View Full Version : virgin mobile + ntl + telewest
nicky munchkin
27-01-2007, 20:47
Just got a letter through my door from virgin mobile. Virgin mobile and virgin.net are merging with NTL and telewest to form one company to be called virgin media. A link too (http://know1st.co.uk/)
Just wanted to let any NTL and telewest customers know. ;)
Er, so with internet speeds at up to 8mbps (which usually signifies a DSL internet service), what on earth is gonna happen to my 10mbps cable package with NTL?
Big Adam
27-01-2007, 21:28
I don't know but if they can offer a more attractive "package" than the old NTL offering, I'll be tempted.
I think 10mbps with 75gb monthly usage (which I'm still not convinced they actually enforce) for £35 a month is actually pretty good.
BloomerzUK
27-01-2007, 22:42
I hope they don't go ADSL.. I hate ADSL.
Cable for life.
eXistenZ
28-01-2007, 11:38
Reading through the leaflet, it seems they are doing both.
They wouldn't purchase NTL / Telewest to scrap cable :p
jacobzcoool
28-01-2007, 14:06
lol.
I hope I don't get a load of 'GET TELEWEST LOLZ' spam from virgin mobile.
Reading through the leaflet, it seems they are doing both.
They wouldn't purchase NTL / Telewest to scrap cable :p
They didn't purchase NTL:telewest - AFAIK, NTL franchised a better name from Mr Branson to try & improve their reputation.
From what I read, doesn't seem to be much changing - it seems Americanised with spin - base becomes medium & family becomes XL - may work for fast food, but not a great idea with phone & TV IMHO.
NTL has always run Virgin.net ISP services AFAIK, licensing the Virgin name from Mr Branson.
NTL and Telewest merged.
NTL:Telewest purchased Virgin Mobile for £900m-ish, plus I think a 25% stake in the new company. They also purchased the extended rights to trade under the Virgin Media name.
nicky munchkin
29-01-2007, 18:54
lol.
I hope I don't get a load of 'GET TELEWEST LOLZ' spam from virgin mobile.
Well its already started with me :( and I havent even owned a Virgin mobile in a few years.
DarkEntity
29-01-2007, 23:03
Well, i aint changing, im very happy with my Telewest Cable connection, no limits and no problems.
You may not want to change (like me), but what enforced changes will the rebrand stealth?
From what I can see, the basic phone & TV (with or without 5p evening/weekend calls) may disappear, the new basic deal being more expensive (including different things).
jacobzcoool
31-01-2007, 12:51
Well its already started with me :( and I havent even owned a Virgin mobile in a few years.
Me too :(
We can't even get telewest here, although I fail to see why people would deliberately get such a rubbish service :p
Me too :(
We can't even get telewest here, although I fail to see why people would deliberately get such a rubbish service :p
I have telewest and like Darkentity, I am very impressed by the service - no problems whatsoever, no limits, and consistent high speed internet.
Personally, I fail to see why you continue spouting ill-informed rubbish?
jacobzcoool
31-01-2007, 14:10
I have heard only bad things about the reliability and service, and I thought it had a download limit.
I have heard only bad things about the reliability and service, and I thought it had a download limit.
you are ill-informed then :p
nicky munchkin
31-01-2007, 18:09
Away until 19th feb
Hes gone :D
His sig said that all day though, and yet he posted in pretty much every active thread.
I think he's teasing us!
Fatal1ty
01-02-2007, 00:49
He's had no activity - since 1.20pm so perhaps he's now gone.... :confused: Not that it really bothers me tbh...
There is no capping with Blueyonder (http://www.telewest.co.uk/websales/service.do?id=2&WT.mc_id=by_serv_igrid) and if you moan at customer services you wont have to pay for installation usually :) ....
Regards
When I first signed up to NTL I had never used cable broadband before - but compared to ADSL it works like a dream - ADSL is some bad nightmare invented by BT because they had millions of miles of wires and an idea that you could stick some piece of cr*p called a 2wire modem on it and shoot high speed digital comms up there. I have a 2mb Cable connection and no complaints about it really.
Every day I sort out the problems of companies whose networks suffer greatly from having chosen BT and then running a network behind a 2wire modem
First thing I always do is change the modem to either a Cisco or a Netgear and then sort BT out by getting rid of all the extra services they sold the company - saves the company time and money
My only gripe with NTL is that their business broadband only runs at 750K download speeds which these days is totally unacceptable To say NTL trade under the name Virgin, because it improves their image is some misnomer surely? Virgin, to my mind at least, is a tacky brand in the world of phone and computer comms.
