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.

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!