Legal action taken against Virgin Media throttling practices

[Ignitionnet]

Originally Posted by AndyCambs

conversely we could always ask why are your posts so anti-VM - but then that's getting personal.

Always a good way to avoid answering a question. Get as 'personal' as you want with me they're just forum posts

Let's drop that, care to answer the rest of the post? You seem all too quick to blame other customers for potentially degrading your service but ignore that it may be VM overselling the network that they advertise as being great for unlimited downloads.

[Martyn]

Originally Posted by Turkey Machine

He knows more about the Virgin cable network than most, which is saying something around here.



In reality, Virgin Media are just like any other big ISP really - oversell the network, under-maintain it, put ridiculous limits on it, then claim it offers unlimited downloads (which on a technicality it does, but realistically doesn't) and the best service in the country. Waitasec, that's just Virgin Media. OOPS!

No thanks, given a choice I'd rather have Be, if they offered the service at my exchange(s).

i would have be also if it was in my exchange..

[cook1984]

The problem with Be is that if you are more than 20cm from the exchange your connection tends to max out at about 10 meg and randomly drops now and then.

[Martyn]

still less then what im paying for 10mb now ( i actually pay for 20mb) but i've never seen close to it... max i've ever seen its just over 15mb.. =-/

[Welshchris]

Originally Posted by cook1984

The problem with Be is that if you are more than 20cm from the exchange your connection tends to max out at about 10 meg and randomly drops now and then.

thats nonsence

[CrowmanUK]

Slight exaggeration there mate, I'm 665m straight line distance from the exchange and get around 13meg down 1meg up and have never had a disconnect in all the time i've been with them, around 12 months.

[Ignitionnet]

Originally Posted by cook1984

The problem with Be is that if you are more than 20cm from the exchange your connection tends to max out at about 10 meg and randomly drops now and then.

I was 1.5km, maxed around 19M down 2.3 or so up, and was more stable than my cable connection which drops about once a week.

Sat Apr 11 18:17:15 2009 Sat Apr 11 18:17:15 2009 Critical (3) Init RANGING Critical Ranging Request Retries exhausted
Sat Apr 11 18:17:15 2009 Sat Apr 11 18:17:15 2009 Critical (3) No Ranging Response received - T3 time-out

[cook1984]

I think some people are lucky and have relatively new phone lines.

Part of mine should be new, as BT replaced it when trying to fix a fault that after six months they tracked down to a leaking roof at the exchange.

Anyway, I am 2km from the exchange and got about 7mb down and 500k up, except that there was occasional packet loss and re-syncs. Eventually Be told me to upgrade the modem's firmware, which I did and it bricked the modem, so that was that.

The point is that, for me and many people like me who are not lucky enough to have a usable line, cable is the only option. We have to pay whatever VM demand, or accept a slow and poor quality connection.

When one company has a monopoly that cannot easily be broken, the government should regulate it strongly. They should also do everything they can to provide alternatives for an important utility.

[Drefsab]

This is actually something that ofcom is looking into, forcing Virgin to offer a wholesale service like BT have to, now I at first thought virgin would not like this idea but they released a statement saying they do not object to the idea though they havent pushed it as they are currently focusing on sorting out their own products first.

Now that would be intersting because you would see if its virgin's core network thats the issue or if its just the backhaul/last mile that is the cause of peoples issues.

[cook1984]

It would be even more interesting if they did it like LLU, i.e. the company can replace some of the VM equipment with their own. Maybe then someone would like to offer real fibre optic internet, i.e. fibre to the home.

[*sloman*]

Originally Posted by cook1984

It would be even more interesting if they did it like LLU, i.e. the company can replace some of the VM equipment with their own. Maybe then someone would like to offer real fibre optic internet, i.e. fibre to the home.

Oh baby i would love that get Be* to install some of their equipment and take full advantage of docsis 3 with no STM speeds over 100mb

I wet my pants just thinking about!

[BenMcr]

How would that work then?

I thought that ADSL is a point to point technology i.e you have the only line into the exchange

Cable is a shared service - even if you put seperate equipment in all users would still have to share the frequency bandwidth in an area

So even if be had better backhaul than Virgin (which isn't the issue anyway) there would still be capacity issues

[cook1984]

Virgin run fibre to the cabinet. That fibre has pretty high capacity, I would assume at least in the gigabit range since it would have to support a lot of 50 meg and 20 meg users.

With LLU another company could run fibre from the cab to the home/office instead of the old copper wires Virgin use. It would blow Virgin's copper network away by offering not only 100 meg downloads, up 100 meg uploads as well.

It's hard to describe how fantastic a symmetric 100/100 connection is. It's a bit like the difference between trying to get a Morris Minor to do 70 on the motorway while praying that bits don't start to fall off and effortlessly cruising along in the quiet comfort of a luxury Toyota or BMW. You don't have to worry about STM, how long things take to download or upload, if running iPlayer or another P2P app is going to kill your Skype conversation or if your flatmate sending a big email attachment or uploading some photos is going to ruin your online game.

[Ignitionnet]

Originally Posted by cook1984

Virgin run fibre to the cabinet. That fibre has pretty high capacity, I would assume at least in the gigabit range since it would have to support a lot of 50 meg and 20 meg users.

With LLU another company could run fibre from the cab to the home/office instead of the old copper wires Virgin use. It would blow Virgin's copper network away by offering not only 100 meg downloads, up 100 meg uploads as well.

It's hard to describe how fantastic a symmetric 100/100 connection is. It's a bit like the difference between trying to get a Morris Minor to do 70 on the motorway while praying that bits don't start to fall off and effortlessly cruising along in the quiet comfort of a luxury Toyota or BMW. You don't have to worry about STM, how long things take to download or upload, if running iPlayer or another P2P app is going to kill your Skype conversation or if your flatmate sending a big email attachment or uploading some photos is going to ruin your online game.

That would be great - sadly the cable network just doesn't work like that

What is going down the fibre pair isn't even digital signals it's actually analogue, produced by modulating the power output of a laser across a frequency band. The fibre optic nodes are nothing more intelligent than simple media converters usually, they just take the analogue optical signal and convert it to an electrical one for transport down coax.

You can't just attach another piece of fibre to a node, to actually do an 'LLU' of the cable network would be prohibitively expensive as it would require an out of band signal similar to NARAD technology which would have to use amps which bypass VM's active network infrastructure right down to the final cabinet with a line extender / bridge amp before the customer.

The only realistic way to use Virgin's assets in this manner is to purely use their ducting resources to run FTTP. Apart from that it has to be a resold wholesale solution using VM's network, or frequency share with an operator's own CMTS in the VM hubsite.

[DABhand]

How is the court case going OP?

If its successful I will be ringing up VM for monies owed for the theft of me bandwith