Virgin Media and its not so Superhub

There was a time when I would have recommended Virgin media to anyone. Their flagship product at the time, the 50Mb service, was fantastic for me. A rock solid service that never had any issues (other than at one time when BT cut through the fibre), gave me a guaranteed 5MB/s, and never had any noticeable packet loss or congestion.

Since Virgin have upgraded me to 100Mbps however, I have had no end of issues. Two faulty “superhubs”, an awful service during peak hours, and countless minutes of unhelpful customer service.

virginmediasuperhub Virgin Media and its not so Superhub

Using my own router and disabling the “Super”hubs built in functions has improved things – I am no longer getting the hub losing connection and resetting itself 12 times a day – but not much. Not to mention the STMs being introduced. One could conceivably hit their STM limit with only ~20 minutes of legitimate useage (eg Steam, ISO downloads etc), let alone pirated material.

The bigger issue here however is that Virgin are chasing headline speeds without actually being able to sell the capacity required; hence the new STMs on its flagship product, and countless threads on the user forums about unuseable connections.

The worst of it? I have been told personally that the support team have detected “over-utilisation” on my UBR, but it is 3% below their threshold to raise it as a problem with the network team. In other words, I am going to have to put up with a dreadful connection during peak hours (when I might, oh I don’t know what to play a computer game, or the other half might want to watch IPlayer on our Smart TV), and endure it getting significantly worse until they will even raise it as an issue.

Cheers Richard, cheers Usain!

Magic

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So it arrived today via courier, just as promised. And I have to say thus far I’m impressed. Lovely interface, fast device, easy to hold, good response from the touchscreen, and a good camera. Obviously I need to dive in further and experiment a bit more, but it’s good thus far.

Android Magic

htc pioneer h1 Android Magic

I decided to take a step forward with technology. My current mobile is damaged and doesn’t really work properly, plus Android has matured to a level that I now want to try it out.

My brother-in-law is developing applications for Android, and I’d like to support him and play about with them as well. All in all a nice little phone with some good looking features, and whilst I’m not overly ecstatic about a Vodafone contract, at least they abolished roaming charges this summer. Not that I’m likely to roam this summer.

The less said about the Google tie-in the better. But maybe with owning one of their devices I can find a way to bring them down from the inside..