Virgin Media Caps Are Driving Me Crazy
I’ve been playing close attention to my broadband speed every since Virgin Media introduced Speed Caps, and they are starting to drive me crazy. Although my newsgroup usage appears to be unaffected, which is crazy as I’m sure that newsgroups usage is probably a big component of Virgin Media’s usage spikes, my web browsing has become almost unusable.
Watching an online video is now almost impossible with Virgin Media. If I want to watch a YouTube video, I have to leave it running for a few mins to let it download and then go back and watch it. It’s impossible to watch YouTube videos in real-time because the playback is so jerky.
I wouldn’t mind the Virgin Media caps if they were reasonable, but as a 10Mbps (soon to be 20Mbps) user I’d expect to at least be able to use popular mainstream internet services like YouTube. I just don’t know what is going on with ntl and particularly Telewest since the merger. I was a happy Telewest user for 7 years before the merger, but now every month there’s a problem with my internet or TV service.
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Comment by Amr on 7 May 2008:
ok this is getting ridiculous!! i’m on a 4mbps connection and i am capped almost all the time at 10kbps .. even when its not peak times or whatever the hell .. i do download quite a bit but now this is becoming hopeless.. i cant even browse.. every page takes ages to load i cant even download journals or anything.. i am going to cancel my connection with virgin like TOMORROW if they don’t do anything about it !!!
Comment by nick on 11 April 2008:
it seems some areas are capped between 4-9 pm, while others are being capped between 4-midnight, it’s all to do with the speed upgrades taking place that’s the 4 Mbit service being upgraded to 10 Mbit. The problem is Virgin have not made any statement about this, officially the only time caps should be in effect is 4-9pm for EVERYONE.
If Virgin Media are capping beyond that time COMPLAIN!
see this link:
http://bbs.adslguide.org.uk/showflat.php?Cat=&Board=virgin_cable&Number=3319563&page=0&view=expanded&sb=5&o=0&fpart=1&vc=1
Comment by Dan on 10 April 2008:
Well, seems as though they’ve ditched the 5% thingy. I’m getting capped daily… along with many others. Only takes me about 15minutes to reach the cap by downloading.
Another issue is I’m often capped well long after 9pm. So today I reached my limit about 8pm, meaning they expect me to wait until 1am the following day for an uncap? Virgin, you’re having a laugh.
I was actually planning up upgrading to 20mb before this, but generally not happy with this service at all and will be reconnecting my BT line to change provider quickly. Probably to Bethere, that’s what a few of my friends are on. I know I’ll be happy with that.
Comment by nath042 on 6 April 2008:
i am also getting shoddy TV and internet and even phone services at times from Virgin Broadband, my tv cuts out and loses signal every 2 or so hours and the phones been off 2 times in the last week for atleast 10 hours each. I have had several workers from Virgin media over to try to fix the tv and internet but still it goes down so it would have to be a problem at their side. Then they introduce this cap, and that really pissed me off. I’m not sure if its still going because my internet didn’t get capped yesterday and downloading 350 mb through a 2mbps connection isn’t hard tbh. Just playing a game for a hour or 2 will download that much. I dont see why “M” users should get the cap if their internet speed isn’t going up anyway!
I still can’t believe they didnt tell me about this. I had to read it off their website after wondering why my internet was so slow.
Comment by F.O virgin on 16 February 2008:
Strange to read the comments about over usage on the lines, VM have just trialed the new 50mb line due for release this year soon. They are able to offer it’s cutomers 150mb but there are no plans to unleash this speed.
I too get capped, i admit i am a heavy downloader but it’s the upload speed which i find most frustrating. I’m able to dL @ speeds around 2.4mb but i can only upload 82kB/s W.T.F? this is just scandaless.
What are we to do, every ISP is implementing this capping or reduced dL every month. Virgin media don’t give a toss, they know they have the fastest speed and they were they only provider to let people Dl copious amounts but they have us by the ball$ and noone can do a damn thing, not even changing providers will help.
Comment by alan on 21 January 2008:
well i,m on 20mb and have just been on the phone to virgin as my 20mb has been capped down to 5mb every night now so i tested the theory that if you download more than 3gb its capped ,well guess what i never downloaded a thing ,just had my pc running all day and boom 8pm capped,virgin media told me that now there is no limit it is an automatic cap on xl users now but still have to pay for 20mb
Comment by jon-t on 24 December 2007:
in reply to the above post:
unfortunately on ADSL you can’t calculate your download speed based on distance from the local exchange, it all depends on your line attenuation & S/N ratio. For instance one person who is 1.5 k/m from the local exchange may get 6 Mbit while the other may only get 4 Mbit at the same distance.
this is not the case with fibre optic cable where distance has not effect on speed, so if a cable provider quotes a 20 Mbit broadband service, thats what the subscriber should get or pretty damn close to it. That’s what makes Virgin Media (cable) customers so angry, despite all their traffic management etc they still cannot produce a reliable 20 Mbit product, you may be lucky and get 20 Mbit or you may be unlucky and get less than half that and your paying £37.00 per month for the privilige.
Virgin Media are getting away with blue murder and if you live within a reasonable distance of an unbundled exchange you’d be mad not to switch to ADSL, even if you include the price of a BT phone line your still financially better off!
Comment by jonny p on 24 December 2007:
lol it’s funny to see so many people with the same problems. i work for sky broadband tech support, now the nature of this business is that all we hear are problems (nobody calls to say hey tech guys my connection is great) but it’s satisfying when u fix something, whether it be speed or no connection or whatever. Now ok, there is a common thought that because everyone DSL is at the mercy of BT it cannot be sorted fully but something just happened, bt realised that sky is a big enough player to actually affect their broadband sales. so the next thing i noticed was when people had speed problems we could actually have some say in the service even if it wasn’t unbundled. Now her’s for stupid me, i signed up for virgin attracted by the great speed packages and the fact i lived quite a bit away from the exchange. but then i moved, to studentland. what’s virgin’s core market? house sharing students who can split the price. but then u get a whole street of them sharing it. It’s no hidden fact that cable is totally shared broadband but 2 meg max on a 20 meg package is just theft. so even though our BT exchange has absolutely no due date for unbundling, we’re going to move to the sky connect package because at least we know that with 8 meg connection if we calculate distance we’ll at least get a solid 6meg line rate from BT, bring on unbundling, hopefully u’ll be lucky enough to live in an unbundled area. virgin is crap, there’s no excuse for any of it, they should just be honest.
Comment by jon-t on 23 December 2007:
@ Daniel Rowley (Aion) and any others who are confused as to why their download speeds are dropping to 1 Mbit, this is because Virgin have implimented a new traffic management scheme for example …
4 Mbit connection traffic management (during peak hours)
OLD scheme exceed 750 MB download speed cut to 2 Mbit for 4 hours
NEW scheme exceed 800 MB download speed cut to 1 Mbit for 5 hours
see my link above for all the latest speed caps
Comment by jon-t on 23 December 2007:
Beware New Virgin Media Caps are now in effect even though their website says they’re not due until 2008, they are here now and your even worse off than before. Virgin call it traffic management, we call it SPEED CUTS!
http://www.virginmedia.com/help/traffic-management.php