Virgin ADSL rant
This rant has been a long, long time coming.
Virgin ADSL has been the worst ISP I have ever had the misfortune to have dealt with, ever. It makes me nostalgic for the days of dial-up, where 56k was fast and we got disconnected every two hours and paid twice as much. Turns out, that was value for money.
There's the usual shit that everyone already knows about, such as selling your browsing history to Phorm, or totally disregarding net neutrality. Each of those are themselves motivation for me to cancel, but what really does it is the quality of service.
For starters, it's pathetically slow. They advertise it as "up to" 8mbps where they'd be more accurate to advertise it as "down to" 0mbps. I've never, ever seen it go faster than 1mbps, and if it hits 512kbps that counts as a good day.
Then there's the Fair Usage policy: "For the small number of customers who are in the top 5% of heaviest users, our traffic management solution will temporarily set download speeds to no lower than 80Kbit/s. This limit is applied daily, 4pm until midnight, for one week". Considering that most of their customer base are basically using it for light browsing and email, this means that if you actually (god forbid) attempt to *use* your internet connection, perhaps by watching youtube or something, you're going to find yourself in the top 5% fairly swiftly. This will be the point where you discover that the "no lower than" part is an utter, complete lie - as if 80Kbit/s isn't prehistorically slow already.
During the hours of 4pm and midnight, you basically do not have an internet connection. Most of your DNS replies will go missing and once you finally hit refresh enough times to get one, the page will spend just about forever loading. There's just no point in trying to use the internet at this time of day. Sometimes it does just about work, and I've clocked it going almost as fast as 28kbps. That speed would have been pathetic in 1998, let alone 2008. For one third of the day we do not have an internet connection, and it's the third when I'm trying to actually use the fucking thing.
It's not just me who has had this problem - everyone I've spoken to who has Virgin ADSL has the same issues, and find that the only way to get a usable connection during those hours is to go on holiday for a week first. In summary, given the choice of Virgin ADSL and no internet connection at all, I'm opting for the latter. It's exactly the same level of service, except 15 pounds a month cheaper.
Edit: It's actually gotten to the point where I go to uni in the evenings just to use the internet. That's the only way I was able to post this at 7pm.
Virgin ADSL has been the worst ISP I have ever had the misfortune to have dealt with, ever. It makes me nostalgic for the days of dial-up, where 56k was fast and we got disconnected every two hours and paid twice as much. Turns out, that was value for money.
There's the usual shit that everyone already knows about, such as selling your browsing history to Phorm, or totally disregarding net neutrality. Each of those are themselves motivation for me to cancel, but what really does it is the quality of service.
For starters, it's pathetically slow. They advertise it as "up to" 8mbps where they'd be more accurate to advertise it as "down to" 0mbps. I've never, ever seen it go faster than 1mbps, and if it hits 512kbps that counts as a good day.
Then there's the Fair Usage policy: "For the small number of customers who are in the top 5% of heaviest users, our traffic management solution will temporarily set download speeds to no lower than 80Kbit/s. This limit is applied daily, 4pm until midnight, for one week". Considering that most of their customer base are basically using it for light browsing and email, this means that if you actually (god forbid) attempt to *use* your internet connection, perhaps by watching youtube or something, you're going to find yourself in the top 5% fairly swiftly. This will be the point where you discover that the "no lower than" part is an utter, complete lie - as if 80Kbit/s isn't prehistorically slow already.
During the hours of 4pm and midnight, you basically do not have an internet connection. Most of your DNS replies will go missing and once you finally hit refresh enough times to get one, the page will spend just about forever loading. There's just no point in trying to use the internet at this time of day. Sometimes it does just about work, and I've clocked it going almost as fast as 28kbps. That speed would have been pathetic in 1998, let alone 2008. For one third of the day we do not have an internet connection, and it's the third when I'm trying to actually use the fucking thing.
It's not just me who has had this problem - everyone I've spoken to who has Virgin ADSL has the same issues, and find that the only way to get a usable connection during those hours is to go on holiday for a week first. In summary, given the choice of Virgin ADSL and no internet connection at all, I'm opting for the latter. It's exactly the same level of service, except 15 pounds a month cheaper.
Edit: It's actually gotten to the point where I go to uni in the evenings just to use the internet. That's the only way I was able to post this at 7pm.