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ADSL2+ 50MBPs here.

Looks like they took on too many customers and it was overload. They took all of virgin net dial-up customers in just one day because virgin wanted to switch to broadband cable users only and cable television and telephones. "people in the U.K. hate TalkTalk Telephone and Internet because their sales staff bombard them with special offers nuisance calls and spam". Really? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... "Virgin broadband customers told: we're moving you to TalkTalk and you'll lose your email Virgin Media is transferring 100,000 broadband and home phone customers to TalkTalk, and customers will have 12 months to adopt a new email address. Virgin Media insisted that the transition to TalkTalk would be “seamless” and customers would not lose their connection at any point". I love reading other people's Internet providers homepages. http://community.virginmedia.c... At the moment I'm reading some in Amsterdam find the language hard going I might purchase a server there prices look good.

Spoiler: Erasure is much harder to spot than image splicing.

I dunno... the Erasure in this image is incredibly obvious if you ask me.

Unfortunately you're not allowed to use your own router on VM's network.

Yes you are

Film credits have mushroomed even more over the years. In the old days just a few names for a few seconds. Now there are hundreds of names at the end and can take up more than 10% of the movie running time. The movie Clerks 2 credits 163,070 people!

a state of affairs or an event that seems deliberately contrary to what one expects and is often amusing as a result.

Your wedding is supposed to be the happiest day of your life. If this picture doesn't make you smile at least a little, then you take life too seriously.

They charge £16.50 a month for NOT having a phone line, how does that make any sense?

http://store.virginmedia.com/b...

2) pilots waste an insane amount of time with "um", "uh", explaining things verbosely, not planning what they are going to say ahead of time, etc.

Most people waste an inordinate amount of time on "um" and "errr" ; planned public speakers excepted, which is why they charge a significant fee. That's also why the ability to make a presentation in front of a meeting/ classroom, whatever is worth a significant chunk of your salary, if you can do it.

Radio interviewers doing vox pops typically do a process they call "de-umming" where they trim out the umms and errrrs of recorded speech, and typically reduce the length of the segment by 20-30%.

The City of London Police are abusing their power to enforce civil matters and shut down legitimate search engines.

And what's really odd is that this domain is blocked in the UK by the big ISPs anyway. It was blocked along with a bunch of others back in October 2013.

If I try to access it on my current ISP, I get redirected here: http://assets.virginmedia.com/site-blocked.html.

So the City Police are trying to take down a domain that you can't even access directly in the UK.

http://store.virginmedia.com/b... Covers at least 60% of the country.

for thepiratebay.org

HTTP/1.1 302 Found Location: http://assets.virginmedia.com/site-blocked.html Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8

Then on the page you redirect too:

HTTP/1.1 304 Not Modified Server: Apache/2.2.15 (Red Hat) Last-Modified: Mon, 12 Aug 2013 11:35:14 GMT Cache-Control: max-age=4600, public Expires: Thu, 15 Aug 2013 14:36:23 GMT Vary: Accept-Encoding Content-Encoding: gzip Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8 Accept-Ranges: bytes Date: Thu, 15 Aug 2013 20:39:31 GMT X-Varnish: 2120962236 2120363846 Age: 25388 Via: 1.1 varnish Connection: keep-alive X-Varnish-Cache: HIT

http://promobay.org/ is blocked on my Virgin broadband connection.

See also: http://community.virginmedia.com/t5/Chatter/Blocking-of-the-Promo-Bay/m-p/1589066

It looks like Virgin Media at least still do run NNTP servers in the UK if this page is to be believed, although I have not used them in years: http://help.virginmedia.com/system/selfservice.controller?CMD=VIEW_ARTICLE&ARTICLE_ID=3525. Most ISPs were in the habit of dropping the binary groups even 10 years ago on storage and bandwidth grounds, which would also reduce the exposure to copyright issues.

Sorry, the web page you have requested is not available through Virgin Media.

Virgin Media has received an order from the Courts requiring us to prevent access to this site in order to help protect against copyright infringement.

If you are a Virgin Media home broadband customer, for more information on why certain web pages are blocked, please click here.

If you are a Virgin Media Business customer, or are trying to view this page through your company's internet connection, please click here.

I just tried accessing the HTTPS URL as a test on Virgin Media and it simply times out. Not sure if that's due to blocking or maybe PirateBay just doesn't have SSL setup (although I'd presume they would)?

The HTTP URL is redirected to Virgin Media's site blocked page.

Not sure if serious or just that stupid:
Use Internet to download additional files during installation.
Useful when the install target has no Internet connection.

