Be Excellent To Each Other

We've got a thread about this already, but it's two years old.

Anyway, I want the fuck-off great big 50MB virgin broadband connection when I move house. Do they shape / throttle your traffic if you download ("Linux Distros" - Ed) from ("torrentz.com - no, wait..." - Ed)?

Anecdotally it depends, most pals in Glesga say it's throttled to fuck in the evenings till sometime after midnight (that sounds more like congestion to me though). However a pal in Edinburgh reckons she's consistently getting the whole shebang.

IIRC Virgin have a FUP too.

Apparently, if you carry out a successful DoS attack against a site hosting images of the prophet, you get 100 virgin torrents.

I'm on 10Mb and I get throttled in peak times, unlimited after like 7 or someshit. The 50Mb is supposed to be completely unlimited with no restrictions like back in the old days. I haven't got first hand experience, though. Definitely says on the website it's uncapped.

I have the 20meg package and it throttles the shit out of torrents in the evening. Sadly it also throttles the shit out of everything else too.

Virgin are shit. The download speed wasn't great and yes it gets throttled to buggery during peak times. I'd look at the area you're moving to and see how many people are on the nearest Exchange and whether they've moaned about virgin already. Avoid studenty areas at all costs on virgin.

Virgin were brilliant for a while, but as they gained popularity here they turned to utter, unreliable shit. I got fed up eventually, installed a BT line and dropped 16Mb to escape them. I still don't regret it.

It did seem heavily throttled in the evenings.

I don't have any experience of them recently, but I was on Blueyonder 20meg a few years ago and it was largely fine. I experienced the occasional outage but generally it was fast and reliable. Once Virgin took over those outages became more frequent and the customer support was non-existent. And by more frequent, I was personally suffering a complete loss of internet for 2-3 days out of 10 and they were fucking useless with their support. As I said to Doccy G at the time, problems I can deal with, but if I'm paying for a premium service I expect a premium service - it would have been more acceptable if it were cheap, but I was paying £30 pcm for a service that was probably delivering what it said on the tin about one day in five and was frequently falling over completely.

I can't recommend Virgin.

I've been with Comcast, ntl and subsequently Virgin since the late nineties, and although they have their moments, I honestly don't have any complaints about them. Their interwebs service is great. It goes down every few months for a few hours maybe, but I'd be surprised if that didn't happen elsewhere. Yeah, I get capped to 1Mb if I download over 1.5GB before 7PM, but after that I get full 10Mb with no restrictions, and as I say, the 50Mb package doesn't have those capping rules. It's 100% all of the time. Can't say I've ever noticed it being slow either, except when I've been capped for downloading too much.

Always get my full 20mb apart from when I exceed daily limits and then I get throttled but only for the rest of that day. This rarely happens and I download quite a lot of demonstration videos.

50mb is not throttled though and I have known a few people on it who were completely unfettered and able to download whatever they pleased, I have also read reports that in some areas you don't get anywhere near the 50mb though so it might be worth looking at cable forum and seeing what people are saying about your location.

I believe Virgin throttle you in the following way:-

If you download a certain amount, between a certain time, your broadband speed will then be dropped by 75% for 5 hours.

After that, it'll return to normal.

As for how much you can download, I don't know.. but there's a handy graph on their website I've seen.

I'm currently getting 10% packet loss on my virgin ADSL. Have been for ages. Asked the landlord to complain :/

Back when I lived in Manchester I had Virgin cable. It was terrible. I used to get 500ms pings to everywhere :/


Grim, if you're going to 50mb, you might want to have them prove to you that you can get above 20mb. Otherwise, what's the point other than the lack of traffic shaping? (FYI: they don't traffic manage the XXL package). Also, cable sucks for uploading. It seemed like every time I uploaded a single little packet, my download speed would drop to an sixth of what it just was

You only get throttled for four hours from the moment you went over your limit, not the rest of the day. Just thought I'd clarify that in case anyone thought it was extra draconian.

