Upgrading
 

Phoned up VM to talk about upgrading my broadband from 200 to 300 not really for the downstream but the upstream after about 15 minutes of talking to the rep i decided to go for it only £1.15 extra per month which is good value. Now all i am waiting on is the newer superhub (arriving Fri 17th)

Anyway i logged into my account to pay this months bill and got a nice surprise i am getting the vivid 350 ;)

My next step is to see if i can get the voip service.

Re: Upgrading
 

there is another thread to do with a trial atm which sounds like it is for voip. Normally, they trial it to a very small pool of customers, do some updates/patches/fixes, do some more testing and then make it available to the customer base (which will be after xmas) so it isn't something which you will be able to sign up for any time soon.

Re: Upgrading
 

I rang up last week to cancel my phone & TV as I dont use the TV, and the phone line is just spare, so just keep the broardband.

They rang me back today and offered me the phoneline for £1 a month, plus upgrade me to the "300" as Gamer 200 is no longer available.

I took the offer.

Checking my config now, my download setting is 402500000 (about 380M).

Testing it directly into the PC, I got about 370.
Sadly my router can only do just under 250, but its an improvement on before.

Re: Upgrading
 

I regularly get 378mbits in speedtests and it is also reflected in real world speeds. I have hit and sustained 45.8MB/sec quite a few times when downloading bits.

Re: Upgrading
 

That's the "350m" profile, so looks like you're on 350 :)

Re: Upgrading
 

Are you guys out of contract? I've asked a few times now and it's always been an extra £20 a month to go from 200 gamer to 300.

Re: Upgrading
 

I was when i upgraded. I went by the homeworks website and expected to pay an extra £10/month but when i rang up they said i could have it for free and £4 off a month. I was over 2 years out of contract.

Re: Upgrading
 

I've upgraded several times whilst in contract:

200mbps to 200mbps gamer
200mbps gamer to 300mbps
300mbps to 350mbps

I even saved money with some of these upgrades!

Re: Upgrading
 

I've been speaking to them on live chat, maybe that's the issue

Re: Upgrading
 

No, that's education.:D

Re: Upgrading
 

Finally rang up, got 300 (350/380) for the same price essentially.

392 on speedtests, well worth the call.

https://www.cableforum.co.uk/images/...2017/11/28.png

Re: Upgrading
 

nice, good things come to those who wait.

Re: Upgrading
 

Yup, now we just need a 10:1 ratio on that package :)

Re: Upgrading
 

Yup, that needs to be the new big thing. Forget anymore downstream upgrades until they have got docsis 3.1 in place and focus on making all tiers 10:1. It should be achievable if they are making 3 or 4 channels available in a bonding group AND making them qam64.

Re: Upgrading
 

I had a look at the offers available to me and was surprised that I can move from 150mbps to 200mbps for only 14p per month. But it specifies the new 500Gb Tivo when I'd rather keep the 1Tb one I have now. Would I have to accept a SHUB 3 rather than the SHUB 2AC I have now?

I'll give them a call next week....

Re: Upgrading
 

Yeah, a tech told me that all they do is shub3's now and it is the easy option for them as far as guaranteeing speed goes. You can get away with keeping your current tivo box. They send you a shub and tivo in a box for you to hook up yourself and you ring an automated number when you are done to get them registered. I didnt connect my new tivo either and had no probs getting the shub up and running.

Re: Upgrading
 

200 I believe you can keep your SH2, but for 300 you need the SH3.

Weirdly I'm having speed issues after upgrading, on 200 i could max it out 24/7 at 220, however since upgrading to 300, i'm having issues hitting that majority of the time.

The area is fine for 200 as I had no issues before upgrading, so how come now i'm on 300 i'm not able to even hit the same speeds?...

https://www.cableforum.co.uk/images/...2017/11/30.png

Re: Upgrading
 

Perhaps the same reason I cannot.
My (home) router is not powerful enough to run much above 240/250.
So even though I'm now on 350, I cannot actually achieve that (unless I plug directly into the modem).

