U sane ?
Oh so thats why we haven't seen the "say bye bye to buffering " ads lately
At least Richard doesn't have to rely on VM for his net connection on his island - but what about our island ?
Here on the networks desk at Vulture Central our inbox runneth over with complaints from fed-up Virgin Media customers who feel that they are being roundly ignored by the telco, which is yet to fix a network peering problem with a mysterious third party. The major buffering glitch is causing havoc with punters who are …
Yes they are. When that started off I thought it seemed pretty good, and the grey line at the bottom of the youtube screen showed that data was loading in OK, albeit slowly. This is just what I see with my Orange connection, and frequently get buffering issues with youtube. I had assumed it to be a YT problem because it doesn't usually happen with Vimeo, but that may not be the case.
As usual the lack of information from VM to its customers is lacking. They won't answer if they redirect/proxy/cache/shape/fiddle with youtube or other streaming traffic. In fact they won't supply any information to their suffering customers.
On top of that they are stalling for time by asking customers to traceroute to youtube which they know is pointless as the videos are served from a different location to the actual website. They have asked customers to run wireshark now to sniff traffic, which is usually the domain of network professionals.
Its like one big joke....that is not funny.
I use iPlayer, netflix across a multitude of devices. Haven't seen any buffering lately, certainly nothing in last 3 months. Regularly watch feature films on my xbox as I can get full 1080p from that where I can't from any other device as no one else seems to broadcast 1080p.
So, I guess I am lucky, VM have been great in my area (West Lothian).
no one mentioned their long suffering outsourced call center.......... Aiiiiiiiiiii I just did
2 hrs last weekend trying to get my broadband sorted while being transfered from agent to agent until 1 agent said I was'nt even paying for broadband and put me through to the scottish section.
Who saw where the problem was, and said "we'll get an engineer out for a fix tomorrow and have a refund"
But VM are still s**t.. its just they are less shit than the other ISP options in the area
I've had some minor gripes with Sky and had been considering the total package switch this weekend. Since Virgin won't even answer el reg what chance would I have with Virgin? TV, phone and broadband package switch to Virgin cancelled. Just wish there was a better alternative, BT have ripped me off in the past so they're not an option.
...except I experienced dreadful network performance a couple of years which went on for months. As someone who works on Da Intarwebz and has some experience of networking I was able to show that the uplink from the cable head end was saturated from 6pm to 12pm, and the problem arrived when the local University term started.
After a few fruitless "please provide us with ping tests" and "go to speedtest.net" conversations with VM CS I contacted @virginmedia on Twitter. BOOM - open, honest, frank and clear explanation of the problem, entirely agreeing with me.
It still took several weeks to be resolved, but that's network provisioning for you. And I did quite nicely out of my complaint, ta very much. Haven't had a single problem since.
I have had numerous issues with VM over the last couple of years, when it works its brilliant but when its broken it usually takes them weeks to find or resolve the issue. I even started to think they have a "improve connection" button on the helpline. Whenever I called them with an outage or fault and they did their line tests it would all magically improve as soon as they did it and then fail shortly after.
I came really close to jumping many times in the past year. Then miraculously they fixed it and all was brilliant, my 20meg broadband was fantastic.
Recently I made the mistake of taking the free upgrade to 60meg. Ever since then youtube is impossible to use unless i drop it to the lowest quality setting. Lovefilm is unusable and Netflix is ok when I use a US DNS.
They are clearly selling something they can't deliver. Say goodbye to buffering? Should surely be "Welcome back buffering!"
When I lived at my mothers, we had Cabletel who became NTL, and all was well.
Since they became Virgin Media it went downhill - the internet would randomly drop, the Pace digital receiver was slow and buggy, the TV service was like watching a video through a bathroom window and their offshored customer service was dire.
When I moved out I vowed to never use them. I'm with PlusNet who have a great customer service dept, and their fibre broadband gives me 40mb without issues or extended buffering.
We do get their marketing junk through the letterbox constantly, but it goes in the postage envelopes of the other marketing junk. Somewhere out there a credit card company employee is reading about the delights of the (mostly broken constantly rebooting from what I hear) VM TiVo box.
What is the point of me paying for 50Meg cable broadband if it cant even stream low quality youtube videos without constantly pausing and buffering.
My mobile phone, with its significantly inferior quoted speed has no such problems with youtube, so in theory I could cancel my 50meg virgin broadband and pay an extra £10 a month to my mobile phone provider to upgrade to unlimited* data
*unlimited does not mean unlimited as far as data usage is concerned as OFCOM doesn't own a dictionary.
I used to be a VM advocate, I had their 30MB from when it was telewest 512K. Fantastic until SuperCrapHub came along.
Now all I hear is complaints.
I moved out of a cable area, went with BT, couldn't believe it. Their quoted speed met expectations, I never have buffering, Had to call their customer service a few times, completely effortless and very reminiscent of vodafone's fantastic service.
All very shocking as I used to view VM as a great brand synonymous with great customer service and unquestionably quick, reliable internet connectivity.
As per the news article, it really sounds like VM have gone the way of TalkTalk. Oh well, pint anyone?
BT. Phorn. F**k them. F**k them forever. Not to be trusted. Slimy s**mbags.
Virgin Media. See BT
Talk Talk. Have all your pages access sent to China for your "safety".
Sky. Proprietor R. Murdoch and Jimmy boy. I would rather tuck into a meal of my sweat and toenail clippings before I hand them a penny.
According to the conservative back bench MP that wanted to age vet *all* web sites accessible in the UK (mostly because she could not work out how to make the parental controls work) there are around 450 ISP's in the UK, That leaves 445 outside the biggest 5.
