Virgin Media admits it 'fell short' in broadband speeds ahead of lashing from BBC's Watchdog Virgin Media has admitted it "fell short" in delivering broadband speeds ahead of a BBC Watchdog report due to air tonight which found customers in some areas receive 3 per cent of the 200Mbps speed they were originally sold. A letter from executive sales director Neil Bartholomew, seen by The Register, said: "Customers trust …
Pfffff! You're all so lucky!! I just tried the Ookla test (http;//beta.speedtest.net) and it shows out here in the middle of nowhere eastern France, we have a ping of 45ms, download 2.11Mbps and upload 0.88Mbps, plenty of outages and slow-to-render pages (even with AdBlockPlus). Served by Orange - the ONLY provider in these parts unfortunately.
HOWEVER, this last fortnight the road in our village (33 residents) has been trenched out and ducting laid for fibre - Yay! - as part of countywide (Département-wide) aim of fibre to all citizens by 2020. Our village was due for 2017 and here it is! I think someone was threading the fibre through a couple of days ago so I await for the actual connection :)))
lordphil
I'm not sure that would help. AFAIK, VM have plenty of backbone/trunk capacity and sell access to that. But the problem is overselling the local network in some areas, so I don't see how selling access to that for other ISPs would make things better. No one else is going to dig their own access from the street cabs or the headends and as yet, BT are not allowing access to their poles or ducting.
I amm all for network efficiency but virgin take the piss. Im making these numbers up but i suspect that they are not far off.
local network segment can support 20 customers at advertised speeds. they sell it to 200 customers and attempt to make it all fit by packet shaping, throttling? unfair use and peak time capping.
all of this rendered my vm 50Mbps connection unusable unless i set an alarm for 3am and stayed up till 9am.
the underhanded way they do it annoys me, all of the speed test sites seem to be exempt from their rules and it does take a bit of know how to identify the problem.
i have never before nor sinve experienced such a farcical network connection service in all my days. i bailed as a result of moving house.
I now have 150Mbps with none of the above rubbish, it works all of time peaktime or not, no bandwidth caps or fair use crap for 30 euro a month.
and they install brand new coax from the cabinet to my house. I had to move countries to get it though. The Netherlands may have its problems but internet access is not one of them.
I was on 100 Mb, got 'crap' speeds,
paid more, got 200 Mb , get crap , but nearer to the 100 mark than before,
No change in my end, just the virgin software and network.
So why should I pay for 200, when I can only get around 100, and its purely the virgin software thats controlling the speed, not the link.
"fell short of the high standards we set for ourselves"
Hardly high though are they Mr Bartholomew? Take upload speeds, Virgin's package that is priced the same as the cheapest Ultrafast Fibre (BT OpenReach's top fibre) package is 7 (seven), that's SEVEN times slower. I know because, as a long-time Virgin customer whose contract was ending, I shopped around recently before realising quite how uncompetitive Virgin are on speed (where it matters) and dumping them. To get the same upload speed (up to 20mb), you must get Virgin's 200 or 300mb packages that are vastly more expensive. Virgin are still pretending we're in a pre-cloud world where people don't upload most of their data. 100 or 300Mbps isn't a hill of beans to most people, 3mb to 20mb upload speed however is a transformative experience.
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