Virgin demands ISPs end broadband speed 'con'

Speed, we all need it.

The link for average speeds is http://shop.virginmedia.com/broadband/about-virgin-broadband/speed-matters.html?buspart=6469 for those wondering.

And very telling it is too. No wonder Virgin want the current practice to stop as it will show their offering in a much better light for cable broadband.

Of cource Virgin ADSL broadband is just as bad as the rest. Wonder if they will lead the way with honest speeds on that ?

So what?

'up to' is technically correct.

'average' is technically correct.

If the punters signing up don't understand the technology then neither nomenclature will help.

Trying to predict and describe network throughput is like trying to predict and describe road journey times. It depends on the end points of the journey, the route you take, what type of vehicle you drive and what time you're driving.

Virgin - the crippled broadband provider

Unless you pay Virgin the top amount for their broadband packages you get what is essentially a crippled service. Their 'unlimited' broadband gets cut to 25% of their advertised service if you exceed a predetermined amount of date in a peaktime period.

i.e. if you watch a few episodes of programs and a movie from iPlayer you will suddenly discover your internet dying. Their cable modem also doesn't deal well with Bittorrent (which is now a legitimate method of getting updates and demos around the web) and essentially collapses your internet connection. Open uTorrent and you can't browse the internet.

Added to this their help centre in Bangalore is a painful experience where I have had the operators lying to me and pretending that they are fading out when they can't answer a question speaking quieter and quieter despite all the voices in the background being clear as day.

I would not use Virgin even if they paid me - they need to clean their own house before they start throwing stones.

Typical

Just checked out that URL and of course, there's nowhere to submit comments politely requesting them to explain their hypocritical, two-faced stance on the issue!

can see why

it is a bit hypocritical of virgin to say that when they do the same but in my experience when virgin say "upto 10meg" they aint far off it all, i'm still yet to have an 8mb connection that yeilds more than 3mb where as on virgin i've always been within 1mbit of its advertised speed.

Paris, because she is also misleading

I get..

8.4 Mb on my up to 10Mb cable connection most of the time. Upload is another thing entirely though, until last week it was a paltry 0.46Mb. In the last week this has doubled to 0.96Mb but its still rather crap.

And the other big con......

UNLIMITED

(*subject to what we consider to be fair use on any particular day)

Either it is UNLIMITED, or it has a LIMIT. It is the difference between a finite number and infinity - the two do not exist in the same numberspace.

Pot, meet Kettle.

I've had Virgin's XXL service for a month now. 50Mb, supposedly. Oh, I'm sorry, UP TO 50Mb.

Have I ever got the 50Mb I'm paying for? Once. Very briefly, on a Sunday morning. Most days my connection wobbles anywhere between 11Mb and 40Mb depending on the time of day and the site I'm trying to access.

I'd hardly call that a satisfactory state of affairs, Virgin, and for you to call on everyone else to stop this "up to" crap just reeks of hypocrisy of the highest order.

And don't even get me started on the bull with them throttling Wow-related traffic on what is supposedly an unrestricted connection....

Fair charging

How about detecting the various speeds we get over a month and charging us based on that? If an ISP was brave enough to do that, they might get a lot of people signing up.

It would also be fairer to those people further from the exchange who get slower connections.

And I challenge you...

... Mr Branson, to stop being a prick and actually take some of your companies to task over their shoddy service and rip-off products... isn't it time for you to piss off in a balloon across the sea yet? I have a boat and an air rifle I need to practise with.

Is the alternative much better?

My ISP has gone 'honest'. I subscribe to their 'Pro' grade of service at my country / summer cottage where they say the standard of service is 12.6Mbytes and their stated minimum is 512 Kbs. (Non-dynamic).

Actually I am about 370 metres from their pole-mounted DSLAM broadband appliqué box even though we are about 62 kilometres from the backbone fibre, they feed a string of villages from a spur fibre.

So my version of 'up to' has figures but still looks bad on the minimum service end. We've had one outage in 4 years that lasted about an hour.

Cable TV is the real con, since most systems are essentially a WAN so when active subscribers increase, especially in the evenings and on weekends, the speed is pitifully low with timeouts commonly showing when loading web pages.

I use Wimax as back-up (we have country-wide coverage) when needed (1.51173 GBP/100 Gigs).

Line rental

The other con that they can stop is failing to quote the proper headline price when advertising their broadband - they forget to mention that you need to pay an extra £12/month or so renting a phone line that you may well not want.

The hypocrisy of it

Maybe Virgin should stop massaging the truth, if they want some credibility with this.

To quote from their http://www.stopthebroadbandcon.org/ site: "You should be getting what you pay for"

Yet, their "traffic Shaping" means I now get about 5Mb connection in the evenings, whilst paying for 50Mb.

And they obviously don't like criticism on this point

They're obviously not willing to listen to criticism on this point either - the contact form on the stop the broadband con site appears to be borked!

Nice legs, shame about the face

Virgin media seem to have good cable infrastructure (it's customer support which really, really sucks) so should be well placed to state a truer average speed and not lose face. In my case for "up to 20Mb" I consistently get 19.5+ which cannot be faulted but I am sure it's not so good in other areas.

While they are at it they can also work on exposing their own and others' "unlimited" downloads as a lie. It's not that hard to work out what the maximum amount is which can be downloaded in a 24 hour period when capping kicks in.

Phoney speed claims bad - Phoney unlimited claims good?

Clarity in advertising and yet Virgin still claim unlimited downloads - really? Unlimited??? that tiny 1 next to the claim... doesn't that apply to an FUP or some other limitation to the "Unlimited downloads" that you proudly claim in a font several times larger??

Phoney Unlimited deals are as bad as "upto speeds" and would probably be illegal in any other industry - and would be illegal here if we didn't have political entities so corrupt that they allow huge amounts of influence by Business in return for party funding - a practice as corrupt as any padded expenses claim - don't hear the party leaders condemning that one do we?

Pot meet kettle. ISPs (including virgin) and politicians .. they all smell as bad - rotten and corrupt. Put your own house in order first Virgin, you are as bad as any of the others.

Hypocrites!

Weeeellll......

I understand where you are comming from, but in this particular case, I personally believe you are just splitting hairs....

I have a 50MBps fibre feed from VM and I have a DSL connection from Eclipse Internet facilitating a BT line.

The DSL connection trickles somewhere around 1.4 - 2.1 MBps, which is not really Eclipses or BTs fault, but never the less, I am paying for "up to" 20MBps, where as on VM I am paying for 50MBps.

That I don't always get 50MBps lies in the nature of the biest, as the chain is only as strong as the weekest link.

But I ca nsay, that whenever I donwload something from within the VM network, I certainly do get my aprox. 6 MByte/s

And if VM would provide something like a /28, or at least a /29 subnet (free of charge idealy), I would probably kill my DSL completely. But I still ahve to say, that service wise Eclipse is one of my favourite ISPs