StooVee

Start sentences with a capital letter? ;-)

Narnia, is your broadband delivered over your cable connection? If so, maybe you are lucky and my girlfriend isn't. I'm not complaining about broadband speed here - it's fast enough - roughly a 10Mbit connection which is fine for what we use. I'm just disappointed that the broadband splitter/attenuator or whatever it is in the cable reduces the signal to the TV sufficiently to cause picture breakup on certain channels and in fact makes the on-demand services (via the set-top box) like BBC iPlayer unusable. As has been said in this post previously, broadband speed is often a lottery of contention, cable quality, distance and of course as in any lottery, luck.

Thanks for the info re Virgin Media cable jamster. My girlfriend has already called them and had a visit once before she even got broadband because the TV signal was next to useless and now with the splitter/attenuator that is put in to provide the feed to the broadband modem the TV signal is back to being poor. While I appreciate that broadband is contended you shouldn't have to lose TV quality just to get broadband otherwise VM are selling a product that doesn't work. I think I'll call VM on my girlfriend's behalf to have a chat with them. The broadband isn't used as much as the TV, but sometimes to ensure a good TV signal we have to bypass the splitter and plug the cable straight into the set-top box - unacceptable really. And obviously it means you can't use broadband while in this setup.

m100, I just realised that you probably have Virgin Media broadband delivered over your phone line (ADSL) rather than via a cable connection. My post assumed you had cable and if you don't then my suggestions are of little use. What Tonyotonyo has said is true, you rarely get what is advertised with ADSL phone line based broadband connections. This is because there are many factors than can affect the speed of connection - the quality of the cabling between your house and the street; the street and the telephone exchange; the distance, and therefore the length of the cable, between your house and the telephone exchange; the number of business and retail customers with connections to the same telephone exchange as you; the number and capacity of the network links from the telephone exchange back into the larger networks that make up the internet and even the quality and age of your ADSL modem. Connection quality can also be affected by not having MicroFilters on other phone extensions you may have in your house. Whatever speed you get day one is usually all you're ever going to get. You may be connected to a particularly busy exchange with high usage and therefore be contending with a lot of other people for the maximum capacity that the exchange can deliver. When it's quieter you might get better speeds. Its because of all these varied fators - quite a few of which are often outside the control of your Internet Service Provider, that mean they can't say for certain that you'll get the advertised 20mb and they put the 'up to' in the small print. The 20mb (or whatever you were told you could get) is a theoretical maximum in ideal conditions: for example you have modern ADSL and PC equipment, nothing other than your ADSL modem connected to your phone line, you live so close to the telephone exchange you can read the security guard's newspaper without binoculars, the wires go directly from your house to the exchange and are no longer than a skipping rope and you're the only customer using broadband services from that exchange. Only THEN you may get the maximum speed offered, but they'll still say 'up to' in the small print. But unfortunately this isn't a realistic real world scenario. What speed were you told you'd get and what do you think you actually get?

Hi, my girlfriend lives in Dulwich and has Virgin Media with both TV and broadband and I have to say I am unimpressed. Since getting the broadband connected her TV signal has dropped significantly causing some channels to be unwatchable and the BBC iPlayer service to be unusable. The signal to my girlfriend's TV is much improved when I connect the main cable directly to the Virgin Media set top box. I haven't tested internet speeds with only the main cable connected to the modem as she doesn't use it that much. As a single feed comes into your house and gets split (at least this is how it is for my girlfriend) I would try to disconnect the splitter and connect the main cable into the broadband modem. If you get faster speeds after doing this then the splitter is reducing the signal quality and affecting your speed. If so I'd suggest you call Virgin and complain. I hope this helps.