Virgin Media Community

[SportyMilo]

Hi guys,

still finding my feet and only 3 weeks into my (so far very positive!) first experience with virgin Media. I was wondering if downloading from the xbox, games that are over 100gb eg, you are penalized in any way if you download a certain amount a week/month. I know other provders have in the past and I would like to download a few games but just wanted to make sure unlimited means unlimited without any speed penalties etc!

I'm on the 600 Oomph package and used to max of 86 - so easy to download so much data and far quicker than i ever could before!!!

Cheers.

[jbrennand]

No limits for this kind of usage. However if you are noticed to be doing it 24/7, for long periods I am sure they will be onto you pretty quickly 🙂

[SportyMilo]

Thanks John, I'll make sure it's 22/7 then 😁 - only joking - nah won't be that kind of traffix but good to know. Will download the one game now! Cheers.

[mjpartyboy]

With so many devices and services having a constant need to use bandwidth, a capped or throttled package would make daily consumption of video streaming, audio streaming, gaming, etc. a pain to manage nowadays. So, VM dropping their throttling policies was a great move, although extreme heavy use might be mentioned somewhere in the T&Cs.

[Andrew-G]

You'll run out of games and content to stream long before you bother VM over download volumes.  Even with high download volumes and streaming, your average utilisation factor on a VM broadband line will be very low indeed.

When streaming you'll only be using 25 Mbps even with 4K (and a mere 5 Mbps on HD), so that'll never stretch even VM's slowest 100 Mbps connections unless you've got an entire houseload of TV's all simultaneously and continuously streaming different 4K material.  Games might need large downloads, but you'll presumably spend more time playing them than downloading.  And even if you're a Linux developer downloading multi-gigabit packages, you'd spend more time working on or testing each build than you would downloading.

There's many things you might choose to hold against VM, but their unlimited broadband means exactly that (unless you're into probably illegal or fraudulent uses) and their high bandwidth is routinely delivered reliably and in full, usually offering capacity far beyond the requirements of the vast majority of customers.

[mjpartyboy]

Now, if they could just improve their latency. 🙂

[Andrew-G]

Now, if they could just improve their latency

VM's roll out of Low Latency DOCSIS is scheduled for the 12th of Never.  Whilst the low latency standard is built into DOCSIS 4.0, VM aren't likely to implement D4.0 before 2026-2028 because they need to recover the costs incurred from D3.1.  Even then, there's no requirement to deploy everything that's part of the standard, and at the moment (as far as I've read) the main hardware makers are reluctant to invest in Low Latency DOCSIS as they don't believe cableco's will pay a premium for it. 

So you're waiting for VM to complete their D3.1 roll out (late this year through to mid 2022?), and then four-five years to amortise the substantial cost of that.  And then you'd need them to be willing to commit to several hundred million quid and a vast network upgrade programme, plus you need to hope they choose LLD as part of any D4.0 plan, and they'll need a new model of hub that doesn't exist yet.  By that time there's going to be a lot of competition from FTTP that has inherently better latency than DOCSIS, so with competitor pricing pressure, and little or no unique speed advantage, I can't see VM will find much of an investment case for D4.0.....

So don't hold your breath....

[mjpartyboy]

Perhaps they can at least provide a Super Hub that doesn't use the Intel Puma Chipset when they release the SH5.

[risc19]

Well now that would be nice.

But they only just started using the HUB4 (puma7) and thats after the Puma6 debacle/class action law suit.

I'm not confident they will ever be able to pick a solid device.

My guess is they got a VERY good price on the HUB4 due to most people avoiding any puma chipsets.

I also think they found ways to make it even cheaper to produce compared to the original TG3492LG.

I'm sure at some point there will be teardowns of it online.

[Andrew-G]

You want a Hub 4 teardown?  Well, I can't read the text because my Chinese is a rusty as a Wuhan's lab's biosecurity, but the pictures in the link in this post here may be of interest..