0iD
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My personal experiance.
Virgin media BB (non cable) for me, sucks BIGTIME!
If I use it between say 4pm & midnight it's so slow as to be barely useable. I swithched from ID Net (lovely faultless 4000kb/s all the time) to Virgin because the mrs was on an economy drive & wanted the free evening & weekend calls. Still, it was upto 8m & they said I could definately achieve that. ...
My left buttcheek!
Take tonight for instance (5 random readings to give an average)
4:30pm 1803kb/s
6:23pm 192kb/s
6:33pm 539kb/s
6:48pm 154kb/s
7:11pm 488kb/s
It's rubbish, online gaming is well nigh impossible lest I do it after 1am
I've tried different PC's, different OS's, different routers, the usb modem they gave me, all the same story.
and when I do complain I get charged 25p a minute for the privilege & a 10p connection charge, sometimes being on hold or in a que for upto 30 mins.
All they have to say is "You have to expect some slow down in peak periods". and I paid £7.60 for the privilege of that bit of sage advice.
Recently, after many online complaints I get this message:
Dear Customer,
Thanks for your email.
The slow speed is caused during the evening hour/peak hours since the number of browsers increases; this is linked to “Contention Ratio”
To provide a cost effective service - our ADSL services are 'contended' (shared) at the following ratios:
50:1 ADSL 500, 1000 & 2000 Solo
20:1 ADSL 500, 1000 & 2000 Business
This contention is applied within the BT network - both locally with other users on your telephone exchange and within the BT network as it connects into our network.
What this means in the 'worst case' is that you could be sharing a 500 Kbit/s connection with up to 49 other users. So if they were all using it at the same time 'theoretically' you would only get 10 Kbit/s (not very fast at all - in fact quite a bit slower than a normal modem).
However, 'in reality' this scenario is very unlikely to happen and you should usually find it to be far faster than a modem connection.
ADSL relies on individual users not making unreasonable traffic demands on the network to provide fast access speeds for all - please see here for further details.
Remember if you are not getting the speed you expect it can be due to the contention ratio but also too many other factors including the capacity of the remote site you are accessing.
If you have any further queries you can chat online with one of our agents, to chat online please click on the link below, and enter your Virgin Media email address and password to access our online chat agents.

So, I ask the question, "If 50 users are continually usuing the 8mb/s line I could potentially only ever experiance 160kb/s on my BB connection?"(Which unfortunately seems to be the case)
The answer was of course a hesitant "Yes"
Then I ask, "In what way, shape, or form could you possibly call this Broadband? The name does tend to imply a certain experience."
To date I have had no answer.
Virgin media BB (non cable) for me, sucks BIGTIME!
If I use it between say 4pm & midnight it's so slow as to be barely useable. I swithched from ID Net (lovely faultless 4000kb/s all the time) to Virgin because the mrs was on an economy drive & wanted the free evening & weekend calls. Still, it was upto 8m & they said I could definately achieve that. ...
My left buttcheek!
Take tonight for instance (5 random readings to give an average)
4:30pm 1803kb/s
6:23pm 192kb/s
6:33pm 539kb/s
6:48pm 154kb/s
7:11pm 488kb/s
It's rubbish, online gaming is well nigh impossible lest I do it after 1am
I've tried different PC's, different OS's, different routers, the usb modem they gave me, all the same story.
and when I do complain I get charged 25p a minute for the privilege & a 10p connection charge, sometimes being on hold or in a que for upto 30 mins.
All they have to say is "You have to expect some slow down in peak periods". and I paid £7.60 for the privilege of that bit of sage advice.
Recently, after many online complaints I get this message:
Dear Customer,
Thanks for your email.
The slow speed is caused during the evening hour/peak hours since the number of browsers increases; this is linked to “Contention Ratio”
To provide a cost effective service - our ADSL services are 'contended' (shared) at the following ratios:
50:1 ADSL 500, 1000 & 2000 Solo
20:1 ADSL 500, 1000 & 2000 Business
This contention is applied within the BT network - both locally with other users on your telephone exchange and within the BT network as it connects into our network.
What this means in the 'worst case' is that you could be sharing a 500 Kbit/s connection with up to 49 other users. So if they were all using it at the same time 'theoretically' you would only get 10 Kbit/s (not very fast at all - in fact quite a bit slower than a normal modem).
However, 'in reality' this scenario is very unlikely to happen and you should usually find it to be far faster than a modem connection.
ADSL relies on individual users not making unreasonable traffic demands on the network to provide fast access speeds for all - please see here for further details.
Remember if you are not getting the speed you expect it can be due to the contention ratio but also too many other factors including the capacity of the remote site you are accessing.
If you have any further queries you can chat online with one of our agents, to chat online please click on the link below, and enter your Virgin Media email address and password to access our online chat agents.
So, I ask the question, "If 50 users are continually usuing the 8mb/s line I could potentially only ever experiance 160kb/s on my BB connection?"(Which unfortunately seems to be the case)
The answer was of course a hesitant "Yes"
Then I ask, "In what way, shape, or form could you possibly call this Broadband? The name does tend to imply a certain experience."
To date I have had no answer.























