Virgin Media 1Mbps Broadband Package

[crmpicco]

Hi All,

I am moving house and am looking a a broadband provider in the UK.

Virgin Media provide a 1Mbps package with no caps or limits for £14.99 GBP per month.

More details at:
http://www.virgin.net/allyours/broadband/unlimited/

Can anyone vouch for this provider? The problem I have experienced before (mainly Tiscali) is blocking Torrents through BitTorrent. Can anyone say that Virgin Media do not do this?

I also need access to SSH, does anyone use SSH on Virgin??

Any thoughts appreciated.

Picco

[David Harrison]

If you use a torrent agent that offers encryption between transfers, I'd suggest enabling that, but it will only encrypt transfers to and from other clients that can support encryption of transfers, such as Azureus. Encryption will probably get around the traffic shaping by the ISP. Also, using a port other than 6881 to connect to the tracker with can help.

If you're going to torrent than I'd suggest a connection faster than 1 Mpbs because ... that's just somewhat slow nowadays, but stay away (or at least be very cautious) of ISPs that don't have a cap on the bandwidth, because they will almost always have a "fair use policy", which basically means they can massively restrict your connection for simply using it too much, never mind the fact that you paid to use it.

Depending on how much you torrent, most services (even with a cap) may be enough for your needs, but if they're not then I'd suggest looking at BT Business Broadband (http://www.btbroadbandoffice.com/broadband?affinitypartnerid=OL2&campaignID=businesshomepage) (if you can get it). It costs a bit more (£26.99) but you get an 8 Mbps capless connection that's absolutely ROCK SOLID, with no FUP so it'll never be limited.

[\\.\]

Virgin Media AKA NTL & Telewest.

Whilst I cant vouch for Telewest, NTL are total crap.

The new captain is no better, so the junker that Richy bought is more of a shipwreck than a yatch.

[\\.\]

Also

Virgin media have dropped various "Premium" Sky channels from the cable tv package that they offer, dont be fooled into signing up until Sky are definately back on board.

This incidentally is not VM's problem, Sky turned around and doubled the fee to VM who would have to pass on the extra cost to the consumer and VM dropped Sky for their "By the Bollocks" Tactics.

[wh666-666]

For £18.99 you can get 2meg broadband ... Im a telewest/virgin customer and wouldnt ever use anyone else especially not BT. Im on the 5 for £50 deal .. I pay £50 a month and get two mobiles with 300min + 300 texts, landline with free evening/weekend calls, digi TV with a couple more channels than freeview and 2meg broadband (soon to be upgraded to 4meg for same price).

Also last year i got all my services half that price again for a few months. As a new customer haggle your arse off. Every year i haggle with cable and tell them since BT are allowed to alter their prices now that they need to give me a cheaper service for me to stay with cable. Come on be british, bash them down in price, they will haggle to get new business if you haggle in the polite british way and they'll haggle to keep your custom thereafter.

Of course id never stray from cable ... mmmm cheaper than a bt line and sky and everything else on top .. free installation (bt charges £100 per visit and dont garuantee to connect you in one visit) .. cheaper standard line rental than bt ... Need i carry on?

As for reliability ive only ever suffered a loss of service once in over two years and that was only for a few hours. In the same area as me people with bt have had line faults more than this and as for there ISP's, well they've had a hell of alot more downtime than cable.

As \\.\ said telewest lost sky1 ... A shame but its just one channel and that was a dirty trick by sky deliberately rising the price so cable couldnt afford it, then trying to blame cable for not caring, all in the middle of the lost season and then starting a mass advertising campaign offering installs before lost started again and catch up weekends.

If you really want sky one that badly you can either get free digi tv with cable or a few extra channels for £18 p/m minimum (sky's very cheapest tariff).

Also TV rots the mind anyway :p

[\\.\]

... (bt charges £100 per visit and dont garuantee to connect you in one visit) ...
£100 per visit?

I never paid a penny, no install or setup fees, my BT connection is Way better than NTL/Telewest/VM can offer me, I get 8Megs and I get the full bandwidth, none of this contention ratio buisness which you get with Cable on NTL/Telewest/VM service.

I pay £35 a month and I get...

2 phonelines (1 Broadband telephone number that connects to regular telephony & regular Land line number thats EX-directory)
1 Wireless Broadband Router / Modem c/w Wireless handset for calls
250 BT Openzone / WAP minutes per month
The usual ISP package of 1 Main email and 5 other email addresses.

Having been an NTL customer, I can say that even though I have recently experienced service problems on BT, they atleast pull their finger out and get something done, my partner is still with WM and she gets very intermittant service and she pays the £18.99 a month service, she took the TV package as well and they are stinging her for £45 a month when next door only pay £30 for everything including phone.

