I'm going to leave Virgin Media (and so should you)

I've been with Virgin Media since they were Blue Yonder and then NTL and have consistently upgraded as faster cable connections arrive. I like lots of bandwidth because sometimes I need to download large files quickly but I find that for Skype, iPlayer and the plethora of other bandwidth hungry apps you can never have a big enough pipe.
Several times over the last couple of weeks my connection has slowed to a crawl. This screengrab from my 'phone is typical - unusable for anything other than email or IM. Eventually I called tech support (which is often a painful affair!) to be told that I'd fallen foul of the traffic management cap. All the details are in the title link. Bear in mind I never signed up for this - they introduced it without fanfare last summer and the details are show in the table below;


So let's take the slot between 16:00 and 21:00 - if you pull more than 3.5gigs across your connection you trigger the cap and they slow you for five hours. "Hang on, who downloads three and a half gigs of an evening?" you ask - but it's not the downloads that get you. We're talking about an 18,000 second slot which (do the calculation yourself) means that if you run your connection at two megabits per sec (it's actually a tad less) you fall foul of the cap - ten percent of what you pay for (on my twenty-meg connection) will give them the excuse to slow you down.
So - in a household of teenagers it is by no means unusual for more than one person to be watching the iPlayer (Sarah and I on the TV using the Wii, the boys of their computers) - so that's 2 or 3 x 800kBits per sec, maybe a bit of Skype (around 400 kBits per sec) and add to that a download or two and you've fallen foul - and over recent nights I have every evening!
Part of the problem has been the dodgy DVB-T tuner in my PVR - I've been downloading BBC shows in HD rather than recording them!

Virgin's response is one of fairness - why should some people hog all the bandwidth? The implication is that their network (the only one that is 100% fibre-to-the-cabinets as their adverts remind us) isn't up to delivering the bandwidth we have been sold. This is bogus because when I raised this with them their response was to try and up-sell me to the fifty-meg package which has no restrictions! It's a marketing strategy. I bet when they launch their 100meg connection the fifty meg one will suddenly have limits introduced to 'maintain a fair usage model'.

Virgin Media's traffic management and my old cable modem

I've banged on about Virgin in the past and how they have great bandwidth when it works but terrible customer communication and technical support.
They recently introduced a traffic management system that ramps down your bandwidth when you've spanked the connection (that you paid for) between 16:00 and midnight. What they didn't tell anyone was that if you're an old Telewest customer the model of cable modem you have (Scientific Atlanta WebStar if you're wondering) isn't compatible with the traffic management system (it's all done using a QOS protocol that only recent-model modems support).
Now I know why iPlayer, YouTube etc. wouldn't work every evening (much to the annoyance of the kids) - I was getting only 150Kbits per sec, not 20Mbits! Hopefully the new cable modem will solve this.

Virgin Media box - rubbish, and it killed my PVR's EPG!

For many months Virgin Media have been calling me to try and get me to take TV as part of my package - I had telephone and data. Eventually the pestering ground me down and I said they could send me the set-top box but I resolved not to install it - I was getting an upgrade to 20Mbits and fixed-cost calls (i.e. standing charge only) so that it seems I'll be saving.
Well - once the box had been delivered I had to unbox it just to have a look and I realised they sent one of the H.264-capable Samsung boxes (HDMI o/p at 1080!). Sarah then said "...it has a better quality version of iPlayer than gets delivered over the web - could we use it for that?" so I ran a co-ax under the floor and installed it.
Of course it didn't work and after much tinkering in engineering menus I discovered that the smart-card wasn't paired with the box! So back into the carboard and stored in the cellar!
Whilst I was tinkering I set MediaPortal to see the box on it's S-Video i/p and was going to run an extra IR blaster so I could PVR cable-channels (in much the same way that TiVO works with Sky boxes). Last night I noticed that MediaPortal had stopped making off-air recordings and when I looked it was clear that it wasn't getting any EPG data. After much head-scratching I realised that if you define an external cable or Sky box it assumes that the EPG ain't coming from DVB-T any more - d'oh!

So - that Virgin box is staying in the cellar and ain't coming anywhere near my good working setup!

A good read, a bad ISP!

I've just finished A Sea Change by Michael Arditti (ISBN-10: 1904559212) and was left very uplifted. I got downstairs for breakfast to find my cable is down again - less uplifting!

Based on a real-life voyage from Nazi Germany to Havana in 1939, The Sea Change is the "memoir" of Karl. As heir to a fortune, he begins as a spoilt, self-conscious young aesthete and, in the course of the voyage, becomes a man - falling in love with the beautiful Johanna, becoming reconciled to his father, battling Nazi crew members and eventually having his bar mitzvah.

Virgin Media's free TV service?!

I had a rep from Virgin call me to say that in perpetuity they would give me the penultimate TV package for £1 a month! 99 extra channels.
I told the woman that my kids watch too much TV as it is and I'd rather they provide a reliable broadband connection. She seemed genuinely surprised at me not wanting The Jewelery Channel and Bravo!

Virgin Media's tech support

I moaned about Virgin Media's tech support last year but when my connection was on a go-slow last week I discovered that you now have to pay 25p per minute to talk to tech support. Fantastic, I thought, a payed-for service will mean that it's worth having and I'll get to talk to a proper network engineer and not some person who is flipping over laminated pages. How wrong can you be?! The first thing the chap insisted was that it must be my router at fault - I told him that I'd swapped out the router with no change in performance - typically 40kBits per sec. He then told me to directly attach my PC to the cable-modem - never a good idea to come out from behind a NAT router, but we'll let that one go.

Anyhow - I told him that I'd already tried both a Mac and a Linux machine but there was no change;

Sir, we do not support Mac OS or Linux

So, you don't support the one OS that your entire network runs on?!

Sir, you must open Internet Explorer and delete all your cookies

And this is going to improve my connection speed how? How long before you advice my to re-install Windows?

Sir, that is step number five, now we must do things in order

I then told him that my neighbour (who also had Virgin) was suffering a slow connection;

Sir, my system is telling me that you have a perfect connection

It seems that Virgin's tech support have neither the tools to diagnose nor the expertise to fault-find any problems and the fact that everything he suggested was entirely without any merit leads me to believe they are just trying to keep you on the line as long as possible without any hope of resolving the issue.

And this you pay for!

Virgin Media, cable modems and bad tech support

I had my cable go down on Wednesday - it would stay up for half an hour after resetting the cable modem. So - a quick call to their tech support only to be told that it had to be my wireless router - hmm, I began to wish I hadn't blogged that Dilbert cartoon on 12th May! So - I tried another routers and even hooked the ethernet out of the router directly to a couple of computers. Of course when I called back the guy was on his break and I had to start the whole procedure with another person. Anyhow - today I had the tech support visit and the engineer showed me how bad the feed from the cabinet in the street was; -27dBuV - he said he'd normally expect to see -6dBuV! So - at the box end he discovered the port feeding my house was faulty and replaced it - nice signal level at the house. But, when he drove off the ping I was running fell over and the link was down again. I got straight back on the 'phone and this time got a representative who actually knew what he was talking about. When I told him the story and the half hour business he knew exactly what the problem was. A couple of days ago Virgin pushed out a firmware upgrade to the Scientific Atlanta cable modems and it corrupted the data rate sync settings so the buffer in the modem would over-run after n-minutes of use. See these screenshots if you're similarly troubled!