brain_stew
Member
Hull is literally the only place in the UK without any proper competition in the BB market because of historical reasons. Its not a true reflections on the UK BB market as a whole.
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Virgin Media doubling internet speeds for all customers
- Thread starter RibbedHero
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Except the way they operate is to ensure that only they have land lines in the region. If BT were to install in the area they would have to pay KC. It shouldn't be allowed, but nobody gives a shit in the UK or the EU.
If the government truly cared about monopolies they would do something about this.
Joel Was Right
If you smell burning, it's probably the generators acting up. Report it anyway.
I have an 8meg connection but most of my download speeds from websites average around 300KB/s. It's only in streaming where I seem to get most of my throughput and I've had no problem with it; I can stream 'HD' content and fast forward it with hardly any buffering. That said, my upload speed is limited to 1Meg. Whilst ridiculous downstream connections don't tempt me, I would jump at the chance to have a 10meg upload connection speed.
RibbedHero
Member
From the same wikipedia article:
As brain_stew noted above, Hull seems to be unique in this situation. The rest of the country has an incredibly competitive BB market.
If you were to show anyone in this city how much they would save and how much faster their service could be, they would jump to someone else. It just needs advertisement and someone would destroy KC, even basic BT and Virgin packages are so much cheaper but hey! Those fucking landlines.
"(190,000 homes)"
There are more Karoo customers than that. It's rotten.
Now add £10+ line rental fees.
Approximate upgrade schedule ....I'm down for Feb/March 2012.
http://webcache.googleusercontent.c...media.com/fasttickle&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=uk
http://webcache.googleusercontent.c...media.com/fasttickle&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=uk
brain_stew
Member
You can't advertise products that don't exist. Hull is the only area in the UK where BT don't have any infrastructure at all because of the old municipal monopoly setup by the city council there. Its the only area of the UK they can't sell to.
It sucks, but it is unlike any other BB market in the UK, where absolutely everybody can at a minimum get unlimited BB without a FUP for £25 (and many can get FTTC for that price or LLU ADSL2 for £10).
brain_stew
Member
Boo, not getting the Virgin upgrade here until sometime after July. I'm quite surprised as Sunderland was one of the first places to get the 100mb rollout.
Rice-Eater
Member
Google Fiber is 1 gigaBIT per second, not gigabyte. 8 bits equal 1 byte. So whatever the advertised speed is, just divide by 8. Supposedly it's 125 megabytes per second for Google fiber, so the speed test results of 151 makes it even better.
Site has been updated with their new mascot.... Usain Bolt donning a Richard Branson goatee
http://doublespeed.virginmedia.com/
The benefits of living on University campus.
It's temporary until you finish your studies, my friend. Just temporary.
donkey show
Member
Man, I can't wait to move and switch to Virgin Media soon.
This finally might be the thing that gets me to switch. I'm on sky and whenever Virgin send me offers to switch, it always works out about the same price, with slightly faster broadband (I get about 10mb from sky, and it'd be 30mb from virgin). Faster, but not a reason to switch. But 60mb might be. Or I could actually opt for the lowest tier to keep costs down, and it'd still be 20mb.
I'm a really, really happy customer. Speeds are good, I don't recall ever having a service outage (and I've been with them since the start) and prices are reasonable. Recently my router went pop (not provided by Virgin). I called them, asked for a wireless router and 2 D-Links turned up the next day for free. Great stuff.
donkey show
Member
Good to hear! Where I'm currently at, Sky is the best option since it's hard linked to our building and Virgin doesn't have fibre lines there. Checked out the postcode listing to where I'm hopefully moving in a couple months and they already have fibre there and will be getting the speed boost around July.
I need a time machine already.
electricshake
Member
Aw I need to wait till October! on 20 at the mo, they offered me an upgrade to 30 for the same monthly price but wanted to charge me a 50 quid connection fee! I said naw. Still rockin my old ntl modem I think, are they upgrading those as well for sure?
on 20 at the mo, they offered me an upgrade to 30 for the same monthly price but wanted to charge me a 50 quid connection fee! I said naw. Still rockin my old ntl modem I think, are they upgrading those as well for sure?I'm down for March/April (I presume of this year) so that's not too bad!
They already can, sky so far is choosing not to sell fttc atm still conducting tests
As soon as they roll it out I'll be getting my parents to switch, their LLU has been great for them (and me too when I've been there).
I wish I was with virign.
You're missing an "a".
Facism
Member
Virgin have always had decent connections. Shame their customer service department are filled with witches and spazes. They overcharged us years ago and everytime we tried to deal with it we got some cunt harpy on the other end of the phone screaming at us.
