M14 Fallowfield Poor Speeds

[webdudeuk]

I'm in the Fallowfield area of Manchester and have had really slow broadband speeds during peak times for the past few months. When I called Virgin they told me that they have planned to fix the over utilisation issue in the area in January and offered me a discount. From my experience in past years in area M20, Withington, the promised upgrades never seemed to resolve the issues.

I wanted to make people aware so they can call Virgin, to make sure they get the discount they are entitled to and also to make sure that Virgin have the incentive to ensure that the issue is fixed. (They have aggressive marketing in the student area despite being over capacity).

My speeds are normally 30mbps but between 17:00 and 01:00 my speeds are under 1mbps.

[robbojc]

Im just wondering with all these post does anymoe get a decent connection during peak hours i thinking not

[BenMcr]

Im in the same area on 50Mbit and haven't noticed anything that would suggest a problem

[buckleb]

Well there is the old truism that you only get people complaining on forums, and very few of us bother to praise when things are good.

My connection is generally stable and has pretty much always been so (apart from a couple of instances that required an engineer to fit attenuators to bring down power levels). I've been with Virgin since the Eurobell/Blueyonder days so I don't really have a lot to complain about.

Crawley, where I live, may be especially lucky though, as up until Telewest bought out Eurobell, we had an analogue cable system. I imagine that a lot of work had to be done to bring us into the digital age, and I'm theorising that we therefore have newer kit than most (that's just idle speculation on my part though).

To my mind, the speed of the upgrades means that every part of the VM infrastructure is having to play catch-up with every other part. Hopefully at some point somebody will say "Hang on, we don't need to give our customers the ability to download the internet every night" and then we will have a stable network (yeah, I'm an optimist ).

The thought of moving to ADSL gives me the shivers to be honest, which tells me all I need to know about how I feel about my cable internet!