50M : New Virgin Media Business Option

[ccarmock]

I see VMB have launched a third tier in their Business Cable broadband services a 30 Mb/s service for £25 a month without phone line or £30 a month with a phone line

Their pricing seems a bit odd:-

Service ------- Without Phone --- With Phone ----- Phone therefore adds
30 Mb/s ............ £25 -------------- £30 ------------------ £5
50 Mb/s ............ £40 -------------- £50 ------------------ £10
152 Mb/s ........... £45 ------------- £60 ------------------ £15


Quite why the cost of the phone line increases through the packages I don't know

They appear not to have fully updated their pages yet as it seems you can only order the 50 & 152 Mb/s services online and the latters till has no fixed IP address option. No mention of fixed IP on the 30 Mb/s service either.

[Sephiroth]

Pointless having a business service that doesn't offer a static IP address and when the SH doesn't support DDNS. I suppose you could put value on the SLA but I think that the SLA is somewhat hollow.

[apb27]

i've always wondered are their business tiers also subject to traffic management?

[ccarmock]

They always used to be outside the core business hours which I believe are 8am to 6pm Mon-Fri the limits were much higher than the consumer service, but to get them to tell you what they were was a challenge.

Since STM downstream has been removed for the consumer service I would assume the same should be the case for business, though they still talk about traffic management outside core business hours. Crazy since many businesses do not have core hours like this.

Also I agree with Sephiroth that it's pointless to not offer fixed IP on a business grade service.

The website implies that option is still only available on the 50 Mb/s service. If you try the online order process for the 152 Mb/s service it confirms no fixed IP yet.

I can't try that for the 30 Mb/s option since you can't order that online, instead you have to call.

This all seems a bit disjointed. Having said that the service is good, and while you are using the same network and thus subject to the same congestion as the consumer services, the fault repair service is very good indeed.

I can vouch for the fixed IP options working well on the 50 Mb/s service. I am just waiting to hear when it will be available on the 152 Mb/s option.

The message from sales was originally in the first quarter this year. Now that that has passed they are saying first half. Any info beyond that seems impossible to get.

They had two issues to resolve - business firmware for the Superhub 2 AC to support the fixed IP config options as well as a performance problem when the L2TP/PPP tunnel is formed at higher speeds.

There was also discussion that a new router/hub (I was told not Netgear derived) would be used to address the lack of business firmware on anything other then the Superhub 1

[Sephiroth]

Thanks for the info, CC.

I'd like to take the VMB service, but I would need a fixed IP service, modem mode and although 50 meg is more than enough - that's not the point! My area has no usage issues so congestion would not arise unless the students up sticks and come and live here.

So I'll wait and watch the forum. Darn sight more info here than can be reliably expected from VM.