30mb or 60mb broadband?

Signing up with Virgin after hearing good things:

http://store.virginmedia.com/broadband/Student-broadband/student-broadband.html

I'm in a house with 5 other people - should we go for 30mb or 60mb? What's the difference and is it completely unlimited/uncapped?

Thanks for your help!

(edited 11 years ago)

Reply 1

username874409

60, because it's twice as fast.

Reply 2

mangoh

Original post by george0797

Hi from my understanding all VM broadband packages are uncapped, it's unlimited in this case.

Go for 60Mb if 5 people accessing internet.

Reply 3

College_Dropout

Although it is unlimited, when you go over a certain cap, they HEAVILY cut you're speeds, im talking in some cases to 0.5mb. I suggest you go with BT Infinity if its available, it's not a special student deal BUT you wont be restricted in any anyway and is truly unlimited, except they do reduce speeds for p2p (torrents) during peaks, same goes for virgin and its upto 76mb.

Also, notice its 'up to' so you might sign up to virgin and only receive 2mb. Same goes for BT infinity but the technology used is better, the speed is very dependent on the distance between your house and the exchange with virgin, with bt infinity its dependent on the distance between the house and the street cabinets so all in all. the distance would be much less.

Reply 4

neillya1

Original post by College_Dropout

Although it is unlimited, when you go over a certain cap, they HEAVILY cut you're speeds, im talking in some cases to 0.5mb.

So true, and so damn annoying too at times.

P2P traffic is always throttled at peak times (Torrents or anything P2P usage e.g. some online game servers) and there are caps on how much "normal" data you can download.

This table shows it nicely from the Virgin Media website :h:

Download over 7GB between 10AM and 3PM and you then get a 50% reduction in speed which lasts 5 hours (if you go over at 2.59PM it'll still last 5 hours until 7.59PM)

Download over 3.5GB between 4PM and 9PM and the same applies.

If you get 30/60Mb internet then chances are you'll be download a lot (streaming, Steam, Torrents etc) so you'll get throttled really quite regularly.

The 60Mb limits are 10GB and 5GB instead of 7GB and 3.5GB.

There's also upstream limits but you're unlikely to ever hit them.

This is what they say about P2P throttling:

We moderate the total volume of file sharing traffic on our network between 5pm and midnight on weekdays and midday and midnight on weekends. This policy, which applies to all broadband packages, is restricted to Peer to Peer (“P2P”) applications which are commonly used to distribute large amounts of data.

This policy does not impact any applications other than Peer to Peer, so things like watching iPlayer, online gaming, making calls via Skype, downloading music tracks from iTunes or streaming them from Spotify and sending an email or normal browsing are unaffected.

It's important to remember that these traffic management policies only apply at peak times when speeds are most likely to be affected by people using more than their fair share. Outside of peak times we do not manage traffic.

http://help.virginmedia.com/system/selfservice.controller?CMD=VIEW_ARTICLE&ARTICLE_ID=2781&CURRENT_CMD=SEARCH&CONFIGURATION=1002&PARTITION_ID=1&USERTYPE=1&LANGUAGE=en&COUNTY=us&VM_CUSTOMER_TYPE=Cable

Reply 5

alexs2602

This throttling is a practical dream in comparison to BT, I wouldn't be put off by scaremongering. I'm lucky to get more than 10kb/s if I want to download before midnight on BT. You might get semi ok speeds in the morning but not at the times when I download the most.

Reply 6

Flibble22

With 5 people I'd definitely go for 60mb.

Reply 7

hamza7

Go for BT infinity .. it is simply amazing, you get amazing download speeds all day. Personally I have had infinity for about a month now and I haven't had any problems at all, torrenting is fine depending on seeders, I obviously don't download at maximum speeds but it's good enough.
Normal downloads (like steam and stuff) is like having a 1000cc motorbike on an empty straight road with no speed limits.
I usually give it a few minutes and I start downloading at 9 mb/s which is crazy. I download at full speed and my ping is still exactly the same, doesn't even change ;p