200M Gamer : Question About Virgin Media and BT Infinity?

[ethan103]

I wanted to know, my home is relatively new (2.5 years old) and it has both VM and BT Infinity, now, do they share any infrasture or line connection whatsoever?

Or do they run completely separate and independent?

[weesteev]

Totally different physical networks.

[ethan103]

Originally Posted by weesteev

Totally different physical networks.

Ok thank you, so having both services at my home wont make them cross talk or interfere with each other?

[jb66]

Originally Posted by ethan103

Ok thank you, so having both services at my home wont make them cross talk or interfere with each other?

No, they can overlap

[ethan103]

Originally Posted by jb66

No, they can overlap

How so?

[jb66]

Sorry I wasn't clear. They do not interfere with each other and you can overlap services. I.e have bt running while you have virgin installed so you have no downtime

[General Maximus]

Originally Posted by jb66

No, they can overlap

Originally Posted by ethan103

How so?

he doesn't mean overlap as in interfere with one another, he means they can run simultaneously/alongside one another. They are completely different types of cable running to different street cabinets which won't be close to each other. The coax from VM will run under ground and your phone line for the Infinity will run over head on a pole. The only common point of intersection is your house so unless someone blows your house up you should never suffer from a loss of both services. Sometimes somebody (council/water board etc) digs up the road and cuts through a VM pipe by accident which will knock out your connection but it won't affect BT and likewise if there is a storm and a phone pole gets blown over it won't affect your VM connection.

I strongly recommend VM over BT. With VM there are no distance based speed restrictions so as long as you are in a cabled area the max speed available to your area (e.g. 200mbits) is what you will get. In contrast, BT/Openreach providers advertise e.g. 76mbits on Infinity 2 but it is all based on the distance to your local cabinet and as an example for me, the most I can get is 53mbits which pales in comparison to the 378 I get from VM.

[kalleh]

Originally Posted by General Maximus

he doesn't mean overlap as in interfere with one another, he means they can run simultaneously/alongside one another. They are completely different types of cable running to different street cabinets which won't be close to each other. The coax from VM will run under ground and your phone line for the Infinity will run over head on a pole. The only common point of intersection is your house so unless someone blows your house up you should never suffer from a loss of both services. Sometimes somebody (council/water board etc) digs up the road and cuts through a VM pipe by accident which will knock out your connection but it won't affect BT and likewise if there is a storm and a phone pole gets blown over it won't affect your VM connection.

I strongly recommend VM over BT. With VM there are no distance based speed restrictions so as long as you are in a cabled area the max speed available to your area (e.g. 200mbits) is what you will get. In contrast, BT/Openreach providers advertise e.g. 76mbits on Infinity 2 but it is all based on the distance to your local cabinet and as an example for me, the most I can get is 53mbits which pales in comparison to the 378 I get from VM.

This is all depends on your area. I'm fortunate enough to live in a area with both and close enough to cabinet for top sync.

Our 350 has several months out of the year where peak times it performs bad for even downloading just depends on the area. It's not quite as bad for congestion as it used to be back in Telewest days where congestion was never fixed but our headend has never been the best for performance.

The FTTC line from AAISP through BT's cabinet performs better for gaming not by just a slight amount but by a hell of a lot.

[jb66]

Originally Posted by kalleh

This is all depends on your area. I'm fortunate enough to live in a area with both and close enough to cabinet for top sync.

Our 350 has several months out of the year where peak times it performs bad for even downloading just depends on the area. It's not quite as bad for congestion as it used to be back in Telewest days where congestion was never fixed but our headend has never been the best for performance.

The FTTC line from AAISP through BT's cabinet performs better for gaming not by just a slight amount but by a hell of a lot.

It also costs a hell of alot too

[kalleh]

Originally Posted by jb66

It also costs a hell of alot too

Don't think £60 a month is unreasonable for good internet. I spend a lot of time working online and in general using the internet and play alot of games online so I get my money's worth.

The VM Bundle has value aswell i guess with the TV option but in this term you get what you pay for.

[Jon22]

Originally Posted by kalleh

Don't think £60 a month is unreasonable for good internet.

Got to agree with that. I certainly wouldn't mind paying that as long as the service is top notch. Heck, I'm paying nearly that with Virgin now that the discount has finished, and at the moment, I certainly wouldn't call their service top notch, at least for around here. I'm just waiting for the contract to end with Virgin and then see who to go with then. AAISP are certainly a possibility, along with Zen. I'd even go with BT.

[rtho782]

Originally Posted by kalleh

Don't think £60 a month is unreasonable for good internet. I spend a lot of time working online and in general using the internet and play alot of games online so I get my money's worth.

The VM Bundle has value aswell i guess with the TV option but in this term you get what you pay for.

AAISP are awesome but that £60 doesn't even get you unlimited data, it's 1TB a month.

At that cost I'd need a VM connection as well for "bulk data", steam games etc.

It's also about 1/5th of the speed of my VM connection that I pay £39 a month for.

I'd love for more ISPs to be like AAISP, hell if they offered unlimited for £60 a month I might even consider them (although I'd only get about 50mbit from them so maybe not) but you're comparing a rolls royce to a ford focus.

I do actually use AAISP for VoIP

[adduxi]

I have both BT and VM running simultaneously for work redundancy and it works great. Using a Draytek Vigor 2860 and 2 old Asus RT66's for wireless access. Link is always up and never any issues.

[Sephiroth]

Ditto what adduxi said, except both routers are ASU’s RT-AC68U. I use the HG612 modem on the Infinity service, though the HomeHub 6 at my other house is a reasonable gateway if you don’t need full router facilities.