The VM package is hit and miss and YOU DONT get the FULL bandwidth your expecting, read the small print and you find that they do not guranteee the bandwidth and they dont tell you the contention ratio unless you ask, if you have more than 15 per node, you'll get next to nothing in bandwidth.

You need to look deeper than just the cost, if you was to put the old sliding scale on the two services, the VM £18.99 package is easily twice the cost of the BT package given the loss in bandwidth puts you cost per Gigbyte way up. If you say 4Meg for £18.99, that makes 4Meg for me would be about £17.

Also, VM charge you £4 admin charge per bill that is not paid by Direct Debit.

[wh666-666]

Probably because you have a suitable line already in place. My house has a very old wire not suitable for adsl (need to be re-cabled) and ive had flats before with no line. Thats what BT charges for installation visits .. VM doesnt.

I always pay by DD so that doesnt concern me

Sad to hear about your crappy service from NTL, hopefully with VM uniting it things will improve. Former telewest in our area i cant say enough for them as they've been very good.

Im on 4 meg but i could get up to 10meg for not much extra if i wanted but whats the point when im not using all of it? At the mo if your a speed freak cable offers the fastest speed. Fibre is a future dream, vdsl is more realistic but still decades off logistically and asdl2/asdl2+ is only in certain test areas and only those can boost you to a headroom of 16meg or 24meg.

All the different services i have with VM would cost me more than double extra a month with other providers.

[spike274]

I have been with NTL (now known as Virgin Media) for several years.

The TV service was very poor - whenever you pressed the red button the whole box crashed and needed a reboot. And the program information/tv guide often was not available. If you tried phoning customer services you were left on hold for anything up to an hour and then they would just say - unplug the box and then plug it back in. I changed to Sky+ over 12 months ago and cannot recommend it enough - it is fantastic (and the red button works! :))

I have always had my phone line and broadband with NTL too however these have been fine so I kept them when I moved the TV service to Sky. The broadband is a little expensive but this week I got a call from them and they are now charging me £27 for a phone line and 4MB broadband package.

Also, they will be increasing they're broadband speeds in the first week of May without increasing the cost. I think its something like: 2mb becomes 4mb; 4mb becomes 10mb and 10mb becomes 20mb.

[\\.\]

Which is pointless unless you go out and buy a 100mbps card, the vast majority of lan cards only run at 10mbps anyway and connect to a 100mbps router connection will only get 10mbps to whack.

Quite how you ram 20megs down 10mbps line is beyond me, but the advantage comes in when you have 2 or more people on the same internet connection. The impact of local traffic is not as detectable.

[David Harrison]

the vast majority of lan cards only run at 10mbps anywayUm ... no. The vast, VAST, majority of LAN cards are 10/100, which means that they will auto negotiate with the device at the other end (ie: a switch or another computer if it's a direct (cross over) connection), and connect at the highest speed, ie: 100 Mbps.

A lot of motherboards are also coming with gigabit NICs now too, but it seems to only be the upper and upper-mid range motherboards. You'd be hard pressed to find a network card on a store shelf that only does 10 Mbps (or slower) now.

[\\.\]

I have a 10/100 network, the most you can expect out of a LAN is 10mbps per connected computer, this is the default.

If you try out a simple experiment with two machines on the same network lan and one uploading toan ftp server for example, the most you wull see the transfer speed to be is around thr upper 6 mbps mark.

If you have your local network setup in a network share, you will get the full benefit of the 100mbps capability in the cards between the connected machines.

In my Lan I have several network devices in the local network share and all act with minimal delay, the network drive react like a normal hard disk as if it was in my PC and not on the otherside of my network.

You cant have general purpose programs taking over bandwidth, which is why it is limited in its alloted bandwidth, if this was disregarded, any machine part of a network share would gring to a halt.

What your suggesting is that the program can override this and do its own thing, sorry but it cant.

[David Harrison]

You just said that you have a 100 Mbps network card, and then you say you can only get 10 Mbps from it, I don't really know how you reached that conclusion.

I did try your little experiment, I set up an FTP server on my machine, and ran an FTP client on another, then I uploaded a very large file to my machine. The connection topped out at 60Mbps, an almost straight line. This suggests to me that Windows limits FTP connections to 60% of the available bandwidth. It also seems that Windows limits file transfers over network shares to 80% of the available network bandwidth. However, if you have two files transferring at the same time, each will get 40% of the network bandwidth.

It doesn't make any sense to let network bandwidth lie there unused when there are transfers in progress, so it will always use as much bandwidth as it can (to a limit) and then it will use less if there are other transfers and connections that need some too.

Since you say you are limited to 6 Mbps for FTP transfers, that would suggest to me that you are connected at only 10 Mbps, perhaps the switch/hub/router you are using only supports 10 Mbps connections.

