2 
Many customers have found that the promised Usain Bolt-like performance of Virgin broadband has actually been distinctly James Corden-like in the real world. Over the last few weeks, some customers have been complaining that a crippled network has allegedly rendered browsing stalwarts such as streaming 240p video on YouTube an impossible, stuttering mess.
Virgin has acknowledged the problem but denied claims of over-zealous traffic shaping. Instead, Branson’s broadband team has laid the blame at the door of an unnamed third-party peering network. Virgin Media told The Register:
“As a result of an issue with a third-party peering network, some customers have been having trouble accessing certain websites and online services even though their broadband speeds are unaffected.
We began rerouting traffic towards the end of last week which has had a positive effect and we’re working with them to fully resolve the issue as soon as possible.”
Anyone else with Virgin broadband struggling to catch up with this week’s Strictly Come Dancing? [The Register]
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Still as fast as the day the old bastard came N’ installed it for us …
Im a sufferer of the bad streaming and buffering on video sites. For me and the Perry Barr users this has been going on for 8months + after finally changig There Hardware on serverside for us we are all at the moment sitting in Trial firmware for our Superhubs with little change at all. 480p Videos on youtube take 10minutes plus to buffer a 5 minute video, Using twitch is terrible again 480p is the max viewing res with little staggers.
Ive been with sky and even with virgins problems i still find it a better service.
Never had anywhere near what i was promised but better than Sky. Hopefully it will improve soon.
Wondered why I couldn’t get YouTube to work yet I could in the office…
I have found that with Virgin you get 1/5 to 1/10 of the advertised speed.
Traffic shaping happens if they admit it or not and im sure they actively ruin certain connection to services like iPlayer. As their rep told me, if I want iPlayer to work correctly I have to use their ondemand box and not the BBC’s own web service.
My Virgin fibre internet is significantly worse than my previous copper Sky broadband. I was expecting a more assured 10mb connection but it certainly gets hammered in the evening, either by contention or traffic shaping. It’s a bloody shame.
I wonder if my 4GEE will be faster when I FINALLY get delivery of my new Sim card.
I get unlimited data on my Three and they’ve never complained in the 18 months though Virgin were fine since like 2007 until this year when it just got so bad.
I’m now having to tether to me Three phone but it isn’t so bad as I basically have a 20mb connection from Three, I’m getting nice speeds of 1.8MBps which is not bad for HSPA+.
As a back up connection or for on the move tethering… You can’t beat Three and it’s all you can eat data.
So I’m understanding this right, are you saying your Three phone provides faster internet than your home Virgin fibre via tether?
Mine used to be perfect but then I kept getting letters saying about fair usage and I replied saying don’t advertise unlimited then and made a complaint about the use of such words when it isn’t true.
Now they just throttle me to speeds where I can barely load pages, it’s mental. I’ve only downloaded 300GB this month so far and they’re already whining on at me.
300GB of what?!
I only have SSDs so I download and uninstall them to fit all the time. I’ve had to reinstall GTA 4 + the DLC and that is 32GB for the original install and another 32GB for the new download cause the EnB mod messed it up. Then there is movies, TV and when they’re like 2GB-30GB each that builds up. Then there is general use which ends up using a bigger chunk than people think. Then there is porn too which in the HD era is like 2GB per film.
http://youtu.be/4TbqBPmInjQ
Surely this would, given that the TV/movies, etc… don’t need to be on a high-speed drive (90min, 30GB raw blu-ray rip only needs 5.6MB/s) be a subtle indication that you need some magnetic storage, if only to back up the game installs!
HDDs are so slow I cannot stand them.
Yes HDDs are slow, but they’re more than fast enough for TV shows, Movies, etc.
HDDs are faster than your 120Mb/s connection, and they’re faster than you need to be able to stream the data to play it back again, so where’s the issue?
300GB NO WONDER THEY ARE TRYNA FIST YOU IN THE ARSE MATE !!!
300GB is nothing, it was like 10 years ago but now….
They advertise unlimited, should change their wording tbh.
Agreed. It really annoys me when people (or companies) say one thing the do another.
