Re: [OxLUG] broadband

Michael Howe wrote:
> Kevin Carmody wrote:
>> Hi all,
>>

> is rumoured that they have tech support people with Clue). I would just
> add that you really want to steer well (multiple bargepole distance)
> clear of NTL/Virgin/whatever they call themselves these days - if you
> don't watch your uploads during the evenings, ping times can get to
> ~10s. That from (painful) personal experience.

Well, I am not going to defend Virgin which I find pretty distasteful,
but the cables do work. When I download a bunch of debian DVDs after 4
pm, I get capped at half my bandwidth for 4 hours (I am on the cheapest
2Mb/s - I forget the upload speed). But 1Mb/s is fine for my needs and
pings certainly don't take 10 s.

There are occasional short periods (up to 1 minute maybe) when
everything grinds to a halt, but that is fairly rare.

I have had problems in the past, but that was eventually traced to a bad
F connector in the street cabinet.

Cable is just vastly superior to ADSL as far as the physics goes. It is
just a crime that Virgin is allowed to have a monopoly.

Just don't think of using the standard "support", but there are
newsgroups that have clued up people: on the vwnews nntp server,
virginmedia.support.broadband.cable has Virgin people who know what they
are doing; also virginmedia.comp.linux is quite reasonable.

You can book technicians via virginmedia.support.broadband.cable if you
have a hardware problem. Members of oxlug are unlikely to need software
support :-)

Account administration is quite a different story...

Adrian