Virgin are a large company working throughout the UK - people's experiences with them are bound to vary from place to place.

There has been a long running and well documented problem with download speed from Metaboli for a significant number of Virgin customers.

However, if it works for you then great - if it aint broke, don't fix it.

All that is being said here is that if you are a Virgin customer and have consistent problems downloading from Metaboli then the chances are that it is caused by the service provided by Virgin and one solution to that is to find another ISP.

I'm guessing you have a 20Mb/s line? The cut to 600KB/s (~5Mb/s) is what happens if you download more than (I think) 3GB in one day, or start a download that will take you over that limit.
If they are able to cap you because of a download you have just started, that means they are constantly monitoring what you download. How can net neutrality survive in the face of that? (They also block p2p, which is of dubious legality due to the "betamax defence").
THAT IS YOUR "FANTASTIC" ISP?

I love AOL UK because they are owned by CFW who have stated that they will not pull that sort of crap (24MB/s ADSL2+ line btw, and EVERYONE in my house is a heavy downloader - 3GB a day EACH at least, and there are 4 of us!). CFW even said no to the "three strikes" nonsense when the gub'ment was pushing it, which is a good thing as people have managed to get warning notices sent to their ISP about the dodgy behaviour of certain networked printers!

Also, the guy is with BT for crissakes, why is everyone advising him to avoid VIRGIN?
My family has a BT account, which recently (last year) became near unusable for the sort of browsing I favour due to their traffic management policies. They are worse than Virgin on the capping front, mainly because they are failing and trying to cut expenses anywhere and everywhere they can. Try to migrate to a better ISP; ask around if you want recommendations...

laserdeer wrote: I'm guessing you have a 20Mb/s line? The cut to 600KB/s (~5Mb/s) is what happens if you download more than (I think) 3GB in one day, or start a download that will take you over that limit. If they are able to cap you because of a download you have just started, that means they are constantly monitoring what you download. How can net neutrality survive in the face of that? (They also block p2p, which is of dubious legality due to the "betamax defence"). THAT IS YOUR "FANTASTIC" ISP? I love AOL UK because they are owned by CFW who have stated that they will not pull that sort of crap (24MB/s ADSL2+ line btw, and EVERYONE in my house is a heavy downloader - 3GB a day EACH at least, and there are 4 of us!). CFW even said no to the "three strikes" nonsense when the gub'ment was pushing it, which is a good thing as people have managed to get warning notices sent to their ISP about the dodgy behaviour of certain networked printers!

Yet again someone who does not use their services telling us what Virgin Media do.

They do not not cap you at the start of a download unless you have you have already passed your limit for the day.

As for blocking p2p, it has never happened to me.

Anyone who uses Virgin Media should be aware of their fair usage policy and it is quite easy to avoid being capped.

Gamer_4843123 wrote: I spend £100 a month on services from Virgin Media.I have never had any problems with any of their services and I'm not very pleased about being told that they are useless by somebody who probably does not use them. They do not have a cap on large downloads.I recently downloaded Turok in less than 2 hours which should be enough proof for you. The slowest download speed I have had on Metaboli is 600kb/sec which I am quite happy with. I will shortly be getting their 50mb service which I wouldn't be doing, if as you say, they are useless.

Im not saying the products provided are useless but the customer supports inability to answer the most basic of questions. I do use them, not as an ISP, but for TV. As for the comment about the capping large downloads, I did say it was another customer of Metaboli's who had Virgin and what they posted here I will admit LazerFX in that posting is a better source of information then the OP.

Heres why I view their support as useless.

They cut off my whole service awhile ago around the time they dropped SkyOne etc because I asked for a cancellation of the phone contract (which hasnt been used for years) took 2 extra months worth of payments, sent a letter in the post afterwards saying people with certain programs would get a refund from services being suspended a few months before they cut it. After talking to them promised me a refund of all the above which after 6 months I never got despite 3-4 calls to them about it, all that was waived was the "installation fee" when they finally offered digital tv here because I refused to go back without the refund.

After the installation the On Demand wasnt working so they sent around an engineer to sort it, who when he came to the door was worried that it was an internet problem because no-one in the area could get over 2mb on the 20mb line. I tell him I dont have virgin internet and point him to the problem, he looks at it (turns it on and off a couple of times) and says they gotta fix the cabling and thats why the internet was only getting 2mb.

