Virgin Media : Poor Internet Speed

I'm continuing to have my issues with Virgin Media, let me explain.  Last month I came to them asking to remove the superfluous junk offering items, as I was simply paying more for items I didn't use, want nor need.

They could not help, in fact they flat refused to, so I cancelled 66% of my services off completely, TV, Phone all gone and never ever to return - well done them...

The next item was the 200mbit broadband I was paying for, below is a historic speed test I carried out a lot, as you can see I never, ever, got near 200Mbit, but I always got over 50Mbit...

Being quite a logical person therefore, and based on this evidence, this proof I had for myself, I downgraded the internet from the Vivid200 to Vivid50, i.e. 50mbit... Yeah, save money, it can do 50 mbit easy, right... Right... RIGHT?.....

WRONG.

This is tonight's speed test...

Last night it was slower than that, I had a download speed of 1.22mbit, and upload of 620K.

Yeah, rocking the 1990's internet speed.

And I'm utterly sick of it, I'm sick of paying for a service I never ever get.  It may have been optimistic, maybe even naive to think having seen 50mbit when paying for 200, I would get 50 when paying for 50, but clearly something has gone astray here.

Clearly, Virgin Media are up to some shenanigans, be that throttling, load balancing, whatever term they want to give it, or even what ever they want to say in denial, but I'm observing this poor speed, I'm enduring this poor service, and I'm utterly and totally frustrated with the script (I would say expert system, but it's clearly a script) the people in the call centers follow.

This is NOT my equipment, this is not my network, this is their external speed, this is from their superhub 2 and outwards, NOT the internal side of that connection.

That is a test through the newer version of Ookla (the site at the top) as you can see the speed is even worse twenty minutes on - BTW, note to Virgin Media, your own engineers use this site to do a test upon installation.

And here's the speed an hour after my original post... this is now 21:32 on a Sunday evening...

Reaching Out & Being Pushed Back

I've spent the last few days talking to a few companies I'd love to partner with, to bring you more reviews.  Now, on the internet we already have a lot of gaming related or performance reviews, but I was inspired more about the idea of working environment, development cycles, or throughput for the worker.

I'm interested in things like cables, drives, storage, cases and also the main centre piece of your working time, the machine itself.

I tried to speak to Intel, and was given a pretty flat "you're too small"... Believe it or not, 400,000 of you have passed through these pages in the six years they've been running (thank you so much), and by far the most popular posts are my programming tutorials, followed closely by the reviews.

Combining the two, could only be a win-win situation!

I have today therefore, sent missives to AMD, Asus and nVidia.  I've also sent online messages to some smaller storage firms, like Xstra in the EU and Kingpin.

It is actually quite hard to find UK based reviews of items, often you can be watching coverage of some great ideas from US sources, only to find either the items are not available or they cost an absolute fortune compared to US prices.

What else am I up to this week?... Well, I had a long researched article in the fire, it was related to my uncovering of several cheaters on US based IT courses, at least the US students were the only ones silly enough to get caught by myself.  However, during my uncovering of this situation one of the colleges in question took extreme exception to my posting about their students activities, and they slapped me with a "cease & desist" order.

Their order only covers publishing any names in the US, but my problem is, I can't prove conclusively who the students in question were, so if only one person out of a class of 29 were cheating in the manner I uncovered, then by just posting the name of the course or college, I would be defaming the innocent twenty nine; not something I want to do at all.

So, for now that article, as interesting as it was is on hiatus, and I can only thank the other three colleges and lecturers whom got back to me, however briefly, for your time and frank disclosures.