Evening speeds - is this for real?

[splame]

I HAVE (honest) been reading other posters' threads which are making quite a bit of noise about how awful the evening speeds are on Virgin Cable; but I wanted to check that mine were overly awful as it's definitely more dire than any internet access I've had in the last 5 years, though not in the UK.

I'm on the 2mbit plan which appears to have a meagre 256kbit uplink speed and reside in North London (n15).

First thing - visiting autoreg.autoregister.net - does that actually work? Or is it just broken? It's not worked in the last two weeks and apparently I'm supposed to go there to setup the connection.

Come 6pm I would be lucky to get anything from anywhere moving at more than 10kbytes/sec total - even from Virgin's own servers?

I've been given on these cheap-ass ugly little Scientific Atlanta cable modems which when interrogated says:

Downstream Status Operational
Channel ID 5
Downstream Frequency 339000000 Hz
Modulation 256QAM
Bit Rate 2148000 bits/sec
Power Level 6.7 dBmV
Signal to Noise Ratio 42.1 dB

Upstream Status Operational
Channel ID 3
Upstream Frequency 37500000 Hz
Modulation 16QAM
Bit Rate 256000 bits/sec
Power Level 43.0 dBmV


My pings to www.virginmedia.co.uk or www.BBC.co.uk vary from 'timed out' down to around 3000ms (woooo hooo):

Pinging www.bbc.net.uk [212.58.226.232] with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 212.58.226.232: bytes=32 time=3261ms TTL=121
Request timed out.
Reply from 212.58.226.232: bytes=32 time=4124ms TTL=121
Request timed out.

Any help or suggestions greatly appreciated.
:)

[LiamTG]

Yes it's for real mate.

In simple terms

It's just ****.

[splame]

Dang - my cable in New Zealand seems like it was a better product - and that was the equiv' of 23GBP for 20gb month - my pings were never more than about 80ms and it ran at 264kbytes/s down whenever I asked - and cost me a packet in extra traffic charges :).

Broadband Size: M
During peak times, the top 5% on the Size: M package download at least 350MB of traffic each.

Any users hitting this amount during peak times (4pm till midnight) will have their broadband speed temporarily traffic managed – their download speed will be set to 1Mb, with their upload speed set to 128Kb. This will last for 4 hours from when the traffic management policy is applied.

1mbit eh?

---------- Post added at 20:52 ---------- Previous post was at 20:29 ----------

~30 mins later and at least the pings have come back from nowhere land:

Tracing route to www.bbc.net.uk [212.58.251.202]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 809 ms 715 ms 458 ms 10.177.x.x
2 15 ms 7 ms 10 ms x.blueyonder.co.uk [62.30.x.x]
3 9 ms 10 ms 9 ms x.blueyonder.co.uk [62.30.x.x]
4 12 ms 10 ms 11 ms 194.117.136.146
5 10 ms 118 ms 19 ms bbc-gw0-linx.prt0.thdoe.bbc.co.uk [195.66.224.103]
6 21 ms 11 ms 11 ms 212.58.238.129
7 10 ms 9 ms 10 ms 212.58.239.58
8 60 ms 12 ms 14 ms www2.telhc.bbc.co.uk [212.58.251.202]

[freakgirl]

My broadband tonight has been unbearable, we pay good money for this we should expect good service

[dev]

My broadband tonight has been unbearable, we pay good money for this we should expect good service

actually, in internet speeds you pay peanuts for a lot, when you get down to the business end, £37 will get you 1mbit of dedicated bandwidth if you're lucky

[splame]

Dedicated links are a fundamentally different ball game though - and the SLA's around the provision of that bandwidth are ultimately many times clearer and, most likely, fairer than the constantly changing 'Fair Usage' term wrapped around what home users get.

In my experience business users get what they pay for - and that's a very high level of service between the hours of 9-6 5 days a week. When's the last time you spoke to your businesses ISP and found they were in India?