Ofcom thinks virgin is the best
hankmoody
Posts: 1,590 Forum Member
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http://www.techradar.com/news/internet/ofcom-broadband-tests-put-virgin-media-top-620092
Quite interesting really, I'm curious what everyone's reactions will be.
Quite interesting really, I'm curious what everyone's reactions will be.
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Had it go to a snail pace about 3 times since I've had broadband.
I was 10 years with AOL and lost connection about 4 times, been with VM 6 months and have lost count the amount of times i have lost Broadband last i remember was about 7 times in the 6 months.
Trouble is if BB goes down you tend to loose 2 services as the TV goes as well.
Somehow unless things improve i don't think i will be continuing with VM after my 12 months is up.
I am some distance from the BT exchange and my ADSL experience was less than stellar. Whereas with Virgin I get the full 20Mb quota and because I don't download like a loon, I've never been STMed.
I'd give Virgin 8/10, knocking off 2 points for the 'pot luck' situation when contacting Virgin support, which to be fair are probably no worse than BT.
When I lived with my mate, our 20mb never went down once. Although we went on the trial for 50mb and that was up and down but meh it was a trial.
When I brought my own home a few years back and got 20mb. Its never....touch wood.... been down for more than 1 once and that was a general postcode fault too.
So in all, ive been with Cable now for 10 years? Dunno, and had 2 actual cases when its been down. Luck?
No, I honestly think that's honestly the rule more than the exception - which to me makes the complaints I see more confounding.
Am getting 51.68 Mb/s at the moment.
http://www.speedtest.net/result/527037758.png
Personally I have had VM/NTL/cable for years and have not even had one outage. My speed is constantly above 9 on a 10Mb connection.
No way I would change to ADSL for any money...
Speed is usually great, almost always get atleast 75-80% of the advertised speed. Living in an urban area (Dudley)
Ive been with VM/Telewest for 10 years now, and i rarely lose the connection. Say on average once every 2-3 months for a few minutes, or once every year or 2 it goes down for usually no more than a few hours.
Something which nobody on internet forums seems to realise, is that the NTL/Telewest ducts are usually no more than a foot deep below the tarmac in the streets. BT's under-ground cables/ducts are atleast 2 or 3 times as deep, AND alot of their network is overhead.
So when the road worker guys are digging up the roads or paths, theres alot more chance of them hitting a VM cable than a BT cable. And it wasnt the cable companies that laid those ducts, they paid the the local councils and contractors who dug the roads up and laid the ducts. All the cable companies did was put their cables into the ducts.
I work on road street lighting, and believe me, things in the ground are constantly getting hit. I personly bet that atleast half of the reason parts of VM's networks keeps going down is because of road workers and rats damaging the cables.
What Ofcom should do is bring in a minimum acceptable speed policy, so if someone is on an 'upto' 10 meg connection they should get a minimum of 9 meg.
They should also think about banning the 'upto' term as it's just another crappy get out clause.
Lets face it, broadband in the UK is years behind most countries.
Compared to the AWFUL service I had with BT, Virgin are like a godsend. With BT, the customer service was never good, and my 8mb speed (but really 5mb) dropped to 1mb every night for no reason. The upload speeds were poor for online gaming as well. The home hub router was alright for me though, I give them that.
I just got one there.
they strike swiftly and without warning and are REALLY starting to annoy me.
Impossible to get faster than 75% of your rated TCP/IP speed....
Not sure I understand that. The poster is on the xxl 50mb tier?
If he had said "it is impossible to _average_ more than 96% of your rated speed", I might be inclined to call that a reasonable rule-of-thumb
OK. Thanks.
When i was with aol talk talk (for freelaptop) sometimes outages lasted whole weekends and speed was at best 2-3MBit dispite having full 8MB connection to the BT exchage rubbish sometimes it could not mange to pay any video's on youtube
So Virgin BB 10/10
Plusnet 8/10 and
AOL UK Owned by TalkTalk 2/10
If you have a 50Mbps pipe then TCP/IP data overheads means you can only actually get ~75% of that.
I don't know how long a VM packet is, I suspect its the MTU Ethernet standard of 1500bytes. But once on the Internet it may drop.
I wrote my own Speed test script and I get 16,267,830 bits/sec (15.5Mb/sec) at a average latency of 15ms from fetching a large file from a a VirginMedia Server.
I'm on 20Mb/sec pipe so 75% is ~15Mb/s
So my pipe is performing quite well.
If anyone wants a copy of the script, just ask.
It's a good and quick way to know if your pipe is working well. It's just a Batch script and a cmd-line program called Curl.