This doesn't sound like the Virgin I've used. Having said that, what was Virgin in your area before they bought it out? I was ntl, which was always really good. Were you Blueyonder or whatever? Maybe that's where the differences lie? I know for a fact 50Mb round here genuinely is a solid 50Mb, but obviously people are reporting that elsewhere this isn't the case, so yeah, Grim... I'd try to find out what the service is like where you're moving if there are such huge regional variations with customer service and quality.

It subdivides even further than ntl and telewest. Back in the late 90s/early 00s, Telewest and ntl went on a big buying spree and bought up a whole load of smaller cable companies. Remember Comcast, Johnny? In most places, the cables dates back to the pre-buyout phase and are almost all copper from the cab to the kerb (or house, natch) so it can depend on who installed the loop initially.

DISCLAIMER: All the above is half-remembered from when I used to work for ntl and may not be accurate.

I think Nynex were the ones who installed the cables here.

Yeah, I was Comcast, as was all of Teesside IIRC, and we get good service here! So perhaps it is down to the original cables laid by each separate little company.

All of Teesside was cabled up by Murphy over the course a few years in the mid 90s. I reckon they did every inch of every street. Except Ingleby Barwick, oddly.

They sure did! They did the path outside my house twice. It still has the scars. Useless cunts.

They dug up my street within a couple of years of it being entirely re-surfaced. It's still scarred to fuck now, over a decade later.

I recall a lot of people moaning about it at the time. They're notable by their absence now, though. Probably streaming HD porn on their 50Mb lines, the hypocritical bastards!

I have no complaints whatsoever about Virgin, in general and especially on their (excellent, for me) broadband, and I've had the 50mb package for about eight months now.

A/S/L?

No, wait.

L?

When I moved in it was Virgin. Had been for years by that point. I think we had NTL written on the white boxes, so I guess them

It's in.



Cor.

Holy fuckballs.

YEEAAHH!

I'm really tempted to upgrade, but I'd just fill my HDDs up with stuff I don't have time to... consume.

edit: Not a completely terrible upload speed, either.

Fuck me sideways

I think a better measure would be what the numbers look like around 20:30 this evening.

Yes indeed.

Excellent

Only pay for 10

I legally acquired the 1080p version of Avatar this afternoon in 3.5 hours, which is pretty much fast enough to stream it.

That's rather nice.

Woo

I'm on up to 8mb from O2. It costs £7.50 a month.

This is what I just got:

Ha! Beat you by 0.01!

my ping is better

My distance is closer... (Even though I actually live about 90 miles away from Manchester )

Still, it's good to know we're getting what we pay for! High 5!!

Virgin just rang to "make sure I was getting the best deal".

"Do you really need our 50MB unlimited service? Our smaller ones are cheaper."
"I'm fairly sure I do, yes."
"Let's just look at your usage last month... You downloaded... Oh."
"Oh?"
"1.5 terabytes."
"Ha!"
"I think we'll leave that in place, then."

The traffic shaping on virgin is starting to annoy. After 1.5gig during peak hours, 25% speed. It's like they want me upgrade

That seems quite reasonable, to be honest. 1.5gig is a lot.

I know there's a reason for it, but it's still annoying.

And the throttling stays in place for ages, too

Funnily enough, I just upgraded from 10Mb to 20Mb for an extra £2 a month - literally 10 minutes ago. 3.5 GB usage cap in-between peak hour times I can't remember, which is damn reasonable. After 9PM you can do what you like of course. Was tempted by 50, but it was an extra tenner rather than £2. They're also upping the upload speed of 50 to 5Mb from 1.5 Grim..., in case you didn't know, which is aces. And they're rolling out 100Mb now too.



They reset my modem and upped my speed literally the second I put the phone down. Ahhh.

I am in the 100MB queue

Sweet!

1.5TB in a month.

Fuck.

Well, it does a full backup of my servers every night, for starters. I doubt that helps.

£2 a month extra you say...