You also have at least as many options on the Ubuntu download page:

http://ubuntu.virginmedia.com/releases//precise/

. In the book he describes a situation in which some cops gunned down an unarmed black kid because they thought he was reaching for his own gun, and not his wallet. In that situation, there was no reason to assume this kid was dangerous, it was just that the kid was black and it was late at night in a bad part of town.

As an aside, for all Slashdotters out there... cops really, really, really don't like it when you reach into your pockets too quickly and/or out of their sight. They automatically assume the worst. Some of them - especially those who have been shot at - have an itchy trigger finger when it looks like someone might pull a weapon on them.

If you're going to reach for anything, do it slooooowwwwlllly. If you have to grab something from a pocket, compartment, etc., do it with the "okay" sign - remove or pick up the item with two fingers, and keep the other three as spread out and extended as possible. It's pretty much impossible to grip and quickly fire a gun or use a knife with just two fingers and it is surprinsingly effective at alleviating their concerns. (You may occasionally hear in movies or the like when someone is asked to remove their gun, the person holding them at gunpoint will say "two fingers!" - that's why.)

Unfortunately, even when they are up-front about their bandwidth management policy, sometimes they make it so complex that it's still hard to know if you're complying. Check out the policy for my ISP, Virgin Media. Props to them for publishing the policy, although you do have to keep checking that it hasn't changed while you weren't looking. But give me a break - two different periods during which traffic is metered, one including an upstream cap, one not, with different levels in each. Plus separate DPI-based management of P2P "between 5pm and midnight on weekdays and midday and midnight on weekends". And if you do exceed one of the caps, they throttle you to 25%, which would be fine, except that however they've implemented that throttling, it makes your connection almost unusable. Download a game from Steam at the wrong time, and you might basically lose the ability to stream video from the web for the rest of the day. Fun.

+1

Sadly here in the UK some ISPs just rate limit all traffic [unhappy Virgin Media customer - soon to change :) ]

http://www.virginmedia.com/images/tm-table-fu-large.jpg

I suggest that both you and the GP should probably take a look at the Virgin Throttling for higher speed lines.

I'm on the M service and I can raep (oops, my ED side is showing) torrents like they're ... free, as long as I do it at the right time.
Knowing when those times are and having a decent aftermarket firmware on my router which I can set cron jobs in means that I can throttle up and down at the right times so I don't get 5 hours of shit slow service twice a day.

I'm on size M and I do OK. It does take me forever to get up to the 2-1 ratio that I always reach before killing a torrent though.

Just for the info of anyone reading this, not necessarily you; ALWAYS encrypt your BitTorrent traffic, ALWAYS use HTTPS to download your .torrent files and ALWAYS seed to more than 1-1 ratio!

30mb/3mb connection with Virgin. £27 a month with no need for a phone line or paying any form of "line rental" to BT, infact I dont even have a phone line in the building.

Their trafic management policy is nicely listed here:
http://shop.virginmedia.com/help/traffic-management/traffic-management-faster-uploads.html

I get on average 33mb down and 3.1mb up according to speedtest.net if I manage to hit their cap in the evening (OnLive uses about 2.5gb per 30mins) then I get throttled down to 7.5mb which to be fair is way more than anyone round here gets on BT anyways.

Its rarely down and always works nicely, problem for most people is down to their cable network not covering most places, if you're lucky enough to get it then get it...

Virgin Media is currently rolling out its 100Mb/s internet.

Just FYI.

BT,Talktalk, Tiscali & Virginmedia (90% of the ISP market in the UK) all continue to hijack DNS and you have to specifically opt out.

https://my.virginmedia.com/advancederrorsearch/settings

http://preferences.webaddresshelp.bt.com/selfcare/preferences.cgi

According to their policy you will be throttled for 5 hours, down to 35% of your normal speed, if you upload more than 6000MB between 3-8PM on any given day. So, if max out your upload for two hours and forty minutes, during that 5 hour window, then you will be throttled.

If it's anything like their ISP service in homes if you so much as dare to read an email during the day they will throttle you for a week.

I'm exaggerating of course but sadly not by much.

Thats not true, you can get an unlimited service (at extra cost) and the most basic package has a 200mb limit, after which you will be throttled for 12 hours.

If I were to complain about anything it would be the actual unthrottled speed, about 20% of the rated maximum seems typical except early in the morning.

After some people I know in the UK on Virgin Media seemed to have latency issues, I did some digging and it seems every few months their traffic shaping appliance incorrectly starts classifying WoW traffic as peer to peer and consequently lag in WoW is in the 1000s of milliseconds.