Personally I believe NTL have made a massive mistake by associating with Virgin, and if - as has been suggested here - they start pushing out ADSL as their broadband package - over and above cable, then that will be their biggest mistake ever
The thinking behind that would only be "heyyyyy ! I know ! we offer ADSL because that way we dont have to have a load of engineers fit all the cables and test the modems. Then we charge more because its a faster connection - Win Win Win with ADSL" but cable broadband is far more stable and more reliable on speeds - the contention ratio seems less important on cable than on ADSL
In 50% of the country, NTL/Whatever, have no choice but to push ADSL, because they don't have the money to cable those areas (Heck, they don't even have the money to finish areas they started several years ago).
As for ADSL being something poor that BT came up with - It's an international standard, deployed in many countries throughout the world and works fantastically well considering the age of the in-ground plant. I'm not a huge fan of BT, but people do keep taking a pop at them and giving the "grass-is-greener" speaches - Where else in the world has 99% coverage of faster than dial-up speeds? Answer: Nowhere.
I'd not underestimate the capability of a single twisted pair - for many a year it's been good enough for everyones 100Mbit office LANs (Granted, a single pair would only give you half duplex) - and that's based on a standards that were set many years ago.
actually you will find that BT had a great deal to do with the invention of ADSL and its implementation. A very great deal indeed.
Also my major gripe against BT is the fact that not one single purchaser that I have known of their BT business broadband packages has ever had a smooth time of things when it comes to activation of all their services. Today I was on the phone for two hours talking to staff who were convinced that a voip phone had been set up on the two wire router properly. When I couldnt get it going after talking to no less than 5 people - all of whom remoted into the router and one the computers I decided to ask someone to get the head of the department who appologised as something at their end of things had not been activated - three days that took. One company they overcharged for services that werent even ordered and it took 6 weeks to get them to change their presumption that we required 5 static ip addressses to our original order for one single static ip.
BT are singularly misleading in the difference between what they say they offer and what they offer. When I order a static IP address I want one that is registered in a DNS as a static IP - thats a far cry from a static DHCP address - one that has a reserved address allocation. For some things that is a crucial difference - but the real thing that gets me is that rubbish called a 2wire router - why the hell they fob that off on customers I dont know but they aint up to the job of providing proper business communications and I always swap them for cisco or netgear
@kpaxian .... totally agree with what you said about BT Business, so much so last month we junked them altogether ... The problems dont end there though our shop website someone else set up through BT has been lost and trying to get answers from BT is like pulling teeth.
Regards
kpaxian - Those are all issues to do with BT Retail though, nothing to do with ADSL itself per-se and the provision of it by Openreach.
fair comment but ADSL is a big topic and I am just saying that in my experience cable is better for home users as its much more stable, and business users have to go with ADSL because its kinda standard for small-medium sized businesses that cant afford leased lines etc.
Why I had a go at BT is because really all other ADSL providers travel over BT lines and my experiences over the last few years just lead me to the point where I have had enough of non-BT providers blaming BT lines so I advise customers to switch to BT because after all why pay a middle man ?
So I believe that quality of ADSL is an issue when not dealing with BT - but when dealing with BT it becomes an issue of professionalism and the fact that its business customers pay a lot for very little more than its domestic users get - infact the longer contracts and higher premiums are merely to have a guarantee of less than 6 hours downtime.
So really it is about the quality of ADSL and how most business users chose BT ADSL because they are virtually forced to - but then what BT offers is something a lot less than businesses should expect - and often at much lower speeds than advertised
Professional quality ADSL should not mean an upload speed of 20Kbps which cuts out after about 400meg of an ftp upload - I would be expecting speeds of about 2meg upload and 8 down - its ridiculous in this day and age to spend 6 hours uploading 400 meg - but whats worse is when they cant guarantee not to throttle your bandwidth or cut it altogether if you are a heavy uploader - believe me - they do that even to businesses
If you read the Ofcom Niche ISP report, you'll see that a lot of business don't choose BT, they prefer to choose a smaller provider. As for the middle-man issue, BT Retail are still a middle-man in the equation. All orders are now processed by Openreach the same, regardless of which ISP they are for, under equivelance (Which is why all ADSL orders now go through tagged as LLU).
As you've found, if you want a professional service, don't pick one of the big players.
DeathByVodka
09-02-2007, 17:14
NTL, when we first got it a few years back, took 4 weeks for them to bother setting up properly. I've gotta say, now, we've upgraded to a 4mb account, the download speed is okay, not brill (450kbp/s ish), but the upload speed isnt great (35-50kbp/s at offpeak times). Then again, I'm not sure what the normal down/up speeds are at 4mb.
