Mmmm blog.

A few weeks ago I signed up to Virgin Media’s Broadband XL plan (up to 20Mbps, provided by cable).

We were previously connected to O2 ADSL services which were giving us a sync of around 6-8Mbps, depending on the SNR margin of the given hour of the given day. Line attenuation was awful, despite the exchange front-door being visible from my bedroom window.

Since fixing bad telephone lines can be expensive and troublesome, I thought I’d head on over to cable-land where everything is supposedly rosy.

A different story

The first cock-up was that we were shipped another customer’s modem. This meant I initially got connected at half the speed I was meant to (“up to 10Mbps”). I took the opportunity to do some performance tests regardless, and real-world performance showed a maximum of around 8Mbps transfer speeds bringing it roughly on par with our ADSL^{1, 2}.

After many long and frustrating calls to a few very poor Virgin Media support reps, I found one who was able to fix the problem, and after a week or so I’ve finally been connected at the full speed (“up to 20Mbps”).

Here is a screenshot from the config section of the cable modem:

When I got over the initial excitement of being connected at “up to 20Mbps”, I did the performance tests again to see the improvement. For the first 5 minutes, I was able to achieve around 9Mbps—a whopping 1Mbps improvement! However, it gets worse.

When I attempted to run further tests, I started seeing even lower speeds, and for the past hour I haven’t been able to download any faster than 1.5-2.5Mbps.

What gives?

The only thing I can attribute it to is that reruns of American Idol finished and all the teenage girls flocked to their computers to update their Facebook statuses at once³. It’s most likely that Virgin Media has a crap network, which really shows up during peak times.

Even if I’m able to get 9Mbps again, it’s not really worth spending the extra money to get 1Mbps more (over the “up to 10Mbps” - L plan).

Overall, really disappointed. The whole internet experience here has made me miss Internode. I’ll be getting a refund or downgrade.

Update: Sometimes I’m getting 12Mbps now. Maybe they heard my complaint (or more likely, it’s past those teenage girls’ bed times).

1. I did two basic tests - speedtest.net, and an SSH file transfer from my workplace (in London) to here. My workplace has a very fast 20Mbit synchronous connection. I repeated these tests a few times.
   
   
2. I did the tests with my laptop connected directly to the cable modem via ethernet, to rule out any problems with the wireless.
   
   
3. I’m actually addicted to American Idol myself—but only because I like to perve on Kara DioGuardi.