As before, simple click the button to download a 3.5MB file from Virgin Media’s servers. The site will time how long it takes to download on your broadband connection and plot your broadband speed rating on a bar chart, allowing you to compare against other standard(ish) download speeds.
This is mainly to help with Google spidering, since the d04 subdomain doesn’t lend itself to website promotion as well as a dedicated domain would. Since I had the domain sitting spare, it made sense to bang Google Analytics on there and do some promotion for it.
The updn bit of the domain is an ambigram as well, which is nice.
Update:
To aid diagnostics (and show off a little) I’ve also written a scraper to take the content of Virgin Media’s Status page and plonk it into a table on the site. There’s even a Google Map showing the approximate location of the majority of the tickets.
With the credit crunch in full swing, it’s only natural that people will look for ways to save money. Right now every little helps, and it was with this thought in mind that I decided to investigate cutting my broadband package to a lower tier.
As it transpires, Virgin Media dropped the basic (4Mb?) package and so I was on the lowest price anyway, but while investigating package options I discovered that the same package was available for new broadband customers – after an introductory discount – for £20 a month.
Whereas I, as a loyal customer of roughly seven years, have the priviledge of paying £25 a month.
I called Virgin and asked about this, and the basic response is that, yes the same package is available cheaper, but because it was £25 when I changed to it (I was on a higher tarrif), that’s what I’m stuck with paying.
Since they won’t drop the price for me, and I can’t simply cancel and rejoin (apparently I have to be a non-customer for 6 months) I’ve decided to cancel the package altogether. My housemate will add broadband to their existing package and I’ll pay the difference, saving me £10 a month – fair recompense for the £5 a month Virgin Media have been overcharging me.
So Virgin are going to lose more money in the long run. They’ve lost me as a customer and income from this household will be £10 a month lower than before while they supply the exact same services.
Check your bills and see what’s available via the Virgin Media website. If you can cancel and re-open using another member of the household, you may be able to save yourself some cash.
After a recent disaster of epic proportions that was made all the worse by not having an Internet connection, I bought myself a USB Mobile Broadband Modem – all the mobile phone shops are touting them at the moment but I decided (not sure why) to get mine direct from Three. Ordered it late on Wednesday afternoon and it arrived on Friday morning.
It’s bigger than a USB memory stick but not massively so. I plumped for the white one which looks rather spiffing, and it comes with a white USB extension cable, a few leaflets and a SIM card. It mounts as a CD-Rom drive and the software is on the stick itself, so no discs to lose. Your SIM fits in a tight little jacket which slides into the unit just below the USB connector and stays out of sight from there on. There’s also a MicroSD slot, so it can act as a regular USB memory stick as well.
Three USB Modem
Three USB Modem
Three USB Modem
The first time I plugged it in the internal memory mounted. Double-clicking on it auto-booted the installer and… That was it. No muss no fuss. The software checks for updates (which I downloaded over Wifi rather than use up my allowance) and is generally unobtrusive, comprising a small window with a network status display and a big red Connect/Disconnect button.
I connected to 3G on the first attempt despite only having three bars. Access was impressively quick – this one goes up to 2.8Mb I think – and there were no problems connecting over Telnet or anything like that. It pretty much did exactly what it said on the tin.
Three USB Software
A couple of months ago I installed a bandwidth meter on my small laptop and found that I used 1.3GB (combined up/down) over the 30 day trial period of the software. Since I use WiFi and even wired where possible, I can quite easily get away with just 1GB a month, costing me a ternner, without worrying about extra charges.
So far so good! I’ve done a little bit of web browsing on it and checked my email while doing 60mph on the M180 (no, not driving) and it’s all been spot on so far.
Update: 10th November
There was a brief period of about half an hour this morning where there was no three network available at all and I couldn’t connect. It was annoying that I actually wanted to do something at that time as well. It’s back on now (using it to post in fact).
I’ve reinstated the old Broadband Speed Test since NTL were rebranded Virgin Media, and put it back online at www.speedtest.d04.netwww.updn.co.uk for you all to play with. This is seriously broadband only, and it’s really only good for Virgin Media Broadband users.
K and myself have definately been upgraded to the new 20MBit package. Upload speeds (using other broadband speed tests, since mine only does download) have topped out somewhere around 720Kbit and my downloads this morning look ike this:
Virgin Media Speed Test - Click to Enlarge
It may be that I am limited by my cable modem. Despite being good got approx 40MBit, the Motorola Surfboard SB4100 that us oldies (K, BB and myself) use is getting on a bit. At this time of the morning I can consistently download at 12MBit using IE, with FireFox being slightly slower.
23rd July ‘09:
I’ve added the list of current service tickets as well, so you can see if there’s a problem in your area that may affect your download speed.
Had a letter from Virgin Media this morning saying that by Virgin Broadband package will double in speed from 10Mb to 20Mb from May 1st, with a £2 increase in fees to help fund it the increase. I’ve read elsewhere that the Upload Speed would increase to 768Kb, which is getting very useful indeed. Virgin Broadbans Quoters have given all the usual useless comparisons of speed like ‘An MP3 file could be downloaded in just 2 seconds’.
Recently my Virgin Broadband (previously NTL) connection has been working extremely well – possibly to a realignment of a dodgy cable somewhere in the house – so a fully-maxxed 20Mb connection would certainly be interesting and some Broadband Speed Tests wil be required. I still have the original Motarola Surfboard modem that I got back in the days when it was Diamond Cable.
The fun all started when we moved offices. We actually stayed within the same building but moved from the slightly-newer part of the building into the slightly-older part. This meant that the fibre cable transporting our Internet connection across the entire roof of the building was redundant and BT had to be called to connect it to a different – hopefully much shorter – piece of cable. BT have been called, and in their infinite wisdom they won’t help us until we find an account number for them.
So, no problem, as a temporary measure we’ll use the high speed Internet access that comes with the building. We track down Dave the Network Bloke and he fixes us up with a couple of live ports so we have Internets in t’office. Unfortunately, since several large companies have moved into the office complex it’s no longer ‘High Speed’. In fact it’s absolute shite. No matter! It’s only for a few days. Possibly.
The next problem to rear it’s ugly head was regarding sending mail using SMTP. No problem, we’ll just use our own server as usual. In order to do this I need to add the IP of the connection to the list of permitted relayers on the server – pretty straightforward stuff. Unfortunately I remember why we left the built-in (Once) High Speed Internet – they block a port required for us to configure our server. It’s an outgoing port, but they’ve blocked it nonetheless. Hnnnng!
O-Kaaay. The only available option at this point is to hook my 15in Powerbook up to my Sony Ericsson k750i via Bluetooth and create a dialup connection that will allow me to bypass this shitty firewall and configure the server. I run through the pretty little OSX configuration wizard and the Powerbook connects to the k750i without problems… but it won’t dial. It prompts for permission to connect to the Internet and does nothing. Eventually it transpires that I need to select the ‘Ericsson T39 14.4′ script, and hey presto – it dials the 123-Reg’s 0845 Dialup number and away we go.
Except that, because the walls are full of wire, I only get two bars on my phone and the connection is pretty much halved from 14.4. Eventually it crawls through the login process and I remember which buttons to click on the first go (saving me several minutes on the phone bill, no doubt) and I get to enter the IP address of the Formerly High Speed Internet Connection. Huzzah! I can send email!
Unfortunately so can everyone in the office complex, but I won’t tell them if you won’t.
