How Fast Is Your Internet Connection..?

[harv]

Hmmmm.I think Virgin Media may have stopped throttling the download/upload speed for torrents. Am currently downloading episodes of The Bill at the full 10MBps

Edit: Whoops, had to edit that and change the Mbps to MBps, that would have been the slow speed I had when I started this thread!

[Dragontao]

I've never noticed them throttling torrents to begin with.

[harv]

They didn't do it by much, but it was there for a while. I think it was something like 90% restriction for torrents, most people wouldn't notice tbh.

[Late]

I don't download so much these days, but used to get major throttling on Virgin a couple of years ago.
Was on 10 meg and it'd be on 3 meg when I got home from work. (And a reboot of pc etc. didn't help - it was definitely throttled by the ISP, and not some problem at my end.) Speed would go back up to ten meg in the early hours of the morning.

If memory serves, their policy was to throttle something like the top 3% of customers (i.e. the 3% who had the highest traffic on that day between 12am and 5pm, or something like that) to one third speed during evening hours (5pm til midnight).
Of course, if you self-restricted your transfers to only use 80-90% of your bandwidth then you'd likely fall out of the top 3% of users and be perfectly fine on the evening. I tended to restrict my downloads to about 60%, so that I could pretty much guarantee my connection would be strong on an evening when I wanted it for gaming etc.

Also, the wife and kids would get all uppity if they tried to use the internet and I was downloading at full speed whilst out of the house - so would just hard-reset the computer. (Which would get me slightly annoyed, naturally.)

[Dragontao]

They didn't do it by much, but it was there for a while. I think it was something like 90% restriction for torrents, most people wouldn't notice tbh.

Believe me, I'd notice.

[Dragontao]

I don't download so much these days, but used to get major throttling on Virgin a couple of years ago.
Was on 10 meg and it'd be on 3 meg when I got home from work. (And a reboot of pc etc. didn't help - it was definitely throttled by the ISP, and not some problem at my end.) Speed would go back up to ten meg in the early hours of the morning.

If memory serves, their policy was to throttle something like the top 3% of customers (i.e. the 3% who had the highest traffic on that day between 12am and 5pm, or something like that) to one third speed during evening hours (5pm til midnight).

Probably why it never happened to me. I do my downloads first thing in the morning when I get up, before going to work, as it's mostly TV shows I download and the ones from the previous night in the US have been uploaded. I'm proably also lucky because I live in an area with quite a lot of old folk who never use a computer. So high usage around here isn't an issue.

Another possible reason I read somewhere is that network prioritisation methods such as QoS can struggle with encrypted data, so if you're using utorrent and have the protocol encryption switched on, it slips through the net because it doesn't recognise it as a torrent.

So if the ISPs are using QoS to target specific protocols, which would be a reasonable way to go about it, then anyone not savvy enough to protect themselves a bit more will find their bandwidth throttled, which will probably be enough to reduce total bandwidth usage and keep everyone happy.

[AVFCRoss]

About 5MB, been waiting for Fibre in my area for fucking ages and just doesn't seem to come...Worst thing is, the main road about 200 yards away has Fibre up to it's bollocks and we're just somehow deliberately bypassed (On a cul-de-sac)...Don't seem any reason why a main road round a corner would get it and we somehow can't. 

[ancelotti]

I think I'm up to about 152Mb download and 10Mb upload after the latest round of speed boosts from VM. Only costing me £26 a month for broadband + phone line rental so it's not bad.

[The Borg]

Not so much How fasts your internet connection. But.... Where to start... Uurrgghhhh BT. Anybody wih them? Had any issues with them?

Been with them for just under a year. Paid our line rental up front. No problems there. And then within less than a year we've had to have the engineers out 6 times!!! We've not been reimbursed for any of the downtime we've experienced in that time. So we've decided to change. Better service, cheaper. Only to find BT are now slapping us with a £256 termination charge. WTF. They won't refund the rest of the line rental we won't be using but they will charge us for the rest of the current contract on broadband.

Help? Opinions? Anybody had anything like this?

[jman]

Yep BT are shit.. I'd never recommend anyone go with them...