Re: Upgrading
 

Shouldn't be, I've got a unifi security gateway which can route internal traffic at 1gig (network max), WAN port etc are all Gigabit too.

I'll keep an eye on it and if it doesn't pick up I'll speak to virgin

Re: Upgrading
 

funnily enough just because you have got gigabit ports doesn't mean you can get gigabit speeds. I can remember years ago there was a Linksys router which sounded great on paper for the price. I can't remember which model it was but it had gigabit ports but the killer is that it could only do 90mbits wan to lan throughput. It caught loads of people out because this was when people were upgrading to the 100mbit and 120mbits new formed upper tiers. I used to be in the same position as Paul M and had no probs getting max speed when I was on 200mbits but I bought a new router earlier this year knowing that I would be going up to 300+. My new one (Asus AC68u) is good for something like 980mbits.

Re: Upgrading
 

Because of this thread I decided to reboot my Shub3, just in case.

Good news!

https://www.cableforum.co.uk/images/...2017/11/31.png

It seems that 350Mb is going beyond mere trials. I had noted the other day, that for the first time ever, that I was getting TBB tests close to 300Mb. Previously I was getting less than 200Mb, with a big difference between the single and multi-thread result. It seems that the local network has been upgraded too.

https://www.cableforum.co.uk/images/...2017/11/32.png


https://www.cableforum.co.uk/images/...2017/11/33.png


The increased rigour on ISPs providing advertised speeds during peak periods may have something to do with this too. It's been in the news only this week.

Re: Upgrading
 

ya, if you have a look at your config you will see you have been provisioned for 400 mbits.

Re: Upgrading
 

Well I feel like an idiot.

Updated my NIC drivers and now getting 380ish consistently - doesn't explain why i was sometimes maxing out, and sometimes not... far as i know there's no contention issues in my area.

Ah well, not gonna complain if it's working :)

Re: Upgrading
 

The USG is an excellent device, but the speed of the NICs being gigabit is not the relevant part.

Nat traffic, especially QoS has an overhead.

If you are using the USG-3P, it will max out at about 150mbit with QoS on due to the CPU overhead.


https://community.ubnt.com/t5/UniFi-...e/td-p/1574906

Obviously internal traffic has no NAT or QoS applied and will hit 1G easily.

Re: Upgrading
 

No QoS set up, DPI is disabled too so nothing like that on.

It's fine now anyway :) https://www.cableforum.co.uk/images/...2017/11/35.png

Re: Upgrading
 

Yay! :)

I would like to use a USG, all my in home wifi kit is ubiquiti, but I am using an i5-5250u running Sophos UTM, as I need filtering etc to stop kids getting on inappropriate sites.

This is the hardware I'm using:
https://www.aliexpress.com/store/pro...800711474.html

I've even used outbound nat to intercept all DNS requests and enforce safesearch, block the use of workarounds like Iodine (effectively VPN over DNS) etc.

Re: Upgrading
 

Yeah! I had noticed. This level of provisioning virtually guarantees that I will get >300Mb even at peak times. Never had problem anyway, but pleased to have a 100Mb margin of error.

Re: Upgrading
 

Very nice, we use Sophos UTM at work (dedicated hardware) and it's very nice, never realised how untrustworthy our staff were before we got this!

Re: Upgrading
 

internet went off last night about 01:00 .... I’m now on 24 download channels and 3 upload with the 400Mbps config! :)

South Shields!

Re: Upgrading
 

VM bod had no idea what I was on about, so I'll try again and hopefully get someone who speaks English as first language.

Re: Upgrading
 

Called again to ask about the 15p upgrade and was told I had a free upgrade available. From 150Mbps to 200Mbps. All done in seconds... :D

Re: Upgrading
 

I just joined virgin 2 weeks ago (moved into my own house) signed up for 300 but obviously on the 350 which is closer to 400 beats the 40 I was getting over the road for sure!