Broadband in the UK is a touchy subject: either you're one of the very lucky ones with a great 24/7 connection or one of those with massive contention rates or your ISP is constantly capping your download speeds.
Paying for a broadband package and actually getting what you paid for is not always straightforward and this week Virgin Media got its wrist slapped - again - for ads quoting inaccurate download speeds. Remember, Virgin's already out to get torrent users.
The 'Hate To Wait' ad series in the national press showed a chart of glowing download speeds for different Virgin Media broadband packages but Virgin neglected to mention that its traffic management system could cap those speeds during peak hours.
From 4pm to 9pm, downloaders exceeding a 300MB limit would have their speeds capped, making a joke of the ad that promised that certain 2MB customers could download a 30 minute TV show (c. 341MB) in 26 minutes.
A complaint by rival BT has just been upheld by the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA). The ASA said:
"We considered that one of the main objectives of the ad was to highlight the speed with which customers could download a TV show on all three of Virgin Media's packages and, in the absence of any clarifying text, readers were likely to understand that those speeds applied at all times. We considered that the text "Acceptable usage policy applies" did not make the peak time restrictions clear and it would not be unreasonable for readers to expect to be able to download at least one half-hour TV show on the M package, or several half-hour TV shows on the L package, during the five hours of the peak time period without breaching Virgin's traffic management system and having their speed capped. Because that was not the case we concluded that the ad was misleading."
So what does that mean for punters and repeat offender, Virgin?
Fines for Virgin? Free surfing for a week? Apologies? Nothing really. Virgin has been told to make future ads clearer and not to be a naughty ISP in the future. In the meantime, how many hundreds of people signed up to the service on the basis of those ads? Still, it wouldn't be the first time that ISP's fudged or massaged download speed claims and it won't be the last..-Martin Lynch
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Editor and Contributor | Martin Lynch
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Virgin media cap for 11 hours of the day
based on there cheapest Broadband (2 meg) :
10am - 3pm you can download/downstream max 1 gig after that your throttled 50% for the next 5 hours.
3pm - 8pm you can upload/upstream max 200 meg after that your throttled 50% for the next 5 hours.
4pm - 9pm you can download/downstream max of 500 meg after that your throttled 50% for the next 5 hours. (as stated above)
the worst of it is if you max out at 8:30pm you have to wait a further 5 hours until your throttling is up thats 1:30am.
I was with Virin Media last year and with NTL before that. NTL was the best service ever with internet always on all the time at high speed. When Virgin took over the change was evident right away... I could never seem to get connection and after reading this this simptoms sound firmiliar. So last year I had, had enough and moved over to BE internet which has been brill, fast, always on and you actualy get what you pay for!
The sooner I get away from Virgin Media, the better. I often get below modem speeds of 2-3 kb/s for 5 or so days on end. They advise me to unplug my modem overnight and don't use it for 24 hours and this might fix the problem. Ridiculous. Any reccomendations on UK broadband companies? As soon as August hits and my year is up, I'm switching.
Believe me I so had the same problem! now I have really fast download speeds and a service that I expect... plus it is cheaper than Virgin. I have Be and it is ace.
https://www.bethere.co.uk/
it has the potential to be excellent... however in practice i burn the allowance in under an hour just with normal use (im a web designer so am heavy on ftp and other bandwidth intensive services)... just not good enough IMHO but im stuck as i dont get TV reception where i live apart from cable :(
I was with ntl for ages as well. My take was always that if you could get by without the crappy support, go for it, connection's always solid and fast.
Then Virgin took everything that was good about ntl and shat all over it.
Even though I'm supposed to be on 20Meg I rarely see any better than 5.
And what the hell is with their 'Fibre Optic broadband' campaign?
Surely ASA and Ofcom should be all over them for that fairy tale?
I think it is even lower than 50% cut. As far as I know everyone is cut down to 1MB ( I used to have 4Mbit connection from those F****** and they always cut me down to that speed )
Problem is that this restriction is applied by some strange routing on virgin servers and it feels like you have 256Kbits connection when downloading small files ( for example: browsing websites ).
I have grown to hate Virgin Media. Broken TV box took them 16 weeks to Fix, so I cancelled the TV service. Phone was always on the blink so I cancelled the phone service and right now I only have Broadband with them, its flakey as hell, get disconected atleast once an hour (which is a pain whilst gaming) and the throttling is intolerable! If i was in a position of knowing I could safly sign up for a years contract with BT I would dump VM today!
Get Sky broadband :-D