Virgin Cable Help Required Please

[Frances]

If anyone is using Virgin cable as opposed to through a BT line I would be very grateful of opinions and reliability of the service supplied.

I have been very happy with my ISP up until now, getting speed up to 3MB. Suddenly in recent weeks the rate just dropped dramatically. After going through many long telephone calls with the technical help line, testing speeds three times a day and trying to download new modem drivers (which crashed the computer) it looks as though BT in their wisdom has reset the line to a speed of only  500KB's.

We found out that they had worked at the exchange on 13 April almost exactly the time our speed dropped. The ISP asked us to contact BT residential and request them to reset the gain. We complied with the request and explained our problem. The lady said she would test the line and ring us back, after waiting ages and keeping the line clear we found she had left a message on 1571, the telephone never rang! The message simply said they cannot increase the gain and go back to the ISP.

We are with Waitrose certainly not the cheapest on the market but profits go to charity and up until now we have had no problems. I do have difficulties with the strong accents of the technical help line but they were always very polite, although in talking to different people each time you ring does not help.

We feel that changing to any ISP that uses a BT line will be a waste of time so are considering connecting up to cable which is connected to the road outside.

Please help with advice if you can.

A very frustrated,

Frances

[Koromo]

Hi

Somehow I don't think that moving to Virgin Cable will help your connection speeds. There has been a bit of a kerfuffle over Virgin throttling back bandwidth during peak hours. See:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/05/08/vigin_nationwide_throttling/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/05/22/virginmedia_claims_no_usage_limits/


Koromo

[animet]

I use Virgin broadband I always get a really good speed, much better than I ever got from BT (who said 'up to' 2 meg, but never managed to get above 500k). Also because of the way it is presented, you don't have the problem of it slowing down when more people in your area go online.

My son had an XBox that he uses for online gaming and he used to experience a lot of 'lag' with BT, but now that doesn't happen

Anita

[downside]

I did have a few problems about 10 days ago with Virgin Broadband in which I was getting an error message TCP/IP errror code 733 and I had to keep pressing a redial button several times in order to connect.  This only seemed to happen at peak times, the rest of the time I connected straight away. I sent an email to them and they sent back a silly reply, but admitted other people had reported a similar problem.  This went on for a few days and now everything is back to normal.

Sorry to hijack this thread but I wondered whether anyone else had this problem?

[animet]

From my understanding, 733 is an ip address problem. When you connect to the internet, you need an IP adress, the best solution to this would be to allocate you one that is yours for as long as you are a customer. But because IP addresses are limited, you get allocated one when you connect to their network, which is then released for use by someone else when you disconnect. The ip address tables need to be kept updated with enough addresses to service all the customers that want to connect at any given time. When your server gets too busy, there aren't enough ip addresses so you can't connect until someone else drops off.

They have probably added more addresses to the 'pool' which is why you can connect now.

Anita

[downside]

When your server gets too busy, there aren't enough ip addresses so you can't connect until someone else drops off.

Thanks for confirming what I suspected Anita.

[Frances]

Thank-you Koromo and  Animet for your replies.

I have looked at the links Koromo, interesting reading, although I have not yet read through all the replies, I will later today.

Animet, in looking through the Virgin site I have been unable to find the cost of their technical help line, I know its probably my fault but being as you are using their service I wondered if you could tell me what they are charging? Waitrose is free, just as well as a few of my calls have been around an hour long!

A few years ago we were with NTL for televsion (via cable) and later internet on dial-up, in both cases the help lines gave poor service and could work out costly, is this service acceptable with Virgin? (if you have had cause to use it )

Thank-you  both again,

Frances

[Nadine Moore]

Hi Frances

Don't know if this will put you off but Virgin Media now incorporates NTL. They are now the same company.

dinie

[animet]

If you are worried about NTL, then you should be worried about alot of Broadband suppliers, because quite a few including Tiscali, Talk Talk, Pipex and AOL utilise their network for they broadband products. Admittedly, their customer support is different, but the access problems would be the same.

Anita