There hasn't been much down time in the past year or so, but there used to be quite large amounts of time when the broadband service would just drop out and we'd have absolutely no internet access, sometimes for weeks at a time (we still got billed).
Guess a better speed would be nice, but it costs far too much. I think we currently pay around £35 a month, for line rental on phone, TV (basic cable), and 4mbp's internet.
450KB/s is 3600Kit/s which isn't far from 4Mbit/s (4000Kbit/s). Unless of course you really did mean that the downloading were only 450Kbit/s.
Then again, I'm not sure what the normal down/up speeds are at 4mb.
Around what you're getting. If you work it out you're getting 3.6Mbps down and 280-400Kbps up.
NTL, when we first got it a few years back, took 4 weeks for them to bother setting up properly. I've gotta say, now, we've upgraded to a 4mb account, the download speed is okay, not brill (450kbp/s ish), but the upload speed isnt great (35-50kbp/s at offpeak times). Then again, I'm not sure what the normal down/up speeds are at 4mb.
There hasn't been much down time in the past year or so, but there used to be quite large amounts of time when the broadband service would just drop out and we'd have absolutely no internet access, sometimes for weeks at a time (we still got billed).
Guess a better speed would be nice, but it costs far too much. I think we currently pay around £35 a month, for line rental on phone, TV (basic cable), and 4mbp's internet.
I'm on NTL's 10Mbit/512Kbit service. There's three of us using it, so the bandwidth is well-used to say the least :D
However, I've noticed even when I'm the only one in -- most web servers (especially when serving up large HTTP downloads) are either capped to something around 250KB/sec per downloader, or they're clogged-up to the max and you get anything from 80-150KB/sec.
This is when I've seen downloads peak at 1.1-1.2MB/sec, from the correct server. :D
So to be fair, once you pass the 2-3Mbit barrier, it really does depend on where you're downloading from. :)
DeathByVodka
09-02-2007, 20:27
My 450kpb/s was the maximum download speed I get. That's from like, Rapidshare premium, or EA's server's off peak times.
Kb = Kilobit
KB = Kilobyte
Mb = Megabit
MB = Megabyte
It's annoying, but the case used for the B is important because one byte = 8 bits (or 1 bit = 1/8th byte). So there's a big difference between a kilobit and a kilobyte.
Browsers show speeds in Kilobytes per second (KB/sec or KBps) and possibly Megabytes per second (MB/sec or MBps). ISPs, including ntl, quote speeds in bits; so Megabits per second (Mb/sec or Mbps) and Kilobits per second (Kb/sec or Kbps).
So to get your speed in Megabits to compare with the speed your ISP quotes, multiply the Kilobytes per second figure your browser gives you by 8. That will give you the speed in Kilobits per second.
450KBps * 8 = 3600Kbps
Now to get that in Megabits, divide it by 1000 (1000 kilobits in a megabit).
3600Kbps / 1000 = 3.6Mbps
So it's not actually very far off the 4Mbps maximum speed for your package.
You can do the same with your upload, except the speeds for that are so slow that they're stated in Kilobits, not Megabits, so you don't have to divide by 1000.
So,
35KBps * 8 = 280Kbps
50KBps * 8 = 400Kbps
The upload speed for the 4mb ntl package is rated at 384Kbps, so it's not that far off. Upload speeds can vary massively depending on where you're uploading to.
DeathByVodka
09-02-2007, 20:57
I knew it was measured in megabits, but I never actually knew how to figure that out in relative speed, so thank you :)
BloomerzUK
10-02-2007, 11:52
It's official switched over now. www.blueyonder.co.uk and www.ntl.co.uk have now gone to Virgin Media.
DarkEntity
12-02-2007, 19:20
Yip and Virgin want to ditch Sky One!!!
nicky munchkin
12-02-2007, 19:32
Oh no we'll never be able to watch repeats of the simpsons/malcom in the middle again :rolleyes:
I know they show a lot more good shows I just felt like some sarcasm.
Yip and Virgin want to ditch Sky One!!!
No, they don't.
However, the contract is up for renewal & Sky may not want to renew it - it's a pretty popular channel & withholding it from Virgin may cause some Virgin customers to switch to Sky.
Modd1_uk
17-02-2007, 18:51
ive just signed up for the up to 10mb package at £35 per month, currently with pipex on adsl and it sucks ass, high pings every day for a week now, ring up to complain and i get the usual polite fck off on the phone. Gonna scrap the adsl line and just use my new cable line :D they are installing on the 24th of feb i cannot wait !
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