Virgin's broadband claims "misleading"
Virgin Media has been told off by the Advertising Standards Authority over an advert which compared its broadband speeds with ADSL.
As reported by vnunet.com, the company has been rapped on the knuckles after the ASA found its adverts comparing the speed of ADSL broadband over copper 'phone lines with its own fibre optic based broadband offering.
In an advert which made it to print magazines and newspapers across the country, Virgin Media claimed that a mere “three out of ten homes in the UK can get 8Mbit/s or more over BT phone lines.” The advert went on to claim that “ten out of ten homes with our fibre optic broadband can get 20Mbit/s.”
On the face of it, Virgin Media's claim has some merit: by its nature, the speed offered by ADSL is variable based on the quality of the wiring and the distance from the exchange – along with the type of ADSL being used. By contrast, Virgin Media's connection speed is fixed at the exchange – no matter the distance.
However, rival Sky – which offers its own TV, 'phone, and broadband via ADSL package – took umbrage at the advert, describing the comparison as “misleading and unfair” in a complaint to the ASA. In the complaint, Sky pointed out that the bandwidth capacity in Virgin Media's network was not sufficient “to provide all customers with 20Mbit/s at the same time” and pointed out that at times of congestion users' connections would be slower than the speed claimed in the advert.
In defence, Virgin Media claimed that the fine print on the advert – which pointed out that “actual speeds may vary” – was enough to warn customers that 20Mb/s was a best-case speed, not a guarantee. The ASA, however, disagreed – and pointed out that the fine print “contradicted rather than qualified the strong implication [...] that all customers on Virgin's cable broadband 20Mbit/s package would experience that speed.”
Accordingly, the ASA upheld Sky's complaint due to a lack of data “demonstrating that all Virgin's 20Mbit/s cable broadband customers could achieve the headline speed in the home” and has told Virgin Media not to repeat the claim again.
Do you think that Virgin Media's central point – that its fibre optic broadband offering will give a higher speed than an ADSL equivalent – holds merit, or was the company over-egging the pudding when making the comparison? Share your thoughts over in the forums.
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Discuss in the forums ReplyI changed to BE broadband yesterday on their adsl2 network and i have got a nice connection of 23 meg down 2.5 meg up.
The connection speed is great and it is better than what virgin could offer me if they could get me a connection. They dont connect flats so i cant go on cable anyway. Doesnt stop them ending me 2 or 3 leaflets a week though.
So Virgin should really start to advertise based on current connections, based on ADSL2, which so far offers a faster speed than that 20 meg fixed speed that they talk about and that is fact(in my case)
Comparing the new cable to ADSL is like comparing a Honda civic type-r with a standard bottom of the line honda, where really they should be comparing a type-r with a subaru impreza turbo.
Currently they are not really doign a fair comparison.
Compare cable to ADSL2 and you have a whole different situation
The only reason I stay with them is that 10mbs is 10mbs, going to a BT/Copper based alternative would cost me a lot more to get the same speed less reliably. BE or ADSL24 are always on the back burner though.
More likely though, is that you will live in an area that has overloaded UBR's, in which case the service can be just plain terrible...and all of a sudden, 'old fashioned' copper wire networks seem like travelling by bullet train compared to what peak time usage is like on a crappy UBR fibre network.
Of course, theres no way to tell which side of the UBR fence you sit, until you have signed the fixed term contract...
I know this from experience...:(
I've been a 20Mb Virgin customer for about a year and before that I was with NTL for several years, dial up then Cable. In both cases I was living in a second floor flat. I've not had a single problem with them (apart from the occaisional V+ box rebooting but that's a different matter).
I can't speak for your situation, just wanted to give my 2 pence.
I on the other hand have to make do with their pathetic adsl service. Their service cuts out randomly and most annoyingly they seem to consider "peak" time as something absurd like 10am-2am, so i am being continually throttled even when I havent downloaded ANYTHING.
The best example of their service was a few weeks ago when they inexplicably capped our internet at 5kb/s yes thats right, 5! An hour on the phone to "customer support" ended in them denying anything was wrong and telling me to reboot the router 4 times in a row to magically fix it.... When this failed to fix the problem (what a shocker!) the customer service person actually said "i don't know what the problem is, or how to fix it"... right.... thanks. 2 weeks later the internet magically went back to normal... yay
Cable could go much faster than ADSL but virgin see no financial incentive, I think they have the capacity for bandwidths up to about 200MB/s if they pulled their finger out. It suits them to keep the market like it is currently though, as in 3/4 years time their 200mb service will cost £50 a month rather than if they released it now they would have to bring the price down in that time.