Since then they fixed the cabling, took them 1 year and 6 months (fixed it a month ago). Considering I live in London, its not a hard stretch to imagine there are other places in the country still with the problem. Most recently the email support offered in which the first person couldnt tell me I had the wrong department without knowing all my personal details, nor could they foward it to the right people, and then the right people still was only "sorry to hear about it", not "this is how it works" which you would expect from them.

Why say change Service Provider, I use Virgin all the time and everything i download works fine,

So, i thought i would try Metaboli, i have been trying for 3 days to download anything, with no success,

1. Closed all programs
2. Turn off firewall
3. Turned of AVG
4. Updated to the latest palyer
5, Added all the ip`s
6. Using Firefox instead of IE

And it still doesnt work, Looking at the posts it seems like lots of other people are having problems as well.

So, what you say to that ?

Mick

Quote: So, what you say to that ?

This is what I say ...

The problem with Virgin is not something that you, me, Metaboli, or anyone other than Virgin can fix. It does not affect all Virgin users but those it does affect are stuffed until Virgin fix it at their end. And it has been proven that the problem is at the Virgin end.

The fact that other downloads with Virgin work is completely irrelevant as it is how Virgin choose to route traffic between (some of) their users and Metaboli that is the issue.

So, please complain to Virgin - maybe you will be the final straw that gets them to act on this long standing issue.

One practical thought I have had recently is that switching to something like OpenDNS may help - I have no idea if this will have any effect as I am not with Virgin - but it is quick, free, safe and simple to try.

Gamer_6274605 wrote: Why say change Service Provider, I use Virgin all the time and everything i download works fine, So, i thought i would try Metaboli, i have been trying for 3 days to download anything, with no success, 1. Closed all programs 2. Turn off firewall 3. Turned of AVG 4. Updated to the latest palyer 5, Added all the ip`s 6. Using Firefox instead of IE And it still doesnt work, Looking at the posts it seems like lots of other people are having problems as well. So, what you say to that ? Mick

Your not explaining the problem for you, the virgin matter is just slow downloads, it should work just at a crawl when downloading for some people, not all as some still get their full speed and I expect it to improve as more of the old NTL cabling is replaced.

Your sounding like it doesnt work at all ie wont download any games. Turning off firewall and AVG, did you also unload them from resident memory after turning them off? if not they will still be on affecting things even worse than when you had it 'on'.

What games have you tried, and are you on a 64bit O/S, try Kings Bounty or Farcry 2 and if those work and nothing else does then Im betting your on 64 bit. Those are the only 2 games that work with 64bit the rest wont even start downloading.

Other things that affect the player:
Spyware, Registry errors.
DirectX updated and checked for older files.
Vista only: UAC - needed for some, and not needed for others try switching things around so its either on or off trying both settings.

Hi haza

I too have bt and sufffer the same thing.

I have contacted them regarding this numerous times and each time it seems to be a real pain in the butt to speak to some1 that knows what they r doing or talking about.all i got the first few times was there is no problem.All they seemed to want to do was run a line test.sometmes it was running fine and at others they found a fault.after finding a fault i was allways told that this would be resolved within a week,but each time nothing changed

On 2 seperate occasions they sent engineers to my home and each time the engineer found no problems with my service and could not explain my poor dload speed from metaboli.This all seemed to start for me with the release of bt's tv service not sure if it is the reason or just coincidence.

On a few occasions i have run netstats and traceroutes which at times have showed horrible connection speeds to some of the nodes along the route to metaboli)some as high as 240ms)some of these slow nodes have been labeled bt so am assuming they are bt's own servers.Then tried speaking to bt concering these results and was told id have to speak to the line faults department.upon speaking to them i genrally have had 2 different responses either they say there is no problem of they say they have found a fault and it will be resolved within 48hrs

They have tried lowering and raising the profile of my line and also tried switching interleaving off and on to see if this helps

I seem to get better download speeds late at night ie after 1am it seems to go from about 240kbps to about 600 kbps

I was with aol before bt and regullary hit speeds of 1700kbps for downloads from meta so can only come to the conclusion that bt are throttling my dwonload speeds from meta

The whole thing has left me feeling like im banging my head against a brick wall with bt.despite loads of phonecalls and asking them several times if they throttle downlaod speeds,i never seem to get a straight reply.All i personally reccomed that you do is try another isp like myself.

Hope this info helps

Well I wouldnt be suprised if the TV thing is a problem..

Awhile ago I was checking them as a possible tv and broadband provider but passed due to how it worked. While it was 8mb broadband their terms and conditions state that it will drop to 512k when the tv is downloading programs.