We’ve been with Virgin 7 years and they have been OK but I’m sure we’ve haven’t got anywhere the quoted speeds (10mb).
We’re moving next month to another part of the country, this time we wont be taking cable TV so Virgin isn’t the automatic choice for broadband.
Question is how reliable / fast is ADSL. Reliability is most important as I work from home most days but speed for streaming video is important too.

Have you done a speedcheck to see what you are actually getting with Virgin?

People slate BT but i’ve just come out of contract with them and the service was very reliable and got a realistic 7mb download speed on a wireless device (laptop).

I’ve been with Virgin since 1994 and they’ve been fine. Not particularly noticed any slow down when the three kids were at home either.

I had NTL/Virgin for years and years and years and was happy with it before moving to an area of Southampton without cable so went with O2 ADSL.

Then they put in cable in our area so we went back to Virgin.

It was dire. Speed was OK but the latency and jitter (more important than speed for online gaming) was appalling. So I exercised Virgin’s 28 day moneyback guarantee and went back to O2 ADSL which while not as fast in terms of data rate, is bang on in terms of latency.

I think it boils down to contention ratio/distance from exchange and probably a dozen other factors in your particular area as to which will be ‘better’, as well as what you want it for.

Virgin is apparently well known for being poor for gaming.

We had virgin cable at our old house (and I had had it for 4 years as a student too) but when we moved we went onto ADSL and its been completely crap since we moved. Getting about 0.2meg and when we moved we apparently paused out contract for free and were meant to get free installation in the new property but got shafted and charged twice and charged for installation in the end.

As soon as we are out of the years contract I am getting shot of them!

Have a look at VM’s help and support forum. Some areas have a lot of complaints…

http://community.virginmedia.com/

I abandoned fibre optic, went to BT’s phone line, and have found a regular almost 6 Megs from BT better than VM’s 10 Megs dropping to zero. The consensus seems to be that when your VM service is good, it’s really good, if it isn’t, well see the forum.