Unfortunatly it would be nice if I could ACTUALY utilise that 10mb line for more than 15 minutes before my connection gets throttled back to the stone age.
Its akin to handing someone the keys to a Ferrari and then telling them they cant drive it faster than 5mph, its bloody stupid.
What would you guys reccomend? Anyone with any experience in shopping for the fastest reliable connection out there? We are all pretty heavy users, and the bill will be split 4 ways, so it doesn't really matter if it costs alot.
i'd recommend *be, thats who i use. near enough their 24mb promise (around 20-22) and its only 25 quid
Far better than BT, who I had last year, or Sky, who my mate uses.
I'm on O2, advertised as "up to 20Mbps", only a few hundred yards from the exchange but I've never seen better than 18Mbps. Not that I'm grumbling.
http://www.cpemma.co.uk/bit/bb2.gif
The throttling doesn't bother me, I used to be a bit naughty and download a lot of things, but I have since stopped. My brother is usually downloading a ton of coheed tour and interview videos (not sure of the legality of these as none of them seem to be released on dvd, if they were he would own them), but he never gets close to getting us throttled. Some days I am playing online on my xbox and in party chat with mates all day. While surfing the net in between games.
But I cannot complain about virgin, one thing I will say about them is that the customer service isn't always great. If their service was as good as the customer service for their mobile phone network then you wouldn't be able to say a bad word about them, I emailed at about 1am asking a question about coverage in my area as I was having signal problems, I got a call back the next morning telling me what my options were, I could try another few phones, I could cancel the contract there and then or I could wait until the end of the 28 days and they would ring me back to ask if I was happy. I chose to cancel, I received a full refund (minus shipping) and got about 40mins and 300texts free as they didn't change me anything for the contract.
not really, i didnt get samuel l jackson to shout that people are definitely guaranteed to get that, rather that is what i get. My parents have virgin cable and they've never had a problem with that so i'd happily suggest that thats a good service too, its never gone down, unlike my own Be service
Same here, we have been with them for over 5 years, maybe more, and not had a single problem with them apart from road works going through cables and them giving us a faulty modem, but apart from that, I get full 10mb when not throttled, and for me, the customer service has been very good.
Like stated, depends where you live.
QFT.
2Mb customer's are being bumped up to 10Mb for "free" (all prices are going up by £2/month coincidently) from 1st May. But it's capped to 75% speed for most of the time.
Still my 2Mb line is capped to 50% at the moment, so I'm being upgraded from a 1Mb line to an 7.5Mb line in a month or so. Not too bad, I guess.
fixed
Can't really complain about that
the only problem i have had is with 50mb service with massive packet loss and 2mb speeds for 5-10mins times (still doing that) norm does it evey 1hr but can be randome
+1. Start Azureus, 2 seconds later, all web browsing speeds go to crap.
Another friend of mine is ditching his £24 per month BT (also severe torrent throttling) in favour of o2.
Virgin broadband is not good at all.
Virgin traffic in general is pretty damn poor http traffic seems a lot slower than ADSL. I can't really do any work from home because it's just crap. I'd be shot of them in a second if it wasn't a rented flat.
Overzealous? It's perfectly fair. Download during peak periods and get capped for 5 hours. Other ISPs would cap you for the rest of the month (Orange, for example).
Virgin do clearly advertise the speeds on their website. http://allyours.virginmedia.com/html/internet/traffic.html
O2 don't limit torrents at all but I choose to impose my own limiting at peak times by automatically cutting my torrent upload bandwidth down by half.
that's more likely the upload maxing out and affecting your web browsing. i leave utorrent for days on end with no impact on browsing cos i've set it to limit upload speeds at certain times.
i agree that the upload speeds are terrible though but all in all i've been a pretty happy virgin/telewest customer for the past 7 years. certaibnly offer a better service than anyone else i know has got from other ISPs
Average download speed = 7.94mb/s, but regularly drops to below 2mb/s
Average upload speed = 0.48mb/s
We lose the broadband service, a few days a year and that is the 20mb advertised service.
We specifically asked the sales man if there was any download limits, fair usage policy, or throttling, he told us that there wasnt, so he lied about that.
The TV service is even worse, drops out for weeks at a time, and when it is working, the picture and sound quality is appalling.
