misbilling, threatenning letters, crap service , and yes it was also slow )

I know it's not a very popular view and one you don't hear very often.. but I'm generally happy with my Virgin Media service.

We're on the XXL 20Mb service, actually getting roughly 15-18 in speed tests that we have run. We do (fairly regularly) hit the bandwith cap and get throttled - Which takes us down to about 8-10Mb for a few hours... Which is still faster than any other net service I have had running at full speed. I'd obviously rather not be throttled at all, but I can't complain too much, we are slurping down shed-loads of high-quality video.

Presumably if they run a similar level of throttling on the 50Mb service if we did hit the cap we'd be throttled back to 20-25Mb/s for a couple of hours, returning to full speed once we got outside of peak hours. That's still pretty fast.

I agree that their customer service is a joke, but that's only if you let them fob you off with talking to call-centre bozos in India. Kick-off and demand to speak to someone senior in the UK. We made a fuss and they ended up giving us a different number in the UK to call and now we just ring them if we have a problem and it is sorted right away.

For those that say it's too expensive.. I just checked the BT website and they charge £25 for 8Mb and (I think) you have to have a landline too, so £35 + landline charge seems pretty reasonable for >6x the speed...

I've said my piece, so get it over with and flame me.

My Virgin cable 10Mbits/sec service dropped to 12Kbits/second this evening!

Ugh!!!

Not with Virgin Media you don't!!!!!

But as the service gets in more and more homes the service will be limited. They have to get you on the hook before they can start pushing you around. Once they hook you and make sure they have no competition good luck.

Virgin Media are in bed with Phorm. Until they publicly reject Phorm and the invasiveness and control freakery it stands for, Virgin Media should not be trusted. Virgin Media have had a number of opportunities to reject Phorm but seem hell bent on doing anything for money.

Of course, Neil Berkett wouldn't mention that because the official Virgin Media line is that Phorm is wonderful and everyone should have it.

Ive got talktalk. 8 Mb FREE (inclusive in phone line rental). Never exceeded 40GB. Get around 6.8MB average speed.

Beat that VM ??

Bastards them.......

About time they are forced to share their network to outsiders (like BT), since they have the cable monopoly and competition always good for customers.(R u listening OFCOM)?

switched to virgin about 2 months ago, the most i have ever had from my 20Mb line is 11, QoS is shocking compared to my old provider. vpn during the day crawls, disconnects and is generally very unhappy. General use in evenings is anything between 2 and 10, very rarely over 3 or 4.

I was too lazy to wait 2 weeks for ukonline to setup in new home, wont make that mistake again..

"Plus, that kind of allowance isn't economically sound, as for 8 hours of the day you're at work, and another 8 hours you're asleep. That's 2/3 of the day with negligible usage."

Actually you will probably find that for most of the people who would want 50Mb/s download speed that for the 8 hours they are at work, and the 8 hours they are sleeping the computer is still downloading linux distributions at full throttle.

That is the only reason the vast majority would want / need anything that fast.

I'm looking forward to the distro of Debby does Debian myself.....

Guy at work is running the trial with them, he connects at 50Mb, can sustain continuous connections downloading on Usenet at around 42Mb (seems to be limited by them not Virgin) there is no traffic management at all, speeds are consistent throughout the day, upload speed is around 2.3Mb which is pretty damn quick by comparison to other services.

How much all of that will change when it becomes public is a different story though... but for now, it looks good!

"With a basic cable TV package, "triple play" starts at £66 per month. "You get what you pay for," said CEO Neil Berkett."

Sounds more like "Triple Pay". Shite, that's pricey!

God, you poor fuc*kers in UK are soooooo shafted. Surprised you don't take shares in a Hæmmarhoid cream manufacturer...

Presumably the new rollout is based upon the new Docsis 3 standard of which IPv6 is a component. Hopefully this will mean that customers will be able to get a native v6 connection in the near future without resorting to 6to4, Teredo or a tunnel.

Post after post after post ......

Your reading an IT news site so im guessing your IT literate yet, many posts here seem to understand that ftp/news programs/general download managers usual come with a scheduler. Why is it so dificult to use these? Thats all VM want and seems fair to me.

I'm happily downloading 10 to 20gig files and don't have any problems scheduling this whilst im at work or asleep, after all, why would I want all my bandwidth sapped by downloads when I might actually want it for game playing/fast trailer downloads etc?

Yours,

a VERY happy 20meg user.