Maybe an ISP only covers *your* area but so what? This situation *only* changes when an ISP starts loosing *cash* from fewer subscribers. As a working hypothesis *most* companies do what they can get away with.
A quick CTRL+F search on this page for 'NTL' had four hits but not in the context I now write.
I was using Telewest in '99 (brilliant; paid for 512K but received 2Mbit)
Since 2001 till present I have been an NTHell user (sorry Virgin Media users; All those crappy Richard Branson adverts mean nothing - it is still the same company as before, they only bought the naming rights...lol)
Just to give you an idea of how bad their customer database and records are - I know of at least 5 people (myself included) who have walked away from debts between addresses; expecting it to catch up at the next one only to never pay a penny towards it. I even know of one friend who was advised by a Virgin cold caller that (upon stating the suspeneded service/outstanding bill) they could use another person living at the property to open another A/C in the other persons name. It worked, they got back online - no debt was ever chased.
Now I only bring this up to illustrate what a terrible mess the company is in. So why do I stil use them? Because quite frankly ADSL (and the con that is the BT quarterly line rental) can go and suck my balls. Fibre will always be faster and current pricing offers far better deals in terms of speed & D/L allowance.
All the commentards above moaning about the slow throughput to a couple of specific sites (a very nominal percentage of the WWW in total) need to STFU and be grateful how good things are today versus just 10 years ago.
Give me a list of pissing and moaning people and I will glady go round their homes, confiscate all of thier external storage devices and replace it with a big stack of floppy disc's instead. I bet after one day of 20K transfer speeds and pulled hair - they might just humble a little.
P.S. I had noticed some problems with buffering YouTube before reading this article. Since i discovered quite often a different upload of the same video would buffer fine; I just assumed it was their issues and not VM's.
https://www.youtube.com works fine as it is not buffered, unfortunately all those embedded links don't use the https site, on a 60Mbs connections I spent 35 mins last night buffering a 1min 34sec 1080p clip, by the time it was ready for playing I had completely forgotten about it. 3 Months now is taking the pee.
And not just video buffering.. they used to be the best of a bad lot locally.. But ever since I was "upgraded" to 60Meg from 20, and given a "super hub", my connection has gone to shit. Friend of mine who's on a 10Meg ADSL line just down the road gets consistently higher connection speeds and lower pings to servers we're both connecting to.
The other reason being that I lose internet connection every time it rains heavily. According to the disinterested and surly engineer who came out to look at it, the street cabinet is not sealed from the elements properly, and water gets in. Could he fix it? Like hell he could. And apparently replacement will take months. In winter. When it rains a lot. Fantastic. Time to depart.
The previous occupants of my house were on Cable Corp (leter Telewest then VM) but they told me it would take seven days to provide service - something that would take 2 minutes on a terminal. So I reverted the connection to BT. Now I get about two junk mail shots a week from VM which go straight into the recycle bin.
Long before this buffering problem VM was already working towards a potential Guiness Book of Records thread about the failures of its Superhub with V36 firmware.
And that has been going on since July, with no end in sight.
http://community.virginmedia.com/t5/Wireless-Networking/Connecting-wireless-devices-needs-a-reboot-on-R36/td-p/1431388
"Fibre will always be faster"
Yes, I'm sure it would - but Virgin don't offer that, they just lie about the nature of their coaxial copper wire service. (Sadly, rather than correct them, the other operators have decided to join them, calling BT's fibre-to-the-cabinet VDSL offering "fibre" too.) BT are genuinely offering a fibre service - 'FTTP' - at 330 Mbps downstream, in a handful of areas; Virgin aren't, as far as I know.
In theory, Virgin's 8-way bonded EuroDOCSIS 3 could share 400 Mbps downstream and about 200 downstream across that network segment (a street or bigger), while BT's VDSL2 could deliver 100 Mbps in each direction. In reality, on either system you're constrained by the network backbone and peering/transit - which, with Virgin, seems to be a major bottleneck now.
When I was still on Virgin's 50 Mbps service, Sky Anytime took a while to start play, then still sometimes had to stop and rebuffer; the instant I moved to Entanet's VDSL service (sync at about 66 Mbps), on-demand content started in seconds and never stopped to buffer. Now, Virgin have been talking about their 100 (and later 120) Mbps rollout for years now - but if they can't fill up a 50 Mbps pipe, what use is a 100/120 one?!
and I imagine it's been mentioned, but Talk Talk aren't any better. Something happened a little while back with the buffering business on youtube and it just hasn't been right since. Well, in plain English, it actually does NOT buffer any more.
I have researched it. There seems to be no answer. What has worked for others does not work for me.
And many are just left with it as it is and have given up trying to fix it. It's not broke our end obviously.
I'm running it on all kinds of stuff: VMs, VPNs, Linux, Windows, not really knowing what I am doing, just experimenting, but I can fire up a browser and type in 'youtube.com' into the URI bar. I mean, you would kind of expect it not to run so smoothly on a VM running off a usb stick, but Debian on VBox running with only 3 percent space left on it, works smoother than some other installs I have...
I tell a lie, some videos do buffer. But never the one you really really wanna watch at the time.
I've tried IceWeasel, Midori, FF, Opera, Chromium, even blessed IE - same behaviour or lack of.
Sometimes I just wanna ah zig a zag ah!
iPlayer does tend to buffer better recently on Linux, but it's still hit and miss when you get that boxing compression. I mean, I got a steady 10Mbps now they have upgraded my line, but something is not right somewhere in streaming land. And other streaming services are so hit and miss that very often they don't even work at all. Maybe I'm just unlucky.
All that bollocks has no bearing what so ever on the fact Virgin Media has screwed up youtube for their customers, hence this el reg article and flame breathing angry VM customers. Might need some buffering tablets for the verbal diarrhoea
Somewhere in a parallel universe....