Broadband reccomendations

[POPEYE]

The bloke came friday and fitted a new modem and it seems to work ok now, we are with virgin media and from what i can gather (knowing next to feckall about it) we have been paying for a 10 meg speed for about 2 1/2 years when the equipment (the top box)we had was only capable of handling 6meg, they've offered us £50 off the next bill (we are also with them for cable tv and phone btw) do ya reccon thats fair? prior to him fitting this thing it all went through this top box, the broadband is £25 a month, is there any better deals than that?,
i have suggested the the missis we dump the cable and get a freeview box and dump the phones and rely on out mobiles (pay as you go, both of us) and maybe get a cheaper broadband, i'm not bothered about super speed as long as the bugger works,

[stormforce]

Sky have got some good deals going Ian.I have been with them for nearly a year and no probs at all.
I got my parents on with them and they got a decent deal for the sky tv,b/band and phone.I think they are paying about £10 a month for the b/band and phone line which is free calls anytime and a hell of a lot of other countries aswell free

[Albannach]

If Virgin have been charging you for something that they know you can't get, they are in breach of contract so must compensate you.

But, if you didn't get the 10Mb (not MB remember) because you maybe didn't re-boot your modem or something, then the £50 offer is generous.

I've been with Virgin (or whatever it used to be) for years, 10 anyway, and have had no issues whatsoever. My 8 year old modem does fine with my 20Mb account. You'll never see anything like those speeds anyway, so wouldn't wory too much about the numbers, just the price!

[POPEYE]

Cheers, i'll check out sky Jim,
i think it's more a case of virgin chargeing us for a service they knew we could'nt recieve, as they (they say) are gradually up gradeing the system and fitting a seperate modem like he did last week, not sure what to do,
(like to tell em to shove the whole thing)

[Albannach]

To be honest, I'd just leave it. Not worth the hassle to change everything for no real reason?

[JUDWAK]

iam with virgin too 21 99 a mounth tv small package on the tv i dont watch it phone free to land lines 6 meg broad band
i got that coz i said i leaving virgin

[24Seven]

Just changed to O2 upto 20Meg, it was 3 months free then as I'm an O2 customer £9.79 per month also got £50 cash back from Quidco.

So 12 months cost me around £40 Inc wireless ADSL modem.

You do need a BT phone line.

O2 customer service is great, BT's is dire though.

Very pleased with the service so far

[Scorpion]

Ian, I was paying in excess of £60 a month for the Virgin L package, TV with Setanta etc, phone and 2 meg broadband. I rang up to say I was leaving and they upgraded me to 10 meg broadband and dropped the price to £36 a month.

Get onto cancellations and tell them you want to leave, it's a knocking bet that they offer you a better deal!

[POPEYE]

Ian, I was paying in excess of £60 a month for the Virgin L package, TV with Setanta etc, phone and 2 meg broadband. I rang up to say I was leaving and they upgraded me to 10 meg broadband and dropped the price to £36 a month.

Get onto cancellations and tell them you want to leave, it's a knocking bet that they offer you a better deal!

Thats about what we're paying Jim (£60) i'll do that cheers,

[KERRSURF]

I have the up to 20mb deal with Virgin, I moaned about the new customers getting a better deal and now I pay £19 instead of £25.

Results for speedtest are reasonable, highest I've had is 9.56Mbps, my xBox live account works well for online gaming and I've never lost connection.

just done a test.

[dieselboy]

i second sky, with their cheap £17 per month all in package deal, including free sky+ box (that i never use but me mum does)...

however, you need BT line which will now cost 12.50 per month. and i always have non stop grief from them. they keep sending me letters saying i owe them £24 from a "balance brought forward" except they cannot find or pin point where this came forward from. every time i call i get a different answer.

i am personally with o2 broadband since they offer a reliable 8 meg service for 7.25. its not really the download speed i was after but the upload speed, they offer 1.3mb up which is about 10x faster than most other adsl providers.


as you say you had only been receiving 6mbit.. how was that for you? you must not have noticed after all that time. i ask because i download films quite a lot, sometimes i have multiple downloads and ive set thousands of peers as a limit to maximise the ammount of connections.
even with all these options set i rarely hit my maximum download of 800kb/s
i tend to average at about 500kb/s or less which eaquals 4mbit

**this is because my upload bandwidth maxes out at the 1.3mbit, therfore slowing my downloads due to TCP taking time to be sent out to the source.

[POPEYE]

I have the up to 20mb deal with Virgin, I moaned about the new customers getting a better deal and now I pay £19 instead of £25.

Results for speedtest are reasonable, highest I've had is 9.56Mbps, my xBox live account works well for online gaming and I've never lost connection.

just done a test.

it does help if you know about mega bytes, etc when talking to these people i guess, you can then give them a decent argument, all i know is what my son has explained to me that we have been paying for 10mb (which he wanted in conjunction with his work) and we've only been able to recieve 6mb and for the last month it's been down to 2 or non existant, we had about a month of intermittant broadband and also tv pic freezing etc,
i will definatly have a moan to em and threaten to leave see if that does any good, actually done really care if i do tell em to shove the whole thing, means i wont have access to the site but sod it, getting rid of them will be one headache less.

[dieselboy]

it does help if you know about mega bytes, etc when talking to these people i guess, you can then give them a decent argument, all i know is what my son has explained to me that we have been paying for 10mb (which he wanted in conjunction with his work) and we've only been able to recieve 6mb and for the last month it's been down to 2 or non existant, we had about a month of intermittant broadband and also tv pic freezing etc,
i will definatly have a moan to em and threaten to leave see if that does any good, actually done really care if i do tell em to shove the whole thing, means i wont have access to the site but sod it, getting rid of them will be one headache less.

yes but dont let them know that you know. because when they try and fob you off you can just explain to them nicely.
for any issues, i normally just phone up and tell them the problem that i have. when they say ok now reboot your router or something like that, i would then go ahead and tell them i had done that before calling etc etc (i normally would do it to rule out that being the possibility anyways..)

i have found reliability is worth more than faster speeds. a few months ago my ADSL kept dropping out, so i called up O2 and asked them to reduce my speed to 4mbit or lower to make it stable again - which they did do. now the problem is resolved they upped the speed.

[Apache]

Dont they generally say something like 'up to' 10Mb?

6Mb IS 'up to' 10Mb.

Weasel words I know, but if you're more than a km from your exchange, and on copper cable, you'll be very very lucky to hit 10Mb. I think all it means is the kit at the exchange is capable of 10Mb. The rest is down to the quality / length of the lines from there.

[slobodan]

Mine is sh!t then?