After our recent update on fair use policies now it seems that Virgin Media has introduced a similar scheme on it’s cable service.
Heavy cable users (the top 5% of Virgin’s customers) may now have their speeds “throttled” between the hours of 4pm and 12am- though users on different packages are likely to be subject to varying degrees of restriction.
Virgin feels that this method of restricting users speeds is a better take on the “fair use policy” than simply capping users monthly download limits. Virgin’s customers won’t be facing an unforeseen limit on the amount they can download.
take a look at this site and you might understand…….what all the fuss is about….
http://allyours.virginmedia.com/html/internet/traffic.html
Mmmmm funny though when ot was Telewest etc we did not have this problem also we pay through the nose for the XL. They put up the price in return offer double the speed at a price! 3gigs might not sound a lot and i hardly do music files so 700 mp3s means nowt. Downloading a 4gig film plus emaI, Updates etc. Boffins has not this race learnt BOFFINS are those who say things like Butter is bad for you, to much salt etc etc etc, yet we have pensioners (and good luck to them all) living beyond the suppose age limit! Now back to the question in hand its all about money no matter what i would also closley look at the usage terms and conditions! Also i wonder do our American friends suffer has we in blighty do?
I don’t see how ‘higher expectations’ would explain Virgin Media’s seemingly calculated decision to hike rates from £18 to £25 for users of the most basic 512k connection as a standalone service, without even notifying the customer. If you look at the Virgin Media website explaining these new prices, the bundle aspect of the new tariffs isn’t even mentioned. Virgin Media simply assumes that you want TV and fries, when you only want Virgin broadband and to keep your BT line.
Let’s say one fifth of Virgin’s appoximately 4.9 million customers are using just a 512k connection alone.
This would mean that Virgin Media has made something like £7 million by automatically ‘upgrading’ 512k customers (incidentally without increasing the speed to 2MB) in just one month, knowing that most of these customers will not bother to challenge such a huge company and push for a refund
Usenet access is no longer a viable propasition with Virgin which was my main reason for being with them. Binaries got so broken for so long I was forced to buy in premium provider, giganews which is brilliant however this incurs another high cost so I’m shopping around for another ISP as Virgins prices now seem crazy and the speed now seems shaky and looks set to be capped at night so I think it might be time to leave.
Other deals seem incredably attractive compared to whats on offer here. Do they thik we owe them some loyalty?
We want high speeds, consistancy and competative pricing or we walk…
I would suggest that virgin very quickly get their act together on this of the loss of customers they have seen over the sky deal will seem like nothing compared with whats comming.
In my opinion Virgin cable should be in a position to cruch all other ISP contenders but they seem to being too greedy, wanting everything fron tv, broadband, phone and mobiles. GET YOU ACT TOGETHER Ritchard!!!!
VOTE WITH YOU FEET, OR GET SHAFTED EVERY MONTH LIKE CLOCKWORK
Ha ha.
None of you people are even remotely grammatically correct, plus your spelling is atrocious!
Good day to you all.
Yours sincerely,
SPELLCHECKER.
They STILL haven’t made improvements yet, this being in August now… They are some slippery so-and-so’s…
How can they claim my broadband connection is ‘upto’ 4meg when they only time i used it bewteen 6pm and 11pm the most I can download at is about 1mb - 1.5mb a second. I’m a network manager and often transfer large amounts of data from work…..correction I used to……Silly money for a now VERY poor service.
I only found out about this as I had a hunch and did a quick google search it was happen, at first I thought it was issues with my servers etc etc. It would have been nice to recieve a warning via post.
Sky/ADSL here we come. Better channels, faster broadband and £12 a month cheaper.
I joined ntl in Jan 2007 because I download from usenet sites and they promised me ‘unlimited’. However, since virgin took over my unlimited is fine but at less than 1meg speed for £25 a month!!. Only 5 more months on my contract, then bye bye virgin.
I am so sick of this Virgin crap, your supposed to not say anything and when you try to, all you get is that they have placed a 28p per minute on there phone lines, this used to be free, well i told them i was going to quit, guess what they knocked my price down from £37 to £25, still not happy, another thing they told me is that they know people are complaining and the time management is going to stop at the end of the year, bu.. sh.. i think, well we will see.
Hah. I only just found out about this throttling scam that Virgin are running. My connection is supposed to be 20MB. We got a letter that said we’d be upgraded from a 10Mb to 20Mb line - the upgrades were supposed to start in May 2007. I’d assume, then, that even if the upgrade had not taken place I should be on AT LEAST 10MB. Not a chance. My down speed - based on a bunch of tests I’ve done this evening - is anything between 0.2Mb and just under 5Mb. I’m on the expensive “XL” package - this is ridiculous.
Seriously - if anyone out there is reading this with a view to switching to Virgin cable broadband? Don’t. It sucks.
As suggested by Mike Russell above, vote with your feet. I’m switching to ADSL. Maybe then I’ll at least get consistent 8Mb downspeeds that I used to have before Virgin took over.
>:(