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For those of you not in a cable area, you will be pleased to know Virgin Media is also open to non-cabled areas for phone & broadband.
Granted you won't have a fibre optic network to carry the signal but its still pretty good as it is. They hope to have it fully rolled out nationwide by April, most places can already get it (I think).
Seems pretty cheap to me too, see here also comes with PCguard which is a security suite for your PC.
It has always seemed to me there is/was a gap in the market for such a service, I base that purely on the price, speed & unlimited downloads (Acceptable Use Policy) combined together.
Maybe its just me who could never find a good package for people on a BT line
DJH@GB-Ro wrote:Not just any part of Virgin, but Managing Director of Marketing for Virgin Media. You're doing some marketing for him for free
hee hee :lol:
Well if they do as good at job with people in non-cable areas, as they do now with cabled areas then there in for a lot more customers coming their way.
Thats always been the problem with cable you have a limited number of customers who can sign up for services and then people out of the area just have to live without the services.
Just read somewhere as well that a trial of 50mbs is currently on going for customer on a cable line
Naon wrote:I think that virgin media have taken over or merged with ntlworld.
Yep
NTL:Telewest is now called Virgin Media, this also brings in Virgin.net (internet provider) & Virgin Mobile
So called quad-play
My TV service has part transformed to Virgin Media just waiting for the final changes to be made then one day when I switch it on it should have been re branded
I recently moved into a new (to me) flat and had Telewest Cable installed. Now I have been taken over by Virgin Media...lucky me!? Trouble is that Virgin will rule my life if this keeps up as I work for another Virgin enterprise Virgin Trains. All I need now is Virgin Gas and Electricity :idea: and Vigin City Council :!: for the council tax and I will have the full set.
DJH@GB-Ro wrote:Not just any part of Virgin, but Managing Director of Marketing for Virgin Media. You're doing some marketing for him for free
hee hee :lol:
Well if they do as good at job with people in non-cable areas, as they do now with cabled areas then there in for a lot more customers coming their way.
Thats always been the problem with cable you have a limited number of customers who can sign up for services and then people out of the area just have to live without the services.
Just read somewhere as well that a trial of 50mbs is currently on going for customer on a cable line
I think I'm going to change to Virgin as soon as I can. I want to have a provider wiith which I can talk to someone other than a call centre when having problems. I'll just go running to my uncle if anything goes wrong :twisted:
DJH@GB-Ro wrote:I think I'm going to change to Virgin as soon as I can. I want to have a provider wiith which I can talk to someone other than a call centre when having problems. I'll just go running to my uncle if anything goes wrong :twisted:
I have never had to ring them yet and thats for 2 years now I have been with them, never had a problem
On another note Sky One is set to be withdrawn for Virgin Media by the end of the month
It's upload speed I'm after - hate waiting for files to transfer :evil:
My mate's got Virgin 8Mb DSL over BT and it sucks compared to Virgin cable (was Telewest), he gets just over 400Kb most of the time unless he waits till after 1am when he will get about 5Mb
Cable & Wireless bags landmark agreement with Virgin Media
Cable & Wireless today announced a four-year agreement with Virgin Media to become its exclusive unbundled local loop (LLU) network provider on a wholesale basis until 2011.
With its extensive LLU footprint giving access to around 4 million additional homes, Cable & Wireless will supply wholesale broadband services to support Virgin Media's existing off net customers as well as new customers.
Virgin Media will be able to offer broadband, phone and television service to parts of the country not currently served by its cable network.
Thanks to its long standing relationships with a number of Virgin brands, including Virgin Atlantic and Virgin Group, Cable & Wireless has the experience and understanding of Virgin's culture.
Neil Berkett, Chief Operating Officer, Virgin Media, said: "This deal is great news for consumers and an important step towards making Virgin Media a truly national brand. Cable & Wireless' excellent service and technology will allow us to offer enhanced broadband and home phone services to an additional four million customers. It also lays a foundation for us to provide our unique quadplay services to the 50% of households outside our cable network."