300GB WOW …. I can only dream of downloading that much in a month.
as a happy virgin customer (even though i have had problems)
i get my full 60mb connection most of the time
although my connection had slowed down, but this was due to my 3 yr old router, i have a spangly new router and getting excellent speed and coverage, i don’t like their superhub, so just have it in modem mode and use my own router
a couple of weeks ago we had problems in south Birmingham but that was fixed
but generaly uptime and speed are pretty reliable
You mean Virgin doesn’t peer directly with Google? What a bunch of losers.
cant flippin watch xfactor cause its saying im from outside of UK WTF!!!
At last, a bit of positive news in this bleak situation.
: )
On the whole the streaming’s been fine for me on youtube and iplayer etc. The problems I’m having I think relate more to Lovefilm and silverlight not playing nicely together on a slightly underpowered machine… Seems like the CPU is taking more of the strain when I want the GPU to be doing the grunt work or something like that…
I get 65 meg from speedtest.net on virgin, but Struggle on 480p on yt, netflix however is fine, really pissing me off right now
I’ve been running on approx half speed for the past few days. Just assumed they had traffic managed me, but noticed it from the very start today so something is wrong.
Ahhhhh I have been experiencing this over the past few days. Supposed to have the 30mb connection and youtube has been cripplingly slow. Only the lowest 240p resolution has been working.
I use virgin and was only thinking earlier how fast it seemed while i was surfing like they had improved it recently or something.
http://www.speedtest.net/result/2305775197.png
Promised 50mbps and for the most part I get it, however I’ve not been able to stream anything over 480p without incurring dramatic recently.
Agreed, I have exactly the same problem.
I can confirm that my Virgin internet’s speed is the same as ever according to speedtest.net, but I haven’t been able to stream anything above 480p on YouTube for the last week or so. And I have a 50Mbps connection :/. Thanks for providing an explanation, though it seems they’re not offering a solution.
Ive had a boat load of problems with Virgin Broadband, even emailed one of their directors who was as much use as a chocolate fireguard. Lost count the times I have phoned up due to the line dropping and losing connection, wifi not working, offshore people who spent 10 minutes trying to work out my postcode (I shit you not), eventually they found out the cable underground was the wrong size. Left a right mess but it worked. I then put a complaint in due to the crappy service two months ago and still waiting on a reply.
Spent a whole year with Virgin . . . sorry for the language . . . but having previously used Orange, TalkTalk, BT (and a few others I’ve probably forgotten) I have to say Virgin are absolute cunts, everyone else provided a reasonable service, some better then others but, Virgin . . . like I say . . . absolute cunts.
All service providers have their issues, none are perfect, but Virgin are just unabashed thieves, I paid for a 50Mb connection and ended up having to use a 3G dongle and Pay-as-you-go top up cards for a good part of my contract with them (whilst, of course, still paying the monthly charges) – like I say all providers will at some stage have technical difficulties, and Virgin certainly had a few, but their customer support really let them down, attempting to resolve an issue was pointless, their response largely ornamental, it’s hard to quite know what ‘disinterested’ would like if you were to bottle it, but Virgin were certainly giving it a go, I imagine their cellar was fairly well stocked.
If they really wanted to help their customers the kindest thing they could have done would have been to tell you to “fuck off” when you initially called them up to resolve an issue or enquire about how long the latest ‘black out’ was going to last – so at the very least the customer would know that Virgin were not overly interested in whatever your issue was and had little intention of helping you out – this might spare you the hour and a half lost in the kafkaesque-premium-rate-phone-maze they must encourage their staff to herd their customers into.
Comically poor service, if you want to feel all zeitgeisty and ‘now’, if you want to get a sense of the power that corporations wield, get an idea of how powerless you are when they fail to meet the basics of their side of the contract and how they can still force you to pay every single penny for a service they’ve failed to provide, sign up, sit back and watch a global corporation tread you into the shit.
: )
Querulous of London.
I got the full 60mb/s downspeed on speedtest.net and on general surfing/downloading a game from steam still, but youtube is just a goddamn mess. I hadn’t seen 240p/360p as options for quite some time, now I struggle to get a 5 min 240p video streamed in under 10 mins.
iPlayer kept stuttering too.
For those saying that their download speed is normal, that is right. It seems that they are shaping the streaming protocols.
If they weren’t limiting then every result on here should be the same:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/diagnostics