It’s more like 5 weeks now but I thought I would do a quick update on how I’ve found Virgin Broadband since joining at the start of November.
Raw speeds are still very good. Take for example the speedtest from this morning.
Generally I get that kind of speed so the service is definitely delivering. However there is a lot of throttling of peer to peer and newsgroup traffic. This varies from day to day depending on, I guess, the traffic levels locally. On certain days it makes little difference, on other days you can see download speeds of a few k/s instead of the usual few Mb/s.
However this isn’t new and is applying to more and more ISP’s. Downloading out of peak times is breathtakingly fast. 7-8Gb files are taking 30mins or so. Uploading to Amazon S3, Flickr etc has also been very quick now that the 5Mb upload speed has been applied. The uploads are the only part of the service (on 50Mb) that are subject to caps and if you go over the cap your speed is throttled to a still usable level but it’s worth baring in mind. I’ve scheduled backups to non peak times and it’s working well.
Overall I’m pleased with the service so far. Quick and reliable with no noticeable drops.
I found out that the 50 meg service doesnt get throttled by Virgin but some sites can be torture, particularly iTunes.
My only complaint is i’m still only getting 1.5 up.
Another issue I found recently is the service drops out completely for 20-30 seconds. (see it in streaming radio and live chat going offline).
DD13
Thankfully not seen the drop out issue….yet. I’d be a bit peeved if it does as I game online often and this would be…..frustrating.