Last Straw. Camel's Back. Etc.

[David Precious]

Denny wrote:
> I have in the past had Virgin Media's '20Mb' cable service at this
> address - it never managed >2Mb in the evenings, and often dropped below
> 1Mb.  Apparently their contention ratios are rather high.  Avoid.

It must depend upon location and how many heavy users are nearby, as I 
have their 20Mbps service, and consistently get good download speeds, 
even during the evening.

For instance, using www.speedtest.net right now (7pm), I got 16.86Mbps 
down and 2.45Mbps up.

That's slightly lower than previous tests (I normally see 18-19 at 
least), but then I have to bear in mind that all traffic is going over a 
VPN connection to my server in London and coming out there, in order to 
have a static IP, and a connection that Virgin/Phorm etc cannot snoop 
upon, and to avoid their transparent caches (I believe they still use them).

I've only had to contact their tech support once in a couple of years - 
the support agent I spoke to seemed clueful enough, understood that I 
knew the problem was theirs and not mine (modem kept losing sync), and 
agreed to send an engineer out the next day to sort it.  The problem 
magically went away the next day (without an engineer visiting my 
house), so I don't know if it was fixed remotely or an engineer did 
something at a local cabinet, all I know is it was sorted out.

Cheers

Dave P