[The Installer]

Originally Posted by cat666

Again your missing my point altogether. I'm not making a dig at individuals, but the Virgin service and the tiers as a whole.

30MB is too high to be the basic package. Your average user only needs 10MB, I believe the current UK average is 9MB.In giving everyone 30MB, Virgin have choked there own network, and also appealed to more new customers which has made the strain worse. How many of the people who have been freely upgraded to 30MB would have had that service if there was a cost involved? They would have sufficed, and have been more than happy with, a solid 10MB connection.

No point missed here.

You said and i quote:

In both these cases people should be paying for the increased bandwidth and not expecting it for free. If you feed a family of 4 then you buy a bigger pie, you don't expect the standard pie to stretch.

So as i pointed out to you, people have got three tiers of service to choose from, and the one with the higher speed costs more than the lowest tier, with the lowest speed. So where in that have i missed your point?

You are now saying that Virgin shouldn't have a 30meg tier as this is too much. Says who?

Virgin sell products of their choosing and in a competitive market, it makes no difference if the average user gets or uses 9meg, so what?

If as you have pointed out, service is awful in your area, chances are you already had the problems way before the speed upgrades started, granted the upgrade might have made things more noticeable, but then again you might have just had a load of new users jump on the network in your area too due to a sales push or something.

As I said before, you might think that a 10meg connection is all people need as it is all you require, but not everyone uses the internet in the way you do. You can not say you should have this as a minimum, Virgin are the ones who decide what the minimum tier is and as I said in my last post to you, how Virgin decide to sell their products and operate their network is a different argument and one which I’m sure has been debated many times before on here and is one I’m not going to get into as it’s pointless.

[cat666]

Originally Posted by mossy2103

And he gets traffic-managed to 50% for 5 hours.

Except that he will be traffic-managed for 5 hours at a time, halving his speeds for the duration, and again when he next triggers STM


And not every user is going to be a relative of Mr F Sharer.

Traffic management means next to nothing to him. If he was happy with a 10MB line a 50% reduction of a 30MB line gives him 15MB still.

I'll agree that not every user is going to be doing as much as him, but as Tesco say "Every little helps" or in this case hinders. If people all stream at peak times then the network will snare up. If the majority are on 10MB then it takes 2 times as long as if the majority are on 30MB i.e more time for the network to cope. It essentialy creates a bottleneck.

[cat666]

Originally Posted by The Installer

No point missed here.

You said and i quote:

So as i pointed out to you, people have got three tiers of service to choose from, and the one with the higher speed costs more than the lowest tier, with the lowest speed. So where in that have i missed your point?

You are now saying that Virgin shouldn't have a 30meg tier as this is too much. Says who?

Virgin sell products of their choosing and in a competitive market, it makes no difference if the average user gets or uses 9meg, so what?

If as you have pointed out, service is awful in your area, chances are you already had the problems way before the speed upgrades started, granted the upgrade might have made things more noticeable, but then again you might have just had a load of new users jump on the network in your area too due to a sales push or something.

As I said before, you might think that a 10meg connection is all people need as it is all you require, but not everyone uses the internet in the way you do. You can not say you should have this as a minimum, Virgin are the ones who decide what the minimum tier is and as I said in my last post to you, how Virgin decide to sell their products and operate their network is a different argument and one which I’m sure has been debated many times before on here and is one I’m not going to get into as it’s pointless.

I don't get why you are not understanding what I am saying.

Virgin are offering a baseline service which is more than the network can cope with in large areas across the UK. It doesn't matter that there are 2 others tiers. The lowest tier, for the cheapest money, is causing problems for thousands of customers across the country regardless of what tier they are paying for.

Thats it, thats my point, backed up by forum posts on VM's own boards with replies from VM staff admitting UBR issues.

Admittedly I then went off on a bit of a tangent with possible solutions, and my view on the tiers, but the main point is there.