LFS Forum - ISP? UK O2 users

Quote from SamH :Aye, if you have the hours in the day available to you (and I do, technically, since I'm home-based) then using time management you can circumvent the capping policy.

I'm going to stop calling it a fair usage policy, though, because that description implies that they consider the conflict between network usage and network capacity to be a matter of unfair customer behaviour.

The truth is that Virgin (and others, PlusNet being one of the worst examples) oversell their own product and fail to invest sufficiently in their network to provide the thing they sell to all the people they sell it to. In every other aspect of commerce, selling something you know you can't deliver is against trading laws. The common term for this is "fraud". Courtesy of OFCOM's duplicity, ISPs in the UK are effectively above the law. Disgusting, but what ya gonna do, eh?

I don't know what the NTL run part of the network was like before Virgin took over but the Blueyonder/Telewest part was very well run. I was with them for several years before VM took over and they were forever upgrading the network. Also, their technical support was usually pretty good, (if you allowed for the fact you were guarenteed to have to wait at least 20mins to talk to someone), as in they knew pretty much what they were talking about and were willing to pass things to the real engineers if you asked for it. These days all you get is fobbed off by some numpty that clearly is just reading from a process document and has no clue about anything other than ticking boxes. Plus the point blank refuse to accept the issue is with their network unless the 1 test they carry out shows a problem !!

As for the FUP, well BY/Telewest had one but they certaintly didn't have a traffic shaping policy. That was a new change by VM. Although I have to say I've yet to fall foul of it.

VM have also been instructed by the ASA to change their ads claiming to be providing "fibre optic broadband". Personally, I'm amazed it took so long

See here: http://www.asa.org.uk/asa/adju ... s/Public/TF_ADJ_45720.htm

BTW - in case anyone is interested BT have finished initial trials and are looking to expand the trial of FTTC, which in combination with VDSL2 for the last leg will enable them, (and therefore any current ADSL provider) to offer products at significantly faster speeds, than currently available to non cable customers.

See here for basic explanation of the technology:

http://www.internetstreams.co. ... erfast_broadband_2012.php