[Wolves] Thoughts on Virgin Media?

[Adam Sweet]

Hi everyone

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I'm thinking seriously about jumping ship from my ADSL line to Virgin Media and I know we have a fair mix of cable and ADSL users here so I thought I'd gather some opinion. I've seen frustrated cable users considering ADSL being told not to bother, so I thought I'd see how it works the other way round.

Essentially I'm on 8Mbit ADSL MAX and commonly get 5.5 to 6.5 Mbits per second but I'm in the middle of my second major bandwidth drop. Last time it occurred I bobbled between 160 Kb and 2 Mb for around 6 months and must have phoned my ISP maybe 8 times asking for assistance, removed all extension cables, replaced the microfilters, filed BT faults and had line tests at which point they concluded it was a user equipment problem. I bought a new ADSL modem and the problem remained so my company installed a business telephone line which included a new telephone cable into the house and we put a business ADSL line on it. I explained the problem with the other line to the engineer and he used the new cable to feed the existing line also. The business line was fine. After leaving my company, I returned to my regular line and it has been fine for the last 4 months until around 3 weeks ago. I have replaced the microfilter and removed any extension cables and so
 on, I'm just trying my old ADSL modem now so I can tick that box also.

I'm currently running with my phone and modem plugged directly into the microfilter which is plugged into the master phone socket's testing socket to rule out any local issues and getting around 150KB/s which is just about fast enough to browse or download, not both. Apparently, you have to get 64KB/s before it's considered a fault.

I'm getting a bit fed up with this kind of faffing every time there is a problem and not only do Virgin Media seem faster, they also sound a lot more reliable, but there seem to be downsides in my eyes so I'd like some opinion.

1) No static IP unless you buy business. I know the IPs generally don't change that often unless your modem is off for an extended period of time. Does anyone host anything on it? Do the supplied cable modems support DDNS out of the box? Does anyone here use the business packages?

2) Bandwidth throttling. I'm likely to buy 10Mbit (L) or 20Mbit (XL) and as far as I can tell, as soon a I break 1.2GB or 3GB between 4pm and 9pm I will get throttled to 25% of my regular speed for 5 hours, through to 1am. That's pretty annoying if I want to download an iso. The same applies if I blow 2.4GB (L) or 6GB (XL) from 10am to 3pm. Which is pretty bad as I plan to work from home at some point using this line. I frequently have to pull down backups, sometimes over 1 GB in size. I don't want to have to set up cron or at jobs and leave my machines on over night though I might buy a box for backups etc which will be always on. Nevertheless, the idea of having to be mindful of bandwidth usage will be a PITA especially during working hours.

3) Support. I hear *dreadful* things about VM home user technical support generally being clueless. Always par for the course with any large ISP, but I hear VM are particularly bad.

4) Do VM still make people relay mail from inside their network through their own mail servers? While it's not a big issue, I do run my own mail servers and plan to host a backup MX at home. Plus doing this breaks SPF unless I add all of VM's outgoing mail servers into the DNS zone file for every domain I host. Pretty annoying. I'm told this isn't the case any more.

On the flip side:

1) Cable has been faster than ADSL for years and VM frequently boost user's speeds for no cost. Trials of 50Mb are around the corner.

2) Cable sounds more reliable according to all of the people I have spoken to. Certainly, nobody seems to have to jump through the hoops that ADSL customers do.

3) ADSL has bandwidth caps and some traffic shaping but no pro-active throttling. I'd much rather a cap than throttling.

4) Cable alone, or cable and phone will still come in cheaper than my current phone+ADSL deal if I go for 10 or 20Mb.

Anyway, just soliciting some thoughts.

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