That said, i always get full speed, and they don't seem to throttle your connection that much as i 've been over the limits many times downloading demos/patches/games from steam. I did Arkham City, which was 18 gigs, no throttling.
That said, i always get full speed, and they don't seem to throttle your connection that much as i 've been over the limits many times downloading demos/patches/games from steam. I did Arkham City, which was 18 gigs, no throttling.
The customer service is shocking, but it's easy to use it to your advantage. When we moved house, they messed up the date they were supposed to come out and re-connect us at our new place, so to make up for it they gave us a discount for 6 months, free HD upgrade and a free second box upstairs.
According to that site, I'm due to be upgraded in April - July.
Osiris
I permanently banned my 6 year old daughter from using the PS4 for mistakenly sending grief reports as it's too hard to watch or talk to her
Whilst I agree about their customer service, it's still very much improved from the NTL days when you couldn't get through to them without a 45min+ wait.
Apr-June for my upgrade.
Apr-June for my upgrade.
Android18a
Member
Nice! Guess I'm sticking with Virgin for now then!
RibbedHero
Member
That speed test is measured in Megabits though. So it doesn't seem right.
I doubt Speedtest have the server capacity to deliver 1Gbit/s to a single connection.
I'm not in my uni house at the minute and this is the only test I've got book marked but their pings are fine for me
Maybe not but I've seen higher results than that before, so as RibbedHero said there is something not right.
BT has areas where there carrying out trials on fttp which atm is 100meg and is going to 300 in the spring. Problem atm is the installs in staking 2 days in some cases so they obviously need to get that down
JonathanEx
Member
April - July? But I might be moving out of here end of July, Branson! Get on it. I want double. Personally.
ToastyBanana
Member
Sweet, common 60mb! Although they took their time getting the 20 to 30mb upgrade to me :/
The Faceless Master
Member
Virgin Mobile USA was a joint venture between Virgin and Sprint, but Sprint bought them out a few years ago and is the sole owner now.
Osiris
I permanently banned my 6 year old daughter from using the PS4 for mistakenly sending grief reports as it's too hard to watch or talk to her
My 25ms ping to the Tribes:Ascend servers from VM says otherwise.
and you have to like getting a service advertised as 30Mb and getting more than that, even if only by a small amount
Backhaul congestion, perhaps.
Osiris
I permanently banned my 6 year old daughter from using the PS4 for mistakenly sending grief reports as it's too hard to watch or talk to her
Osiris
Virgin are sending me a new modem...some wired/wireless amalgamation apparently...
The chap was brilliant...he checked my model number and went into sad mode on me...and started asking how the hell did it last 9 years (apparently that's how old it is)...
Nice one, it will almost certainly be a SuperHub, a combined cable modem / wifi router in one box. Don't worry too much about some of the old comments online about this router, most of the complaints come from the time before the latest firmware (R30) when it couldn't be put into "modem only" mode and used with a 3rd party router and it's wifi performance was average, both of which were fixed in R30.
The router side still has a few annoying limitations, like being unable to set your own DNS servers (coming in a future firmware apparently) but if that's a problem for you you can just stick it in modem only mode and connect your own router to it instead. - I make do with using it in modem and router mode though as it's wifi performance is much much better than my old D-Link.
As long as I can cable up to PC...and wirelessly connect my laptop, PS3, Wii and 360...it's all good. If not yeah I'll just connect it up to my Linksy...
perfectnight
Banned
Ditto. With Comcast, it's actually somehow cheaper to get your Internet bundled with cable than if you got just the Internet by itself. So you end up paying 150 bucks for 250gb a month.
brain_stew
Member
Openreach have offered a range of products to LLU operators from day one but the nature of the technology (with DSLAMs being located in your local cab) makes offering a nationwide, fully unbundled service comparable to current LLU networks infeasible. Certainly, we won't see "free" or £3.50 BB on FTTC for a long, long time, its just not economical.
With an estimate of 30mb, you'll probably end up sustaining around 35-36mb, or ~60-70mb after the switch to 80mb. On that note, some real world tests from the 80/20 FTTC tests are rolling in:
http://www.ispreview.co.uk/story/20...ld-80mbps-uk-fttc-broadband-trial-speeds.html
Looks like a straightforward doubling of your current speeds for most. After this move fro Virgin I really can't see BT charging a premium for the upgrade but we'll see.
That's for their FTTP product and its happening in a few months.
br0ken_shad0w
Member
It's more like North America ISP raises speeds and lowers caps.
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