virginmedia

[michael555]

About 2 days ago we got a letter from virginmedia saying we are getting 10meg for free.

As the letter say this is for 2 weeks only and are upload speed goes up aswell.

I am on 4meg at the moment and it would be cool to try out 10 meg for free.

Is this a company deal virginmedia is doing to take on sky or something?


From oct 1 we will get 4 to 10 meg for free , not sure if everyone on virginmedia get this free deal.

 

[Anon_F]

Is this offer through cable or a phone line?
I would love as a virginmedia customer to be offered speeds upto 10MB.
Except the max speed my local BT exchange can do is 4MB until it is upgraded!!

 

[V_R]

This is Vigin Media cable he talks about. They are upping the speeds of all their connections, the 10mb up to 20mb etc, shame it seems many people are finding the system is too congested to make real use of the speed....

 

[psd99]

u guys r lucky mmy exchange olny goes up to 2mb but i get 1.8 or 1.9
plus i pay for 8mb on sky

it sucks
no plans to upgrsde =either

 

[michael555]

Is this offer through cable or a phone line?
I would love as a virginmedia customer to be offered speeds upto 10MB.
Except the max speed my local BT exchange can do is 4MB until it is upgraded!!

This free offer is for cable so the letter said.

So come on BT,AOL,etc you are lacking behind abit

But then again am happy with 4mb at the moment.
see link

http://allyours.virginmedia.com/websales/service.do?id=2

See there 20mb deal is not bad at all going at Standard price:
£37.00 a month

 

[floppybootstomp]

In March 2003 I took out a contract with Zen (1month) for £28.00 a month. It was a 2mb service. It worked well.

A few months later it came down to £25.00 a month. It worked well.

As of now I'm still paying £25.00 a month, huge bandwidth allowance, 1 Gb webspace, I month minimum contract and realistically get download speeds of around 750kb/sec.

Not the cheapest, possibly the bestest but I'm a firm believer in the philosophy that there is no such thing as a free lunch

Makes me laugh when I'm approached by some spotty be-suited oik in Sainsburys or something trying to sell me Virgin, Orange or some other crap service.

I always ask 'What's the monthly bandwidth allowance?' and instantly get a blank expression and watch as they frantially scramble through their sales manual looking for an answer

 

[psd99]

In March 2003 I took out a contract with Zen (1month) for £28.00 a month. It was a 2mb service. It worked well.

A few months later it came down to £25.00 a month. It worked well.

As of now I'm still paying £25.00 a month, huge bandwidth allowance, 1 Gb webspace, I month minimum contract and realistically get download speeds of around 750kb/sec.

Not the cheapest, possibly the bestest but I'm a firm believer in the philosophy that there is no such thing as a free lunch

Makes me laugh when I'm approached by some spotty be-suited oik in Sainsburys or something trying to sell me Virgin, Orange or some other crap service.

I always ask 'What's the monthly bandwidth allowance?' and instantly get a blank expression and watch as they frantially scramble through their sales manual looking for an answer

Flopps I have often thought of that bandwith bullox!

I wonder if anyone within the company actually looks at everyone and how much their are downloading. I think I have been over my allowance more than a few times.

 

[V_R]

It depends on the provider, some are very strict about usage limits and will not hesitate to limit your speeds if you go over your limit.

I am with Entanet as they have a high limit (330gb a month, 30gb on peak, 300gb off peak, one month contract and only £20 a month. ) Although i dont use anywhere near that, As good as zen is the 20gb limit would not be enough for me, i use about 20-25gb a month. So for me Entanet is a good choice, i dont have to worry about my bandwidth usage at all. And if the service goes downhill i am on a 1 month contract so will just move on.

They dont have someone checking your usage PSD, a machine does it.

u guys r lucky my exchange only goes up to 2mb but i get 1.8 or 1.9
plus i pay for 8mb on sky

it sucks
no plans to upgrade either

Is it your exchange that only goes up to 2mb? I would think its more like what your line can support mate, whats your line stats? (By that i mean what is your downstream attenuation, SNR and sync speed) You can find them by logging into your router and look at the connection page iirc.

 

[TriplexDread]

A close friend of mine has 20meg. He gets the full speed of 2.2MB download although u/l is still slow I think about 300KBs up if he's lucky

His too was a fee upgrade from 10Mb to 20Mb althought the price has stayed the same about £35pm

Works out approx 150meg a minute or about 9.5gig an hour

I dont know if he's been told off about bandwidth!

 

[floppybootstomp]

I actually use about 12Gb a month and I play CoD2 just about every day.

I don't download a lot of stuff though, just the occasional Linux Distro, drivers, aps and a few mp3's.

 

[psd99]

It depends on the provider, some are very strict about usage limits and will not hesitate to limit your speeds if you go over your limit.

I am with Entanet as they have a high limit (330gb a month, 30gb on peak, 300gb off peak, one month contract and only £20 a month. ) Although i dont use anywhere near that, As good as zen is the 20gb limit would not be enough for me, i use about 20-25gb a month. So for me Entanet is a good choice, i dont have to worry about my bandwidth usage at all. And if the service goes downhill i am on a 1 month contract so will just move on.

They dont have someone checking your usage PSD, a machine does it.


Is it your exchange that only goes up to 2mb? I would think its more like what your line can support mate, whats your line stats? (By that i mean what is your downstream attenuation, SNR and sync speed) You can find them by logging into your router and look at the connection page iirc.

check this out:

DownStream Connection Speed1728 kbpsUpStream Connection Speed416 kbpsVPI0VCI38

ADSL LinkDownstreamUpstreamConnection Speed1728 kbps416 kbpsLine Attenuation55.0 db31.5 dbNoise Margin9.1 db13.0 db



and

PortStatusTxPktsRxPktsCollisionsTx B/sRx B/sUp TimeWANPPPoA7262812584306021242603:29:42LAN10M/100M5070010003:30:43WLAN11M/54M1211777685401252370203:30:33


so what do you think of this VR?