BT Infinity is probably one of the worst broadband services I've even had the displeasure of using.  I know several people who are stuck with it though.  BT OpenReach (which is a separate company) is constantly on programs like Watchdog too.

Constant reliability issues and downtime.. I switched to Virgin over 5 years ago, and had two cut-outs since.. one which lasted about 2 days and the other lasted a week (although this was due to them having to send an engineer round and insisting I was in at that time - apparently another engineer had fucked something up, although I still don't know why I had to be in, he didn't even come into the house when he arrived  ).


If BT never informed you of a termination charge when you agreed to terminate your contract (presumably over the phone) - there's fuck all they can do - you should be able to worm yourself out of that one.  If BT have done nothing to reimburse you - then you might find you can go with the Supply of Goods and Services Act - where the company has failed to provide you with the goods necessary or done anything to remedy the situation - i.e. reimburse you for your downtime.

[harv]

I went with Virgin Media around 12 or 13 years ago because at that time they were the only broadband provider where you didn't need a BT phone line. I had problems with BT years ago because I've always paid my bills at the last minute (although with direct debits these days you can't really do that anymore unfortunately ). I always used to wait until I got a red bill and then paid it the same day...

But then BT had the bright idea of cutting the phone off and sending me the red bill afterwards. So I basically told them to go and do one (although I was quite polite to the girl on the other end of the phone because it wasn't her fault).

I was moving out of that flat anyway so no skin off my nose anyway lol.

Went with Virgin when I moved into this place and I really couldn't be happier.

Your best bet would be to go to the CAB I reckon.

[Dragontao]

Been with Virgin Media for many years. Mostly a very good service, the only gripe is their Indian call centres which can infuriate me to the point of genocide.

"There is nothing wrong in your area" is their mantra until they get at least 10 calls (they may have dropeed it to about the same fault, even if 3 people in the same road call up and report the same fault.

or

"there is a problem with your network card". What all 7 of them across 5 PCs and a laptop. How unlucky am I to have all those networkl cards fail at the same time eh.

or

"Well you must switch everything off and unplug it". Dont that. "have you unplugged it". No, I;ve turned the switch off on the plug. "you must unplug it". No I don't need to do that, the power is isolated. "you must unplug it".  Okay <sigh>, done that (lying through teeth).

Apart from that, and occasionally strange dropouts for about 10 minutes during the day now and again, happy enough.

BT. Utter shite.

[The Borg]

Well, we got it today. Our final bill from BT. £248
When reading into the bill further it was interesting to see what exactly made them come to that amount.... Most of it was ending our contract early. Then the interesting bit. £65 for our last bt hub and £55 for our first bt hub. WTF? The funny part about it is they're asking us to return them as they reuse them for parts. So what exactly are we paying £65 and £55 for? I don't want them but if they're charging us that then were practically buying them.......

Crazy huh

[harv]

Kevin in the flat downstairs has had a similar demand for money a while back. He told them to fuck right off, and quite right too.

A right bunch of dodgy fuckers, BT. Always have been, always will be. Not as bad as they used to be years ago mind you, back in the day they didn't have any competition so they could basically do whatever the fuck they wanted. I've never thought much of them tbh, mostly because they were in charge of TV Licence Vans. Twenty years or so ago they were anyway. They were always harping on about being able to detect what channel you were watching and it was a load of old bollocks. At the time they did have handheld detectors to be able to tell but in the entire 90s they only had 4 of them in the entire UK lmfao

One of the guys in a band I was in let us all know what a load of old bollocks it all was, he used to work at BT. The majority of the vans at that time were empty inside and just had a dodgy aerial on top lololol

[harv]

Just thought I'd necro post this thread. My Virgin Media internet has been crap these last few months. These last few days it's been cutting out every 5 minutes forcing me to restart my Virgin Media Hub to get it back again.

I've also noticed this last year or so that whenever the Virgin telly in my area has a problem my internet does too. I'm pretty sure that they're using the internet bandwidth to get their telly service going. Fuck knows. It's happened way too many times to be a coincidence.

I'm going to phone them up during these next few days and ask them, not that they'll tell me if they are doing anything dodgy lol

And for the first time in ages they've put their prices up without giving everyone an increase in speed too.