To be honest nobody likes their ISP, most of us are usually happy to pay the monthly bill as long as the internet works reliably, praying that nothing will go wrong requiring us to waste time and energy on remarkably poor technical support – Yes I have switched the router off and on again !
For more than ten years I have been a customer of Virgin Media (VM) who offer DOCSIS cable broadband in my part of London, and it has mostly been fast and reliable, even though the network infrastructure is rather old dating back to the original Telewest TV Network.
It would appear that following the acquisition of VM by the American Mega Cable conglomerate Liberty Global in 2013 investment in infrastructure has reduced further resulting in my current issue.
Despite not improving the network infrastructure, VM have continued to aggressively add new broadband customers making the network less robust and as a result the 152Mbps I used to see as a download speed is often reduced to 10-20Mbps during peak times. This state of affairs has been confirmed by VM’s support and complaints staff and they have suggested a fix to the network might be possible in August !
In order to shame VM and warn others of the quality of their service, I will be tweeting automatically my download speed every 3 hours whenever the download speed is less than the 152Mbps I am paying for. Sorry if you are one of the several thousand twitter followers of mine, perhaps it might be fun to try and guess the speed reported on the next tweet, do feel free to retweet perhaps adding a kitten picture ?
Ok maybe rather juvenile, but it makes me feel better 🙂
If you are interested this is simple to do, just grab this nifty python script and run it on a server on your home network, I’m using my Mac Mini media server but you could run this from a Raspberry Pi very easily !
Roll on August then…
A case in point, Virgin Media…