Edit: It has just occured to me that perhaps you are confusing Mbps with MB/s. Because 1 MB/s = 8 Mbps, where B = byte and b = bit.

[\\.\]

A router operates at 10 Mbps and its backbone runs at 100mbps.

All LAN cards operate at 10 Mbps even thought they can be networked in a computer network and you get the full benefit of the LAN card.

That atleast was what I was taught with my MCP network administration course.

What your doing is confusing matters. In any networking set up, you lose 40% of the bandwidth from collisions, most you can expect under ideal conditions is 60% of the bandwidth, for a network share that equates to 60Mbps and for connections with programs like ftp, they are capped at 10% of the full card capacity or 6mbps, the only way you can bypass these settings is if they have been forced by 3rd party programs.

The point I was making with the ftp was exactly my point about the capacity limitations, you NEVER get the full bandwidth of the LAN card unless your networked into a workgroup / share which isnt limited by the normal constraints of networking.

The same would go with 100/1000 cards, you will have upper limits on the available transfer rates, and that means for programs like ftp programs, p2p prpgrams or any 3rd party program that accesses the internet will be limited by the settings of the operating system.

So what are you going to pick fault with now?

[David Harrison]

Um ... my router has four 100 Mbps network sockets (RJ-45) and a WAN socket (RJ-11). The router actually combines many devices, it is an ADSL 2+ modem, router, wireless access point and a network switch. That switch is non-blocking, which means that the router can handle all traffic from all connections at all times. 4 x 200 Mbps from each of the 100 Mbps network connections and 25 Mbps for the ADSL connection, which adds up to at least 825 Mbps of bandwidth on the internal bus (since it is non-blocking).

I can assure you that so long as there are two 100 Mbps cards at either end of the connection, you get a 100 Mbps connection, I even just demonstrated that fact. Look at the screen shot (attached), it shows me transferring a file at 65% network utilisation over a 100 Mbps network connection, which is 65 Mbps of data transfer. That's a fact, you can see that in the image, so how can you possibly say I'm only getting 6 Mbps?

With a 10 Mbps connection, I probably would only get 6 Mbps, but it's not, it's 100 Mbps. This PC has a gigabit network connection, I can transfer files over it many times faster again, and I assure you that it IS a gigabit connection, not 100 Mbps, not 10 Mbps, not anything else.

Also, about those collisions you mentioned, there are none (or at least very very few). In the task manager, Windows shows the total network bandwidth being used, whether or not a packet collided with another packet, and it's only showing 65% utilisation, and the lions share of that is useful data transfer, with the rest being protocol overhead. There's no extra 40% utilisation due to packet loss.

To suggest that 40% of the network bandwidth is lost due to collisions is absurd. With modern equipment the number is nowhere near that high.

I again reiterate that perhaps you are confusing bits and bytes. A 100 Mbps network connection, would give you a bit over 10 MB/s of useful data transfer after the overhead. Perhaps that is what you mean. Likewise, a Gigabit network connection would offer a bit over 100 MB/s after overhead. A 10 Mbps network connection would be terrible, 1 MB/s is even slower than USB 1.1, use in a modern network, either in a company or at home, would painfully slow.

I've attached a picture that I meant to attach before, but it was too large, so I've edited it to reduce the file size (cut off the taskbar, reduced colour depth). I'll also make another post with another picture showing a regular network file transfer going at almost full tilt.

Note that in this picture, in 28 seconds it has transferred almost 197 MB of data (not including any overhead). That equates to just over 7 MB/s, which is a shade under 59 Mbps (without overhead).

[David Harrison]

And here's the second picture, a regular file transfer over a network, utilising 91% of the network connection.

[\\.\]

Well if you have a Gigabit switch, you would get improved bandwidth.

For the average user however has a 10/100 setup like most SOHO and corporate LANs. (office) which will terminate in a 100/1000 switch.

your LAN card is more likely to be running at 10Mbps than its 100mbps capability. You wouldnt find a computer with a 100/1000 card unless it was part of a server cluster serving a corporate lan.

and your nice toy? is that at work or home? because for the home user, they will get no more than 10mbps and what your waffling on about is only confusing matters, and NO I am not confused so trying to make me out to look like a prick isnt working.

[David Harrison]

I'm sorry if this isn't what you've been taught, I'm not trying to prove you wrong, I'm not trying to make you look like a prick. I'm merely posting what I think to be correct, and I'm sure you're doing the same. It is not my aim to make you angry or insult your intelligence, if I have done so then I apologise, but I stand by what I have said so far.

I think it's best that we take this off the boards and into private messages from now on.

Also, sorry crmpicco but I'm going to lock this thread now, if you haven't gathered the information you need from this thread, please start another one.