The monthly bill is never correct; we spend several hours a month sorting it out.
The call centre helpline is incompetent and pointless.
The phone service is the worst though, people ring us, but the phone never rings, and its not the phone its self. A couple of months ago, Virgin disconnected us without telling us, sold our phone number to BT, who issued it to one of their customers. When we rung Virgin, they claimed that we never had our number, and only after threatening them, they told us that it would take two weeks to get our phone line and number back. So for two weeks we were stuck with no home phone, stuck using mobiles for two weeks, we never received any compensation, or even an apology. What we did get on the next bill was a charge for calling someone in Zimbabwe for several hours, which we never made.
Sorry about the rant, we just hate Virgin Media.
Since day one of me getting broadband, i've seen the upload rate go from 2:1 (512/256 of original UK ADSL) to my current virgin connection of a quite shocking ratio of ~26:1 (20480/768)*
I mourn the death of usable upload :'(
*That said, i've never fully understood virgin's throttling, it spends a fair amount of time, seemingly at random, stuck at 10240/768 for no apparent reason.
5120/192 when you get throttled (yes, the already pathetically low upload gets throttled 75% as well, just to add insult to injury)
You mourn the death of usable upload? So why aren't you signing up with o2 then? They give 1300mb/s (130kb) upload even on their smallest (8mb) connection. Since I changed to o2, I am now able to seed big downloads very fast.
Our telephone line here can't maintain a stable ADSL connection above 2-3mb unfortunately
i would also agree with others in saying that the upload speed is the only bad point. i'm on 10mb and the upload speed i get is pitiful. i don't think i've ever seen it break 60kb/sec.
still, everything about virgin is better than what i was on before -- bt. what a nightmare :(
They have one of the worst throttling policies of all isps, after 3GB they cut you off (not literally, but with pings of 4000 and more its like being cut off).
Worst thing though is that they send your connection down the gutter for the slightest form of p2p usage, which you can't always prevent as some games use it to transfer data between server and client or for updates.
The 75% reduction in speed advertised as the throttled speed with virgin is complete bs btw, the reality is below:
http://www.speedtest.net/result/450721195.png
compared to what I get normally:
http://www.speedtest.net/result/444782345.png
upload is 700mb and 1.2gb between 3pm and 8pm (i guess 1 hr, i have not worked upload out as i do not use p2p for downloads)
morning limtier is 10am to 3am 2400MB and 6000MB (x2 the Evening) and no upload monitor download only kicks it in
http://allyours.virginmedia.com/html/internet/traffic.html
if your going to be doing alot of downloading all the time jsut make sure you start it at 4pm so the limter comes off at after 9PM
------
still its Not an monthy download CAP if i was to live with CAP or day throttleing, i go with what Virgin are doing as long as its not lowering to much
on 10mb service it is way to much the cap for it all the wa down to 2.5mb
20mb is ok as i find it hard for most users to need more then 600KB/s (5mb) constantly you can allso download over 100-200gb an day with the limiter in place,
alot of BT providers only have 15gb/50gb montly caps, there are alot as well that have no cap but an hidden p2p throttle in place (tiscali is one) that lowers all traffic of that type to 10KB or less
allso the avg for most ADSL users is around 4mb (where i am its 1mb so nock from SKY saying i can only get 15mb with virgin (even if that was true and its not) when infact any one in wa41 post code where i am can only get 1-4mb broadband on an bt line)
thay realy do need to fix the 50 mb service thought as i still haveing 1-3mb speed problems that only last for 5-10 mins every so offen (only when Maxing the download out for 10 mins or up to 1 hr it can some times take for it to kick in the 5-10 min slow down but its random an tad)
well, to be honest -- why would i badmouth something i've had no problems with? that's probably the case with everyone who's had nothing bad to say in this thread...
(although, after making my post the other day it's died on me for an hour two nights on the trot. a sign perhaps? :D)
No problems with it? does that mean you never stream any media over the internet? (easiest way to go over cap) does that mean you live alone (making it somewhat easier to stay below the cap), you never try to upload anything? you don't use digital distribution systems like steam?
yes, i do. i live with other people, all of us using it over a network (although only my girlfriend uses it with any regularity aside from me) and i use steam. i also use xbox live and psn a lot, although i'm not sure how much that would affect it -- no major problems.
i don't see why that's so hard to believe.
