Woody wrote:[color=blue]
> "www.GymRatZ.co.uk" <discount-fitness-equipment@gym.shop.com> wrote in
> message news:ftbg93$nqp$1@registered.motzarella.org...[color=green]
>> Woody wrote:
>>[color=darkred]
>>> As I said on here a week or so ago, Virgin (as was NTL) got big by
>>> taking over other cable companies, and the install standard and
>>> system structure varied a lot between them.
>>>
>>> Get a good area in Virgin - as it is round here - and VOIP works
>>> perfectly well, but in other areas it is not so.[/color]
>> I disagree.
>> I was with Telewest from the start and had brilliant service for many
>> years through 1Mb -> 2Mb -> 4Mb -> through Blueyonder 10Mb even
>> ntl:telewest merger was fine until VM took over and started sharing
>> main pipes with ADSL trafic. Cutting costs through cutting spending
>> while trying to reel in more & more customers so they could find a
>> foolish investor willing to buy a company that was so far down in the
>> sh1t it was a hopelss investment...
>> That's when it went tits-up, that's when voip and even broadband
>> became crippled.
>>
>> Nothing to do with the installation of local infrastructure as that
>> was all un-changed.
>>
>> The deeper they get into debt, the more they will be throttling back
>> bandwidth and limiting QOS. Just as long as they allow you to hit
>> 20Mbps for a few minutes each day when everyone is asleep, the service
>> will keep getting worse.
>> I will never go back to cable not now not never.
>>
>> Pete
>>[/color]
>
>
> Have it your way if you wish, but I have done speed tests regularly over
> the last six months at all times of the day and on a 4Mb cable feed I
> have never had less than 3.7Mb and often have 4.2Mb - and this is
> morning, afternoon, early and late evening, weekends when the weather is
> bad, whatever. I can't think that VM either know when I will do a test
> or have singled out my line to give special treatment, ergo the
> situation must vary according to location.
>
> Any other VM users around the country care to do some speed testing and
> comment?
>
>[/color]
When I was with VM they had their own private support newsgroups which
were full of people complaining about the speed.

They also recommended speed tests which were based upon the total
download speed of a number of connections, they claimed this was because
the remote sites were too slow to keep up with VM. However my
observation was that congestion was affecting each connection at the
VirginMedia end, I independently tested this against another ISP. It is
no good being able to have four 1 Mb/s connections if you need a
connection to stream video at 2.5 Mb/s. I did ask VM about this but they
were not open or honest about the problem.

My own personal observation was that a 20Mb/s line would drop down as
low as 1Mb/s every evening.