To VM or not to VM?

[mpmc]

Hi folks, I'm looking to pick your collective brains.

So Virgin Media have recently extended their network to us via Project Lightning (July) . This ironically coincided with the near end of our contract with Plusnet. Unfortnately their website was still saying 'no' at the time so I went with Pulse8 Broadband & so far it's been great. Much much better than PN. There's a forum post over on kitz forums I did discussing it.

Of course as soon as they started building leaflets came through the door, and after they'd finished the sales people came knocking. Sadly I could not talk to them but I did give the "Field sales adviser" a text and we had a chat over the phone.

He was nice enough although a bit "gift of the gab", went through what we currently had; BB 24 down 4 up, £31 a month with static ip, £38 for Sky HD no movies/sport (in contract until 30th Oct) and £5 for mobile.

We'd previously had Virgin Media / NTL and being the geek I am; I'd looked into how their (old HFC) network worked DOCSIS, HFC etc. So I threw him a few questions sadly he wasn't sure and told me I should be an engineer with them (buttering up?) but to ask the engineers those questions on the install when/if we have it installed.

Some of those questions were:

Note: I did not ask him (the sales guy) all these questions but I threw them to a friend as well via IRC - who is on the other side of Coventry but on VMs HFC.

• Is our area the old HFC or FTTP. He said FTTP but wasn't 100%. I made sure he didn't confuse my question with VDSL FTTC/FTTP to be safe. I can only assume it is whatever VM define as FTTP. I'm going to say this has been answered.
• Static IP. VM never did this at the old place and sadly they still don't. however I know the addresses are sticky so that's fine.
• Transparent proxies. They used them a lot back then, looks like they still do (after chatting with a friend on IRC). Even more worrying is that they may be forging https certs on blocked sites? MITM attack anyone?
• Latency: This is a big one for me; Currently enjoying 20ms to Battle.net services. My friend did a test too, and he got roughly the same. But I do remember at our old address at peak times this was more like 100-400ms!

As we're still in contract with Sky (TV only) we've decided to hold off on doing anything until that ends, while I'm tempted at the better speeds etc, I'm wary of switching given my previous experience on VM at our old place (B77 area). I really do not want to be stuck in a 18 month contract with crappy services.

Any thoughts or advice is greatly received.

 

[TTJJ]

Virgin's speeds are great.

They share their capacity a lot more than Openreach networks generally so when their network gets busy, you'll see spikes in latency.

In my experience, their network has some routing quirks at times. I know they claim not to traffic manage but I felt like there was definitely some optimisation going on sometimes in their network but it was very hard to figure out because speed tests seem to get priority.