Virgin Media - overutilisation in SE London - refunds

[gm99]

Hello All,

Although I am just up the road in SE5 this problem - basically too many users on VM's infrastructure - apparently affects large parts of SE London and originates with some VM infrastructure at Lewisham. The result is severely decreased broadband speeds at peak times. In my case the first sign was iPlayer constantly buffering in the evening, and I have seen as low as 0.8Mbps on a 60Mbps service.

The good news is that anyone affected can request a refund from Virgin.

A couple of examples from VM's forums:

http://community.virginmedia.com/t5/Up-to-60Mb-Speed/Unusable-broadband-in-South-East-London-VM-acknowledges-too-many/m-p/1528162/highlight/true#M5255

http://community.virginmedia.com/t5/Up-to-60Mb-Speed/F002125723-Speed-Issue-relating-to-network-congestion-contention/m-p/1753032/highlight/true#M17855

[Huguenot]

This sounds absolutely right. The majority of broadband third party resellers are effectively sub contracting share of BT fixed bandwidth.

New suppliers tend to 'loss lead' by buying more bandwidth than they have sold, giving major speed advantages to early buyers.

As later buyers come in, the sub contractor doesn't buy any more bandwidth - to recover the loss lead - and all subscribers suffer.

You SHOULD complain. This is subject to regulator oversight and the complaints are valid.

[ianr]

> The majority of broadband third party resellers are effectively sub contracting share of BT fixed bandwidth.

But I assume the complaints this time are about Virgin's dedicated high bandwidth Cable service -- it's that section of the forum - rather than the BT POTS one that VM call National.

I wouldn't be at all surprised about their being overcommitted. I'm on their National service, and experienced over a year of seeing my downloads instantly capped to 2 Mb/s, long after my service had been upgraded so that at startup each day it routinely synched at 8 Mb/s.

[El Pibe]

H, the quoted 60mb is on dedicated cable, it's unsurprisingly not available on ADSL via BT infrastructure.

Peak times you would expect a detox anyway, that's why they're peak, though I've done some spot testing over the weeks and get about 3-6 mbit at peak times, but they don't last long. I was stuck on 0.8 for years due to poor infrastructure on the Brixton exchange ADSL so I can live with that.

[gm99]

Yes, this is Virgin's cable service. The good news us that I have now been given a 50% refund on my broadband subscription, backdated to August 2012 when Virgin first identified the problem.

[KestonKid]

Anyone in the Melbourne Grove area experiencing problems with Virgin broadband?

[pipsky2008]

KestonKid Wrote:

I have been experiencing unusably slow broadband from Virgin media for about 6 weeks now. It may be a different set of issues from those others have described here. Previously I have found the service fairly stable and reliably usable.

I am on the L package. I have a technician coming tomorrow as I've been told by technical services that there is a problem of some kind.

I'll update after their visit if it's of use to other Virgin media customers

[pipsky2008]

The engineer called. He said my modem and power supply were outmoded, replaced them. My service now is very good. Hoping this may help others with very slow service.

[mima08]

The virgin media fibre service seems to have improved considerably over the last 7 days (Se15 4le) - have been able to watch full movies on lovefilm.com, which was not possible before. We did have it confirmed that as there was an ongoing problem, we would be given a full refund (not much use as brandnew subscription and first 6month are free) plus we would not be held to contract. Haven't moved (yet?) as we cannot decide if other providers are any better....

[the-e-dealer]

BT are better!