Disconnecting once a day - acceptable?

jagdeepp

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Hi guys... Well here I am, just over a month in with the 100mb service. My view? Unstable, inconsistent and the traffic shaping results in significant variations.

It's now 10pm. I have had no service for around an hour now. Have switched off and restarted the superhub with no joy.

To be honest the 100mb in my opinion isn't all that it's made out to be. Some sites are generally slow. Xbox downloads are still slow. Netflix is abit quicker but not so significantly. I expected a superfast connection but am left wondering.... Is that it!? Constant dropouts too. I'm actually sat here typing this through my 3G on the iPhone. I constantly wonder whether my better judgment ought to have led me towards bt infinity.

I'm loathed to call up virgin to discuss this technical error as I'm likely to get through to India. Oh well... Time to try restarting the hub again...
 
I'm with Virgin but due to my "rural" location fibre optic isn't available and I'm on ADSL but over the past few weeks the service has been mediocre to say the least. I've been with Virgin for about 15 years now but seriously considering changing my provider. Sky at £7.50 against Virgin at £20 ish, no contest really?
 
I've had the VM 100MB service since January and honestly, unless you are the only person who uses it and you're a pirate there is no point in having it. I'm in an area where the average age is pensionable so we dont have a lot of families and heavy downloaders sharing the pipe back to the UBR and we are only a couple of miles from said router. Xbox downloads aren't any faster than they were on 50meg, the playstation network is still a joke and iplayer still suffers from the streaming icon in the middle of the screen - anyone who saw the recent VM advert with David Tennant banging on about how the streaming icon is a thing of the past with 100meg will know what a lie this is.

100meg is really only suitable for those who have lots of people in the house using the net at the same time. Think of it as buying a family 7 seater car - you can have more people using it at the same time but you cant go any faster than traffic on the road allows. xbox live is not a particularly fast service and you are limited by the service at their end.

I will be downgrading to 60meg when the 12 month contract is up as 100meg is just not worth it for me - family of 3 with the daughter only being 4. It could be a very different story in 10 years time however when she is using it like every other 14 year old.
 
100meg is really only suitable for those who have lots of people in the house using the net at the same time. Think of it as buying a family 7 seater car - you can have more people using it at the same time but you cant go any faster than traffic on the road allows. xbox live is not a particularly fast service and you are limited by the service at their end.

Superb analogy!!

My connection in fact returned after 4 resets of the router. I've found that the 100mb is, as you say, only worth it when downloading a large file. The speeds are good off-peak. Usenet in peak hours is in fact slower than my sky broadbad which gave me a 6mb connection! I used to get 650kb/s peak hours with that. With Virgin during peak hours it drops from say 850kb/s to .75 every few seconds.

If i weren't downloading anything I'd find this a waste of time. - I watch alot of youtube and netflix iplayer etc. Whilst video's load alot quicker and i could watch 1080p videos with greater ease it still straddles from time to time and i still get the buffering sign. Netflix isn't really much faster than it was before when playing through the xbox. Via my iphone its awesome since i can run the slider to any part of the film without any buffering. The superhub and its trash wi-fi then let this down.

It's the disconnections i totally hate. Very unreliable. In due course i'll drop down to a 60mb connection as on downloads so far i've never noticed the extra 40mb! My downloads tend to max out at 5mb/s. The extra 40mb is in my view fairly negligible.
 

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