2 days in and already thinking of cancelling.... (VERY Slow Broadband Speeds)
 

I had the 30MB superhub installed on Wednesday afternoon - I was at work so g/f's parents sat in for the install. 1st box didn't work, 2nd one connected fine.

So I got in from work, cracked on the laptop and as suggested, ran a speedtest through a wired connection from the hub to my laptop. Got a result of 31MB. Not bad I thought.

However, when running a premium direct link download, I found myself only getting a max of 4mb. Not impressed. I put it down to it being peak times and decided to try again the next day.

So yesterday evening came, got home, switched on the hub and then found myself running the speedtest to get a measley 0.5m result. Wired connection - slightly better but nothing to be impressed about.

This morning - booted up the laptop, tried a speedtest and got a result of 10MB. Thought ok, maybe a reboot might get me back up and running, not peak times anymore. Did it work? 0.5kb once again.

You can add in the fact that iphones and ipads fail to connect to a network that it's hub is only 2 meters away....


I've used CCcleaner to get rid of any extra crap that might be lurking on my laptop so it's nothing on that front. My laptop is old - I will admit and by reading these forums, was never under the illusion I would get "up to 30MB" speeds until I get a wireless N adapter, but even still, to only get a paltry 2mb on a wired connection is pretty appauling if you ask me.

Is anyone in the same boat as me? I'm a decent bloke, and all I want is some fast broadband to use.

Be serious - am I going to have to look into forking out £130 for a BT line because I haven't been impressed with Virgin so far.....

Re: 2 days in and already thinking of cancelling....
 

Have you contacted Virgin about it?

Re: 2 days in and already thinking of cancelling....
 

Well, are you sure you're not mixing megabits and megabyes?

31megabits/second is only about 4 megabytes/second

Re: 2 days in and already thinking of cancelling....
 

A Google for 'Premium Direct Link Download' doesn't really point to it being the most reliable source for speed tests, and you're probably confusing megabytes with megabits. The dodgy downloads on most things will be given as a number in MB or megabytes, and 4 of those is correct for your 30 megabits service.

Re: 2 days in and already thinking of cancelling....
 

What internet service did you have before your 30mb?

If you try and download something from your 4 shared and the likes of, it won't make any difference if you have a "Premium" link or not, you can still get rubbish speeds any time of day or night, so don't use any of these sites as any kind of indication of your connections stability or speed!

Go to www.speedtest.net and run a test there with a wired connection to the hub and see what you get. Makesure you have nothing else using any of your bandwidth when you do the test.

Re: 2 days in and already thinking of cancelling....
 

as above dude you need to make sure that you aren't getting yourself confused with megabytes and megabits. When you run your speed tests you'll get the result in megabits, but when you are downloading a file you'll see the transfer speed in megabytes and in a perfect world you'll be looking at 4 megabytes/sec. I have always liked to use speedtest.net as a good measure for my connection and although I get max speed most of the time, I can pretty much guarantee if i run a speed test in the evening i'll only get 30mbits which is nearly half speed for me. It doesn't bother me though because i don't do any downloading in the evening for that reason; it is sloooooooooooooooow.

You should be aware though that VM do impose a traffic management/throttling policy during peak hours and if you download too much within a given window, your download speed will be reduced to something not worth having. Regardless of traffic volume, they also throttle p2p protocols such as newsgroups and torrents which might explain your sucky speed on that "premium link".

It all sounds a bit poo but VM aren't all that bad. Some areas are over congested so you won't get the sort of speed you expect, but as a whole i think most peeps are happy speed wise. To get a true picture you need to do speed tests at different times throughout the day to get a more accurate picture of what sort of speed you can actually achieve with your connection. If you only do it during the evenings and weekends then things ain't gonna look good.

Re: 2 days in and already thinking of cancelling....
 

I find it is a good idea to temporarily deactivate your AV before running a speedtest. Kaspersky is well known for skewing results. I find avira free does the same. I would be surprised if their are not other AV that do the same.

Re: 2 days in and already thinking of cancelling....
 

0.5m ping? THATS AMAZING!!! DIDNT IMAGINE IT BRING POSSIBLE!! I GET 20,30,40ms ping!-.-