Jim Marsh, CEO, Cable & Wireless UK, commented: "This is another landmark win for us; we're delighted. We're obsessive about delivering great service and putting customers at the heart of our business - and clearly, this approach resonates with Virgin Media."
I signed up with 'Blueyonder Dial-up' back in the day, then a 256k package with 'Blueyonder BB', then 'Telewest' took over and increased it to 512k for same money, then 'NTL' took over and increased it to 1Mb for same money, then 'NTL' increased it to 12Mb and put it up by a couple of quid a month.
So I'm on cable BB, 12Mbs, for £18.99/month. Here's hoping 'Virgin' don't do anything to screw it up!
PS: First post, sorry, bad manners, should have posted in the welcome thread first
Just an update to this thread i have been a customer of cable&wireless > ntl > VM. I updated to the 20mbit package as it came out, mistake, mistake, mistake, mistake, mistake, mistake, mistake, the service is total and utter rubbish (i won't go into the level of profanity i am currently tagging with how piss poor this service is at the moment)
I went from the 10mbit/600kbit package, that would do up/down at ca. 85% of theorectial max all of the time, the 20mbit/768kbit service yields a fluctuating ca. 45%max download and ca. 20% upload if you don't stop it from trying to use more it fluctuate very erratically.
Ping times and latency are variable from just about satisfactory to appaling - whilst playing guild wars i experience dropouts, timeouts, slow pings and every so often a 32s ping (read 32second not ms).
Packet loss variable from just about satisfactory to abysmal, if im stressing the connection by allowing it near 25KB of 96KB max i can suffer to 45% packet loss (pinging bbc website over a 1000 packet sample)
I am not a virgin brand basher, i have many of their products which i am very happy with, the broadband part of the media package though is laughable, and i smile when i see the adverts on TV e.g. uma thurman one - hot diggity thats slow.
YMMV and i hope you don't suffer the rubbish service i have had since virgin upgraded the network to 20mbit, will the 50mbit one be even slower again ?
i don't even want to start thinking about the CS desk in sunny india either, have i rebooted the cable modem yet ? No, i thought id ring for a nice chat after a 45minute wait, of course ive done everything humanly possible to avoid having to wait on a bloody phone line for almost an hour and then have my intelligence insulted repeatedly.
After a month i finally got through to a person with a self-aware brain stem (back office person) and they have escalated it to .... don't know where still waiting for something to be done after another month.
DavidH wrote:i don't even want to start thinking about the CS desk in sunny india either, have i rebooted the cable modem yet ? No, i thought id ring for a nice chat after a 45minute wait, of course ive done everything humanly possible to avoid having to wait on a spam phone line for almost an hour and then have my intelligence insulted repeatedly.
I hope you weren't connected via their 'new' 0980 or similar number (as from 1st July. This has a 9p connect charge and then 25p/min.
I had problems with the CS last week, luckily then on an 0845 number. Put on hold for over 20 mins then line dropped. 2nd call again long on hold time, The operator didn't know what he was talking about and was just getting answers to questions from a pre-written list. Ended up telling me my cable modem was over-voltage and they would send a guy round with a new one in three days.
Funny how the whole situation sorted itself out the next day when the thunderstorms stopped. They still insisted they had to replace the modem but the engineer didn't know why! He tutted a bit about the spaghetti wiring round the back of my pc so I ended up wiring it in myself whilst he nipped off for a pee!
DavidH wrote:Just an update to this thread i have been a customer of cable&wireless > ntl > VM. I updated to the 20mbit package as it came out, mistake, mistake, mistake, mistake, mistake, mistake, mistake, the service is total and utter rubbish
Maybe the sites you have been downloading from only have a small upload speed.
Your max download speed from an external source can only be as fast as the upload speed they have installed.
i.e you get a whopper 100Mbit T1 line into your PC but if a site you want a file from has only a 512Kbit Cable line (which usually has an upload speed of 128Kbit) then your download speed will show as 128Kbit or (16Kb/s)
P.S. Divide your cable speed (which is in bits/sec (there are 8bits in a byte)) by 8 to get your max Bytes/sec speed (Bytes/sec are shown on file download apps)