"ftp/news programs/general download managers usual come with a scheduler. Why is it so dificult to use these? Thats all VM want and seems fair to me."

You're missing several points. 1, that costs more as you have to leave your modem and computer on all night. 2, the service is atrocious even if you're just surfing during peak hours anyway. 3, they shouldn't sell what they can't provide. 4, their throttling scheme doesn't work as advertised – it cuts in much sooner and lasts much longer than they claim. 5, other ISPs can charge less and still not throttle.

I'm an ex-customer, having been with them for years. Becoming the "ex-" was extremely difficult, involving threats and demands from Virgin, and a constant stream of junk mail from them since leaving, but it was completely worth it. I now pay half as much for a service that's theoretically twice as fast, but in real terms it's actually 4-5x. Anyone who's with Virgin: there really are much better ISPs out there. It's not going to get better. Don't put up with their service!

Tony, since the STM on the XXL 20Mb service drops you to bang-on 5Mb, not 6-8 or anywhere inbetween, you clearly haven't a clue what you're talking about or are blatantly lying. Are you sure your even a virgin customer?

"My 20MB service always runs at 20MB, I never hit the cap during peak times and my speed is that of what is advertised - so what the fuck is everyones problem?"

It helps if you have a fully functioning brain.

If you've never been STM'd then you clearly never use your connection at anytime during the day and evening and as such you can't say that your service always runs at 20Mb!

Why do these moaning VM ADSL customers think they have any idea about the quality of VM's cable service? If you have problems with your 8MB ADSL line, it's probably due to your distance from the exchange or quality of copper on your phone line.

Another very happy 20MBit cable customer here.

...but our old 2Mb connection that they upgraded for free to 10Mb actually hits 10Mb (when you use the right bits of the internet) and it works almost all the time. (i.e. glitches every six months or so)

Also, on the odd occasion that we've had to phone them (someone busted open the fibre cabinet down the road and chucked the remains of a takeaway in it) they've been quite speedy and remarkably non-scripted.

Users who actually use those kinds of download rates usually need a fast upload rate too (ahem).

VM upload rates have always been crappy - and that pitiful amount was ‘managed’ too! I’ve switched from VM (used XL for many years) to Be Unlimited Pro (2mb upload rate alone, never been managed) – wow what a difference, it was the best tech decision I made – more than 2x the performance at half the price!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

50mb D/L means absolutely nothing to me if the upload is still limited to <1mb; I wouldn’t pay £10pm for it.

seems to be that they are still a mish mash of 2 different companies. I am an ex-Telewest customer and think that the service plummeted as soon as it was taken over, however, ex-NTL customers tend to think it was an improvement, for a while anyway!

I am a 10Mb cable customer, and my connection runs at 2.5Mb any time i'm actually home to use it. Just because i actually have the cheek to use the connection i pay for. What do i use it for, occasionally watching TV I also download software updates for my pc/laptops/phone/360 etc. play the odd online game so use steam. do the odd video call.

Anything other than general web browsing and email will make you hit the throttling limit on a daily basis!

If you say so.

Yes - I am a VM customer. I have downloaded >6Gb of video using UTorrent in the past 24 hours (it's still running in fact), my housemate has been downloading too and we have both been browsing as well, so I'm pretty sure I am being throttled right now. I just paused my torrents and ran broadbandspeedchecker.co.uk which reports my current downstream speed as 9064Kb/sec.

I then tried the thinkbroadband.com one and that reported my speed as 10379.98 Kbps

I'm sure you know best though.

I've done 43GiB in 24 hours; in fact I've managed 115GiB (125GB) in 72 hours - that was after I changed from VM [XL] to Be. I've never got anything like that with VM. I'm not trying to show off, I'm merely highlighting how limited VM is. I should know: I was with them for years.

I wasnt bragging about the amount I had downloaded Steve, just illustrating that I was currently being throttled and my speed was still at the levels I reported in my previous post.

Fair doos. I misread the context of your post.

I can’t remember what I was throttled to when I was with VM, but let’s be honest: 5mb (0.6MB/s) on its own is enough for anyone (54GB in 24 hours); but I do remember being pissed off because my tiny upload rate was managed too – that’s what killed the effectiveness.

However, I was able to download waaaaaay more than 6Gb in 24 hours without the cap kicking in (did you really mean gigabit? 6Gb in a day isn’t much more than dial-up speed [not even double]).