Version A sucks very badly as thay have added 2hrs and halfed the download amount And the cut off is 1AM that whould suck
Version B is far better in the week day as cut off is at 11PM (where as before it could be up to 2am befor ethe 5hrs ran out)
week end has 2.5x the week day limit but its from 11am - 9pm witch still sucks an little but still alot for one day nothing stoping you from still downloading
any one who downloads alot is likey to be on the 20mb should be ok, its the 10mb users who are more likey to complane and i have to agree 2mb sucks
It is not hard for me, but impossible.
Assuming 3 people in a household, that makes 1GB daily allowed.
So, lets say you buy the orange box on steam each once and only download it once that would be 25 days of throttling.
With only 10 "full size" games and about 25 old or for other reason tiny ones I am sitting on a 120GB!!! steam folder that is enough to trigger the throttling on 120 days..... or one third of the year.
Or, watch approx 1 hour of video online, booom..... half your limit gone.
So no, I can not agree with you that there is no problem and as you can see in one of my earlier posts, the 75% reduction is a complete lie, 4k pings make the internet completly useless.
for what i use it for, it's more than adequate.
anyway, a post littered with words like "assume" and "let's say" telling me how things should be, or my own experiences. which should i believe? it's not like i'm forcing anyone to agree with what i said, or telling people "THIS IS HOW IT IS FOR EVERYONE" or whatever. i'm just retelling my own experiences: i download, i stream, i online game -- i've had no major problems, my only gripe is the pitiful upload. i can't see why this has to be shot down when it's nothing but what *i've* experienced over the past six months. i wouldn't expect everyone to have the same experience, i just wanted to mention my own.
if you're this displeased with virgin, i hope to god you changed provider :D
what are you talking about realy are you talking about virgin or an bt provider there (or your ubr is over subcribed where are you at unlikey as your getting full download speed and upload), virgin do not do any thing els apart from only drop upload and download 75% for 5hrs from when you start it, packets are not loss in doing so all that happens is your upload and download speed drops (2/10/20mb users)
if your useing p2p apps that are Flooding your connection thay can make big pings set to low number like 10KB
make sure the BT DNA client is not installed on any pc as its is hidden service or any p2p apps that start with any pc in the house {limewire go into the options and turn off auto start})
you need to cap p2p apps max 1 or 2 pcs (1 @ 10KB on 10mb bb) or not use them at all
if your on 50mb broadband there are problems with the service at this time, that have been going on to long now need to nag them tomoro
had to post second due to user error
you are uploading (prb p2p) with an ping of 4 seconds and 0.01 upload you need to exit all p2p apps and cap them to 10KB if your going to use them in the day time and keep it to 1 pc @ 10KB/s (with 20mb you can get away with 2 pcs at 10KB/s)
allso Upload cap is 700MB (about 30 mins at max upload to start cap) download cap is 2.4gb (15 mins max download cap) on 10mb that you are on you should realy think to move to 20mb so you still got upload left if you wish to still use p2p and have speed (goto www.samknows.com and tell me what speed BT will give you its most likey not going to be more then 4mb)
only WoW i know of and xfire that use p2p to download game patch's (with wow your better getting it direct download from an mirror wow takes days to update if you not backed up the patches) Xfire just turn it off or set it to an low amount
You said you don't live alone, meaning the max you can use is 1,5GB with 2 people, with 3 people its 1GB, with 4 people...
You get the idea.
Such small limits are simply not suitable for the ever growing file sizes and the shift to online distribution of software and media.
Of course I would love to change isp, but its not my decision to make, so for as long as I don't earn enough to afford living on my own (which will never happen) I am stuck with a isp someone else chose.
1: I don't have any P2P Software installed on my PC. (can't vouch for the other people in the house though)
2: Not just P2P traffic comes with 4k pings... it is everything, when throttled google takes between 1 and 3 minutes to load (depending if someone else is trying to get on some website as well or not).
www.samknows.com and tell me what you get on ADSL speed wise
(look at the router you see its quite active if p2p is runnning), you need to tell the others to stop useing p2p before 9PM start them after 9pm so your out side of the TCO
if your shareing the connection with others you need co-op from every one els, this is an problem with the amount of users on your connection + the thottler
http://www.thinkbroadband.com/tbbmeter.html
install that onto your PC and reg it, instal that onto each other pc and put your reg info on there as well make sure you set the alarms to L broadband and turn off the day/week/month alarm (you have to press save on every tickbox) (there test site is low speed so no point in doing tests from there)