Virgin Media or Sky.

I get less than half of what you et.
Thats using the server in Dublin, i have never been able to add one..
Which server did you use?

[mattSV]

That's cos your on BT, and I am on Virgin - fibre optic cable, innit

Awww

[SoulKiss]

Plain old copper pair......

[mattSV]

Originally Posted by SoulKiss

Plain old copper pair......

Ah, but what download speed are you PAYING for

I have moved recently and was looking at sky or virgin.
I decided to go with virgin in the end, I got the package deal of tv, phone (free evening and weekend calls) and broadband for £27 month. It does really depend on what you want but it has all the channels I need, the broadband is quite quick and never had a problem with the phone or anything, plus I found it was the cheaper option for what I needed.
I'll have to agree on the customer service tho it's not that great.
I have heard from a few people that BT and Sky isn't that good, very slow and is expensive with the extra costs, but it does depend on what you want from the service.

I am 200 miles from the nearest server though

[gruntygiggles]

Originally Posted by jamesterror

Its not that complicated to get more than one computer on the network?

Your customer service does sound typical of Virgin Media, when our internet down once they said you need to restart everything, did so. Then they set an engineer out a week later after it was one of the local exchanges down. Muppets.

Your speeds are strange though as the lines they run are cable I thought so the distance to the exchange was less of a difference to ADSL? (Soulkiss help?) Only thing I fault with VM is the crappy upload rate, get Be Broadband and then the rest with VM.

Well, having the laptops wired to the router worked ok, but as soon as we tried to get a second laptop on wireless, the connection on either the main PC or the original laptop would cut out.
Suirrel Hunter, El Saxo and Xan all tried in vain on numerous occasion to sort it out as we had no help from Virgin despite hours on the phone and in the end we just gave up and used whichever laptop was working or the main PC.

As for the speeds, the fibre optic cables mean there is little degredation in the speed from the exhange but it will depend on how many people in your area are sharing the bandwidth and when the fibre optic cables were installed. Where me and Stretchie used to live, that was about 30 years ago. Saxo just told me the cables at his were installed in 1990 and he has no problems, so I think it may just be a lottery of where you live and how the initial install was done. Ours, it would seem was bad!

The reason I like Sky is that when I had it a few years back and for the last 10 months of having it here we have not had one single problem. Anyone can come in the house and get their laptop online in a matter of seconds, we have really fast TV with the loading of the menu and I think the only thing that can be slow is when you want programme information sometimes, but I don't really notice it.

It would be a shame that we can't record more than 2 things at a time, having to watch one, but as you can now have a +1 channel on a lot of things and also watch most things back online, it hasn't bothered us yet.

I'll pay more for the lack of hassle that we've had with Sky.

What GG said is right, the Virgin installation at their old house was a nightmare for some reason, it never worked properly.

However, my own experience with Virgin has been fine - I have the 20mb broadband, and I have a laptop, 2 desktops, 2 Nintendo DS and a Wii sharing the connection with no problems. Online gaming works great on the Wii and downloading from newsgroups is rapid & with no connection issues whatsoever. I think Stretchie & GG just got unlucky with their installation. The customer service team have always been decent with me too whenever I have had a problem, which sadly has been quite frequent with the TV service.

On that note, I'd say their broadband is great but don't bother with the TV (V+ Box) - if you want TV then go for Sky. For the money, Sky HD is the much better package.