 

[psd99]

oh heck they didnt end up like tables

mmmm


check this out (sorry for size):

http://www.picoodle.com/view.php?img=/9/10/1/f_router2m_3719807.jpg&srv=img28

 

[V_R]

PSD, the figures in the smaller pop up window are the ones i am interested in.

A DS Attenuation of 55db is quite high, Not a lot that you can do tbh. Thats why your speeds are not great. It may be that you have some aluminium cable along the line between your house and the exchange somewhere, or just old degraded cable. Or simply that your a long way from the exchange. Do you know how far you are? The line will be longer than you think, as it dont go in a straight line from your house to the exchange. This will tell you how far you are, but not your 'real' line length.

You do have a few db on the DS SNR (noise margin) to play with though, the default is 6db, but if it goes any lower you will get errors and drop outs, Its probably been raised for that reason. If you hold sync and do not reconnect/resync for 14 days solid the SNR should drop to 6db automatically.

How is your internal wiring? You could try connecting to the test socket and see if that helps, if its better then your internal wiring is causing interference on the line. Also ring 17070 and do the quite line test and see if there is any background noise, if there is you could try and get BT to see if they can fix it, but beware if the probs in your house they'll charge you.

Have a read of this. http://www.dslzoneuk.net/socket.php?type=html

 

[floppybootstomp]

Mine:



From:

Speed Test

 

[PotGuy]

Virgin are rubbish.

£25/m for a poxy 2mb connection (Should be 4mb, but it just isn't)

Max d/l speed is about 270kb/s.

On the upside, unlimited usage allowance, and a pretty reliable service.

 

[TriplexDread]

They are well out of line if they are charging you that much mate, well out of line.

Have you kicked off?

 

[psd99]

PSD, the figures in the smaller pop up window are the ones i am interested in.

A DS Attenuation of 55db is quite high, Not a lot that you can do tbh. Thats why your speeds are not great. It may be that you have some aluminium cable along the line between your house and the exchange somewhere, or just old degraded cable. Or simply that your a long way from the exchange. Do you know how far you are? The line will be longer than you think, as it dont go in a straight line from your house to the exchange. This will tell you how far you are, but not your 'real' line length.

You do have a few db on the DS SNR (noise margin) to play with though, the default is 6db, but if it goes any lower you will get errors and drop outs, Its probably been raised for that reason. If you hold sync and do not reconnect/resync for 14 days solid the SNR should drop to 6db automatically.

How is your internal wiring? You could try connecting to the test socket and see if that helps, if its better then your internal wiring is causing interference on the line. Also ring 17070 and do the quite line test and see if there is any background noise, if there is you could try and get BT to see if they can fix it, but beware if the probs in your house they'll charge you.

Have a read of this. http://www.dslzoneuk.net/socket.php?type=html

hi thanks for the input VR

the exchange is around between 0.3 to 0.8 mile away I don't think it is that far to be honest.
BUT it turns out I am 3km away according to that site, damn lines. That is pretty far then.

I got one main socket in the house, but that is not connected to the ADSL, the ADSL is connected to a feeder socket on the other side of the house. The reason it is connected to this one is LOCATION. The router in that socket sits right in the middle of my house and my entire setup. I will try connecting it to the main socket to see if there is a difference.

But first I will burn a dvd r with the new dvd drive I got from a member on this site. Sometimes I think I can be so lazy that it damages my life.

Oh above all I hate all this stuff, like I pay sky for 8mb broadband but I don't even fully get 2mb!
Life sucks

 

[psd99]

haha I have just worked out that for all this time I thought that the name of my local exchange came from the name of a road that is very close to me. But this is untrue the exchange is not named after a road, it is infact about 3km away from me. The line they have drawn is probably even less of a distance than it actually is.

According to that site I should be getting 3mb on my line at least.

 

[PotGuy]

They are well out of line if they are charging you that much mate, well out of line.

Have you kicked off?

Its impossible too.

It is utterly impossible to kick off anything with Virgin so I gave up. They just send you round callcentres all night.

My house is cabled, the tv is good, the phone is cheap so there isn't much point going elsewhere. Freeview is ****e compared to Virgin tv.

Problem is we have been with NTL for nearly 8 years I think now, and when we got broadband when it was first popping up it was really good value.

They just never dropped the charges. They have been saying they will put it up to 4mb for ages, I've just given up. I guess its possible the old cable modem can't handle any more speed, as when we got it the highest speed was something like 1mb for £40/m.

II can always cancel it anyway. Too much hassle to change.

 

[V_R]

haha I have just worked out that for all this time I thought that the name of my local exchange came from the name of a road that is very close to me. But this is untrue the exchange is not named after a road, it is infact about 3km away from me. The line they have drawn is probably even less of a distance than it actually is.

According to that site I should be getting 3mb on my line at least.

Well first things first, try the test socket, Thats the main one thats in two halves, if ou unscrew the two screws in the front you will find a hidden socket behind that. Like this...

Plug your microfilter into that and router into that, dont use the wireless for now use an ethernet cable as you do loose a little speed over a wireless connection.

Check that the 'ring wire' is NOT connected to the socket. You only need wires on terminals 2 and 5.

Again see this guide - http://www.dslzoneuk.net/socket.php?type=html

More about the ring wire here... http://yarwell.blogspot.com/2005_08_01_yarwell_archive.html

Then with that done post your line stats again and i'll have a look. If its improved then you need to clean up you internal wiring.