[GLLUG] Avoid Virgin Media

[Christopher Hunter]

On Fri, 2012-12-21 at 12:57 +0000, Rob Crowther wrote:
> I have Virgin Media at home and also (through a reseller) at work. 
> Mostly it works just fine.  It does drop out occasionally (more at home 
> than at work) and they have an issue where it's impossible to turn off 
> their 'helpful' DNS failure page, but it's no worse in that regard than 
> any other service I've ever used and it's certainly far faster.
> 
>  From speaking to a guy I met at the gym who worked for Virgin Media 
> there's apparently still a significant difference in infrastructure and 
> subsequently support between areas that were formerly NTL and those that 
> were formerly Telewest.
> 
> Rob

Virgin are simply abysmal, no matter how much you pay them.  They are
hamstrung by the cheapest, nastiest coax cable that was buried by the
little cable companies, often as long ago as the 70s.  Their much
vaunted "fibre" is seldom a reality.  About 15% of their network
infrastructure is actually FTTC - the rest is ratty old coax.

At NO time have I seen a Virgin 'net connection that matches their
advertised speeds!  They have changed their advertising spiel to "up to"
because BT took them to task with the help of Trading Standards.  

When we had the misfortune to be connected to their "20 Mb" service, we
seldom got more than 500 kb/s, despite endless visits from their
"technicians" (one of whom stole a pile of CDs from our Living Room).
When we connected through Be.com (ADSL) our data rate went up to nearly
20 Mb!

Virgin should be out of business!