[Scottish] Broadband advice

[Georgia Thomson]

  On 05/01/2011 23:03, Colin McKinnon wrote:
> On Wednesday 05 January 2011 01:48:38 pm Jason Irwin wrote:
>> Looking at Virign Media just now, any good?
>>
> On the whole yes - the infrastructure is **very** good - fibre to the wall of
> your house means you get the bandwidth they advertise, and on the whole
> service is very reliable. They were never very good at services (NTP, email,
> and the bundled hosting package is rubbish) and since the Virgin takeover
> they seem to be trying to land grab by running transparent proxying for all
> port 80 stuff and adding "value" by pre-filtering email. There's only been
> about 2 or 3 significant outages I've noticed in the time I've been using
> them (12 yrs now) all due to problems with their DNS services (switching to a
> seperate server solved the problems for me).
>
> As for support? Well its a call centre in Asia somewhere who work from a set
> of about 4 scripts for diagnosing internet problems - they don't even
> acknowledge the existence of Apple Macs, let alone Linux. And you can expect
> to spend 30 minutes in a queue for the privilege - but I've been involved in
> some very serious and expensive support contracts with detailled SLAs which
> have been about as much use.
>
> Good luck,
>
> C.
>
>
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>
Virgin media have their issues, but their support is not all offshore. I 
know this, as I work for them providing broadband support, and am based 
in Airdrie. We also have no scripts, at all, the only part that is 
scripted it the ofcom required notification of potential charges if a 
tech turns up and nobody is home.
If you do a lot of filesharing or usenet, then you may want to look 
elsewhere, as they are traffic shaping p2p and usenet traffic quite 
heavily on all service tiers now.  they also have a traffic management 
policy in place on all but the top tier of service (everything below 50 
meg) at "peak times"  but it is all detailed on the website.  We provide 
the same level of support for mac and windows, but officially provide no 
support at all for linux, however if you know how to work the machine, 
then we should be able to support you.
I have their 50 meg service, and in general am reasonably happy with it, 
although I was getting better speeds on usenet downloads on my previous 
ISP (3rd party provider)

G