See this ongoing thread:
http://community.virginmedia.com/t5/Fibre-optic-broadband-cable/World-of-Warcraft-Latency-Issues/td-p/167089/page/39

Any time it breaks, they take days to acknowledge the issue, when they eventually do, it then takes days before the fix is implemented. Despite no other European ISPs having the same issue, they have also had the audacity to claim in the same statement that although the fix will need to be done on Virgin Media's side, that Blizzard is also to blame because they made changes on their end without notifying Virgin Media.

Virgin doesn't charge for going over their limits. They publish their traffic management policy (currently no caps on their 50Mb/s service, and ones that I've rarely hit on their 10Mb/s one). If you go over the caps, which only apply at peak times, then you are throttled for 5 hours, and then your connection resets to the normal speed after that.

Same on their 10Mb/s service here. Never had any problems getting 1.1MB/s downloads (here or my last house), and the throttling has only rarely kicked in for me. In fact, the only time that it's happened was when I had to upload 10GB of videos to my publisher. Their traffic management policy only lets me upload 800MB between 4PM and 9PM, and after that it drops to 25% of the normal speed for 5 hours. Avoiding uploading between those hours and I got it all off in a fairly reasonable time. For downloads, I can get 4500MB at peak times (no limits off peak) before I hit the throttling, and I've almost never done that, in spite of working from home.

Even the 50Mb service is traffic managed, although only upstream from 3pm to 8pm http://shop.virginmedia.com/help/traffic-management/traffic-management-faster-uploads.html

The superhub does appear to be a pile of horse manure - I can get the 100Mb service now, waiting until they've sorted the superhub.

Virgin Media throttles all but the very cheapest cable service between 10am and 9pm, divided into two blocks - 10am - 3pm and 4pm - 9pm. (http://shop.virginmedia.com/help/traffic-management/traffic-management-policy.html/)

On the approx. £25/month 10Mbit plan I have I can download 3GB in the first period before getting throttled and 1.5GB in the second. If you go over the limits you get throttled down to 25% of max speed for 5 hours. It can be a little irritating to hit these caps but I don't think letting people download 4.5GB during the day and as much as they like at night is particularly bad - and the caps are higher for higher-speed services.

How many people downloading that much are downloading legal material, anyway?

If I don't post it back when I cancel the contract they'll charge me for it.

Out of interest which ISP is this.

This was BeThere, now called O2 Broadband (I think). However, I was a relatively early 24Mbit/s customer, so the router was probably still useful to them. Maybe if it had been older they'd have told me to keep it.

The same applies with my current ISP (Virgin):

Free Virgin Media Super Hub for 30Mb, 50Mb and 100Mb: Available to all new broadband customers taking our 30Mb, 50Mb or 100Mb broadband services, and to existing customers upgrading to 30Mb, 50Mb and 100Mb broadband (subject to status and credit checks). Broadband activation fees may apply. SuperHub provided free while you are a subscriber. Wireless-enabled equipment required. Existing customers not upgrading their package can buy a Virgin Media Hub for £60 or a Virgin Media SuperHub for £75. Equipment remains property of Virgin Media.

http://shop.virginmedia.com/broadband/about-virgin-broadband.html

In either case, most people don't buy their own router themselves.

Considering I'm in the process of building a network, I find the topic of FUPs and Bandwidth Management both interesting and of some concern.

As a consumer, I look at it from the perspective of "this is unfair, how dare you throttle my connection", while as a provider, I look at it from the "it's literally impossible to provide superior service at the cost consumers are willing to pay".

It's very true that much of the cost of building a network comes from the last mile - equipment and whatnot is a nominal cost as far as I'm concerned, but bandwidth depends very much on the market in which I'm buying it.

Let's assume for a moment I'm buying on the UK market - if I pay say GBP20,000 per month for a 10gbit/s link between New York, that gives me an effective price of GBP2.50 per megabit (80% utilization). Add to that peering of say GBP1000 per month for a 10gbit/s link which gives us GBP0.125 per megabit. Add equipment and last mile costs of GBP5 per subscriber per month and other overheads of about GBP5 per subscriber per month (being not 100% familiar with wholesale prices in the UK, I can only hypothesize, but I do know the prices where I am, so I'm trying to rationalize in the same way) we can establish that I can not effectively charge less than GBP12.625 + VAT for 1mbit/s if I wanted to make no money - add a 30% markup and we could say about GBP16.50.

Considering Virgin charges about that much for a 10mbit/s line (not counting phone or special offers http://shop.virginmedia.com/broadband/up-to-10mb.html), obviously then, there are various points on the network at which there will be contention. It is my understanding that the UK allows a maximum of 50:1 contention ratio (which in my view is a flawed measurement of network performance, but I digress), which effectively limits the amount of data available to each user to consume.

