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Virgin Media Caps Are Driving Me Crazy

View Comments May 23, 2007 | Everton

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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About Everton: Everton is based in London and has worked in the internet and mobile space for over ten years now, and before that worked in corporate strategy and consulting. He has a degree in Economics from Cambridge University.He also writes for Windows 7 News, Windows 8 News and One Tip A Day. View posts.

  • Das
    Time to move from Virgin, have been a loyal customer for eight years, with the last three years having nothing but problems with them. Allowing my son to run up a £500 phone bill in 1 month, even though I was paying for a call lock on mobiles and premium lines. He found out that if you phone the Virgin operator they will connect the call, at an extra cost of £3 for the service. This was at a time when my normal monthly call bill was around £4.
    I have also had around 5 account changes without any prior notice, where bills have jumped £20 to £30 above normal, and when you get someone from customer service (joke)! you can't understand a word they say.
    And now the broadband speed capping watch an on line divx movie 750meg your capped for the next 4 hours. Unlimited broadband to me means the best speed possible at the time subject to the amount of user on line, and no limit on amounts downloaded.
    So by by Virgin, O2 for me when I can terminate my account, and I will pass on the word to my friends.
  • Remi
    Virgin Media are just one of a number of ISP's that use sneaky explainations as to why they are throttling the bandwidth that we pay for, apparently it's for our own good. As for the 50MB package, that may be free of STM now, but wait until more people sign-up and Virgin will throttkle the 50MB pack too ... I dumped Virgin this year and went with O2 which is truely unlimited. Broadband in the UK is way behind most European countries ... we are being shafted!
  • Syl
    Speedtest shows my download speed as normal (9.77/10mb) but ever since I got Virgin Media broadband I haven't been able to watch any YouTube clips or listen to Myspace music or any other kind of streaming without having to stop, wait, reload 2 seconds, play 2 seconds, stop, reload etc. etc. It's like it just times out after less than a minute... very annoying! Is it really a Virgin problem? Because I have no problem downloading to my HD, it's really just streaming that won't work...
  • UJM
    that delay is called buffering, and is caused by insufficient bandwidth to stream the video, this can happen during peak hours when demand is high, it's also far more likely to happen if youv'e been STM'd (traffic managed) by Virgin Media, where your bandwidth has been cut to a level where even streaming a video becomes impossible
  • neno
    yup, O2 or Be are truely unlimited, no caps, no throttling, up to 2.5 Mbit upload speeds, and they're cheaper than Virgin ... go for it!

    O2: http://broadband.o2.co.uk/home/index.jsp

    Be: https://www.bethere.co.uk/web/beportal/homepage
  • wendy
    i'd love to ditch virgin. i've just downgraded from the 10mg package to the 2mg and surprise surprise they've capped me at half a meg, and they're trying to tell me i'm downloading too much. in fact i dont download anything other than the rare bit of music from my friends..i occasionally watch the iplayer and thats it. i HATE virgin and i wish i'd never heard of them. not to mention their inventive billing which seems to go up and up regardless of useage. bunch of moronic thieving bastards. do not want.
  • andrew
    Better of leaving, contract or no contract.I have paid for 2 meg and lucky if I get 25% of it most of the time.The only people breaking the contract are ntl.Lets get together and put these complaints to trading standards.I'm up for it who else is ?
  • L Thompson
    Not sure if this is related but I have started getting kicked out if I download anything of reasonable size. Also seems to happen if I link up any of my consoles via wireless. I have to unplug the modem then plug it back in to reconnect only for it to kick me out again after 5 mins. I'll be glad when I move so I have an excuse to ditch them.
  • reebes
    Has anyone managed to escape their contract or get this fixed up?

    I'm being capped to less than 1 when paying for 10! Sometimes use online games but not during peak hours, but even when I took a break from any large downloading it was still happening.

    Its actually affecting my uni work as i cannot upload my work to my university database. I'm likely to try to take them to court if they don't fix it for good.
  • FIONA
    My speed suddenly shot up to around 6mb for no reason especially on the laptop i asked around if anybody had moved from near where i lived no one had. I had still not worked out why. then i read a review of AVG antivirus. the review said it eat broadband, Bingo that's where i reckon it was. I recently removed AVG and installed something else and the speed is  more or less where it should be. Its worth a try if you have AVG installed put something else on. I had problem with the BBC Iplayer much like you tube constantly buffering. I went back to Internet explorer  no more problems.
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