How is Virgin Media Broadband these days?

[wrenaudrey]

I use to be on broadband through the telephone line with VM, they were great then, iirc i was getting 20-24Mb/s down all the time. It was only two and a bit years ago that I pestered my local VM store to survey my street and try to put down a fiber line. And they did exactly year from this month.

Ever since, i've always got what i paid for 32Mb/s down and around 1-2.4Mbs up.

And i have to agree with the other people in here, the SuperHub is shite. I have another router i bought when i was still on broadband via teleline (a Netgear DGND3700) but i havent quite had the time to play around with it with the SH and tbh, i dont really know what im doing.
Speeds im getting on WiFi through SH with an iPhone 5 is variable, anywhere downstairs full speed 28-30Mb/s. I go upstairs, im down to 12-14Mb/s. It's horrible.

+With VM going up to 152Mb/s, im getting a free bump to 50Mb/s down soon, super happy

 

[SuB]

Speed is usually fine, but when they do these blanket "everyone gets a speed upgrade" promos, the latency tends to go completely to shit.

You won't notice it on speedtest, but when streaming youtube it will stall a lot, and playing things like Battlefield will show it up a tonne, loads of rubber banding and shit.

Apart from that problem for maybe 4 months after they upgrade the speeds.. they're usually fine.

Their support staff are shit though, jussayin'

 

[barnsley]

I'm terrified of the speed upgrade because the network infrastructure in my area is already knackered as it is...

 

[iBeInspire]

Superhub is shit, but the service itself is excellent... I do alot of downloading TV shows, movies and the like - girlfriend's a movie freak - and the 60mb/s down is brilliant. only get 4mb/s up, but don't do much uploading so no real biggy

 

[SuB]

I'm terrified of the speed upgrade because the network infrastructure in my area is already knackered as it is...

Yeah wave your connection quality goodbye fella, also good luck trying to explain the difference between bandwidth and actual speed / latency to people at Virgin media.. I couldn't even get the problem recognised by a senior (and he sounded old/experienced) engineer..

Unfortunately it's impossible, because they see 120Mb/s and think wow that's fast SPEED.

Yes that's great THROUGHPUT per second, but if the LATENCY (actual speed it takes for A to get to B) is crap or even SLIGHTLY inconsistent for any great length of time... then there's no point in trying to play games.

AAAAAAAARGHGHGHGHG

 

[Squidlorock]

Fluffy bunnies Sub, think of the fluffy bunnies!

 

[Damien c]

Yeah wave your connection quality goodbye fella, also good luck trying to explain the difference between bandwidth and actual speed / latency to people at Virgin media.. I couldn't even get the problem recognised by a senior (and he sounded old/experienced) engineer..

Unfortunately it's impossible, because they see 120Mb/s and think wow that's fast SPEED.

Yes that's great THROUGHPUT per second, but if the LATENCY (actual speed it takes for A to get to B) is crap or even SLIGHTLY inconsistent for any great length of time... then there's no point in trying to play games.

AAAAAAAARGHGHGHGHG

Hopefully with the works that are going on around the country with splitting the nodes, this should all get fixed it just depends on whether they have got round to your area yet or not.

Where I live they have not started it yet but I am sat currently just on the other side of the office from, the guy doing the planning for my area and he reckons it will be ready to be released for the work, to start taking place within the next 6 months.

I don't have a issue at the moment with mine though, and he has been told to prioritise certain areas due to the network load in those areas.

Hopefully that is going on all around the country.

I do understand how it feels though because I had the same issue with rubber banding and lag spikes in games, and I tried explaining it to CS and they just looked at me like I was talking in another language.

 

[barnsley]

Yeah wave your connection quality goodbye fella, also good luck trying to explain the difference between bandwidth and actual speed / latency to people at Virgin media.. I couldn't even get the problem recognised by a senior (and he sounded old/experienced) engineer..

last time they did a "SPEEEEEEEEEEEEED" upgrade I suddenly had 200ms on servers that would have 15ms before hand. To be fair it did settle down to 30ms.

Around here they're idiots and should fix the infrastructure before doing 'upgrades'. Its like fitting a huge turbo to a lawnmower engine. It just won't work and it'll need to be repaired constantly. Oh and while they're at it, bandwidth that isn't like circa 2004 would be nice.
Meanwhile my friend who is with BT gave him a free small business switch-thing when one of the ports on the BT hub thing didn't work. He also gets proper download speeds for everything, can support 8 pcs gaming online(we do our LANs at his) and has nice-ish upload. Even city wide the internet is so bad (despite many big companies having big business here). ARM's headquarters are here for example.

Good job Virgin, good job.

 

[Ghosthud1]

Guess im lucky to not encounter any of these issues, upload capping has stopped me from streaming which is saddening, but i'm getting the 152 package very soon which should remedy that. Other than that, ping has been excellent and download/upload speeds have been very consistent. Guess my area isn't too saturated right now.

 

[QuietOne]

I see what you mean about the superhub. I have Superhub 2 and the minute the engineer leaves, the superhub dies. There's nothing. So I now have a giant paper weight.