With the ratio at 50:1, a 1mbit/s user could reasonably expect about 6GB of actual usage if the lines were under heavy utilization - a 25:1 ratio 12GB and 10:1 ratio 30GB. Multiply that by the number of megabits they offer on any given plan, and you can see there what the ISP is expecting each user to use.

I mean, sure, a 10mbit/s plan *could* allow you to download about 3TB in a month, and 100mbit/s 30-odd TB, but that kind of usage is impractical to most people.
Then there is the other argument: if you're using more than a few hundred GBs a month, what are you downloading? Of course it's none of my business as a provider, but it's highly likely that there is a significant amount of pirated material there.

The idea is not so much that each user needs to have capacity available megabit for megabit, but that the network is shared in such a way that it can be utilized effectively, that is, transfers are finished sufficiently fast that the lines are free for other users to do their transfers - as such, 100mbit/s for 35 pounds, as the average consumer willing to pay GBP35-40 for less contention, especially if he is only going to be using 50-100-150GB a month. And why should he pay the same amount as you do for significantly less usage?

Being that Virgin is one of the few ISPs to not have a strict data-cap on their plans, this traffic management seems to be a way of trying to avoid going down that path, and while I disagree with FUPs in principle, I understand that they are necessary at some level. On the other hand, I also disagree with provider's use of "Unlimited". We use the term flat-rate because the meanings are very different - as you can probably guess, "unlimited" pertains to usage, whereas "flat-rate" is all about price.

At the end of the day, if you're really so desperate to saturate the lines 24/7, perhaps you should be offered either a pay-as-you-go usage plan, free of traffic management (if the provider charged a nominal amount for the infrastructure, then say 10p per GB), because the next alternative is that you should buy a dedicated line of some kind.

If you're going to troll, at least get your facts right. The 20Mb/s package from Virgin Media (which is not even partially owned by Branson, it just licenses a trademark from him), allows 7000MB between 10am and 3pm, and 3500MB between 4pm and 9pm before throttling kicks in. There are no limits at other times, so you can saturate the link and download 126GB/day in the 14 hours between 9pm and 10am and between 3pm and 4pm, you're just limited to staying under 10500MB at peak times. Given that this allows you to download more in two days than Comcast's monthly cap, and about an order of magnitude more than most other UK ISPs allow for the same price, you must lead a pretty happy life if this is your biggest complaint.

Top tip for getting help from virgin, avoid the phone lines and get in their forums. They're very helpful and can arrange engineer visits etc for you. There's also a lot of people that work for Virgin but aren't official forum helpers who give a lot of good advice. It's possible to log into your modem and check signal levels n stuff, there's guides for all this in the forum. You can post up your results and see what the opinion is, if you've got a problem they'll send someone out to sort it.

http://community.virginmedia.com/

They work fine for me.

Check you're not using too much bandwidth at peak times, the "fair use" policy is online: http://shop.virginmedia.com/help/traffic-management/traffic-management-policy.html

Virgin Media are pretty open with their limits; they've got a whole page here which details the limits, after which they reduce your speed by 75% - the highest end connection is uncapped. In my experience though, what it doesn't list on that page that it seems to screw with the latency after you've been capped, I've had ping times all over the place.

In terms of 'unlimited' connections, Virgin Media are the most transparent with their limits, most other providers resort to a fair use policy without any hard numbers given.

Just like to point out, Virgin Media already do this

They do? They didn't for this home connection.

It looks like it's some software you install on your PC (see here). I don't know what the defaults are, since I didn't install it.

Statistical analysis shows that the amount of terrorist incidents is actually quite small, but the governments around the world like to exaggerate how many there actually are, to deprive decent hard working people of their freedom and democracy, and pee a lot of money up a wall in the process.

Your sig is, "Take Nobody's Word For It." Very fitting. You don't know what you are talking about.

The list of terrorist attacks in just 2008 isn't short, and doesn't include the many arrests and foiled plots. Wikipedia notes that it is incomplete.

Remember Mumbai? 166 killed, and 370 or so wounded? Al Qaeda would like to do the same in Europe. Why hasn't it happened? Active security measures and intelligence.

Remember 9/11? Why hasn't that occurred? Al Qaeda hasn't lost interest in using aircraft to attack buildings or stadiums. Active security measures and intelligence.

Without proper measures, Iraq's recent history of terrorism could be our future.

Civil Rights Theater seems to be at least as popular as Security Theater.

