Been with them since 56k dial up days, never needed to change ISP so im grateful i dont have to go through the hassle of changing and forking out money to do so. VM arnt perfect but no ISP is.
My cousin across the road has TalkTalk, we live about 1.5 mile from the exchange, shes on the £7/month service with a free wireless G router. On her laptop she gets 0.2Mb speed.
On my £25/month 50Mb VM i get the full 50Mb speed using free wireless N router.

As for the STM/throttling, i only download on average 1-3GB every day, and if i get throttled i still get 12Mb speed, not that ive noticed ive been throttled yet.

Value? what i get is what i pay.
Speed is perfect.
Customer support is ok, some departments are clueless and some are ok/helpful.