Terrorist = "someone opposing any government who should be dead"

Calling someone a terrorist is just a lame excuse to place them outside the law.

So your thinking is that no government in their right mind would label the people who do things like ths terrorists?

Two nearly simultaneous car bombs killed at least eight people in the capital Sunday, and officials said the death toll from a giant suicide truck blast that killed at least 115 a day earlier could be much higher. Iraq Truck Bomb Kills At Least 115

Or this?

and thus I am languishing on a 10Mbps cable connection with 512k of upstream

Assuming you must be referring to Virgin Media cable, you should find your upstream doubled to 1Mb/s shortly (if not already). It came as a pleasant surprise to me when I did a speed test a few weeks ago since I didn't know it was happening. I think the whole country's supposed be done within the next few months.
See http://shop.virginmedia.com/help/discover-broadband/broadband-speed/upload-speeds.html

Billie Piper is ok if you like fat chicks with dog faces.

Fat?? What are you talking about?

Methinks you have an exceedingly fucked up definition of "fat chick". Or, dog-faced for that manner. Real, actual women are rarely that god-awful size zero ideal that everybody seems to like.

I'd happily hump her leg until they turned the firehose on me. She's friggin' hot!!

I think you may have another issue here, maybe with your ISP's proxies, e.g.:

http://community.virginmedia.com/t5/General-broadband-questions/Geo-Blocking/m-p/153643

Macs are supported by the ITV Player.

For completeness, here's beardy Branson's outfit: http://shop.virginmedia.com/broadband/compare-broadband-packages.html

Ports 80 and 22 work fine for me on Virgin Broadband. I haven't tried anything else.

Section 7 of the AUP says it's all good, so long as you keep the server software up to date and don't run an open relay.

Virgin Media have no such clause, best citation i can find is here:

http://community.virginmedia.com/t5/Gaming/why-has-virgin-blocked-PORT-80/m-p/8805

"We don't block ports other than the NetBIOS ports ... for security"

Obviously that's a technical post, not a legal one, but it was only a quick google

Virgin have a horrible throttling policy though, which, while it doesn't affect 50Mb customers, would make gameplay hell once the threshold is reached for anyone else.

Just clap your hands to exit!

You used the word 'advertised' when describing the max download speed but ommited it when you described the cap. why is that?

read here:

http://allyours.virginmedia.com/html/internet/traffic.html

consider the cap advertised!

Nobody is forcing you to stay, I'm sure there are plenty of people who are happy with the *top tier* service of 8meg. Bring price into the equation things start to get interesting!

The 10meg service from virgin is the cheapest option, their 50 meg isn't capped. I have maxed it for well over 24 hours - it really isn't. I'm not a super heavy user but I know I have had some months when I have downloaded well over 100Gb with no recourse. Anecdotal I know but it's interesting all the same.

The other thing is reliability, as a customer of close on 10 years. I can count on one hand the number of times it has gone down. the longest was a couple of hours in back in in about 2006, the most recent was about a month ago mid-week for 20 minutes at around 1am. Again, anecdotal, perhaps I am just lucky.

There seem to be an awful lot of people hating on Virgin because of this that and the other, it sounds terribly like sour grapes. The facts of the matter are pound for pound they offer the fastest service, there 'fair-usage' traffic shaping is advertised and pretty reasonable for what you pay. To the general public these things are all that matter.

Their cable TV? That's shit though. I went so far as getting sky and keeping virgin as my internet provider.

They've got a published table of caps here. Note that the 50Mb/s service is completely uncapped according to the website, and my experience supports this - it's pretty much always at full speed, and even when the network's congested I've never seen the connection drop below ~35Mb/s. The uptime was atrocious when it was first installed (several 24+ hour outages in a single month) but they seem to have sorted it out now.

They're still asshats for many reasons enumerated in other posts, not least their rather mercenary attitude to customers' private data as it transits their network, but they're upfront about the service that they provide and they're one of the few left in the UK that do offer a completely unlimited package.

Honestly I would've preferred to go with Be Broadband - DSL at half the speed, but still unlimited and a bit cheaper from a company who seem to give a little more of a shit about my privacy. Unfortunately BT make it prohibitively expensive to have your line reconnected - as I understand it the charge isn't for installing the line (it's already installed), simply for an engineer to hook it back up at the exchange, and it costs £125. That's what they charge you for the privilege of then going on to pay them line rental every month. Virgin, on the other hand, gave free installation (for which they did need to send an engineer to the house) and a £30 referral bonus to a friend. It would've been nice for principles to win out, but unfortunately it just wasn't financially justifiable.