I made this switch just before xmas (went from 150/10 to BT 40/10), so can give you some insights.

My pings are a little lower, my upload ping is definitely lower. One thing you need to watch out for is DLM, whereby because BT use fibre up to the cabinet, but then copper, they have a system where if you get any problems on your line, it can kick in some error correction, which adds delay. Even turning on and off your modem routinely will make it kick in, so make sure you leave the router running 24/7.

As long as you are lucky, and get no DLM (by just having a good line and close to the cabinet, DLM won't kick in and you'll likely get better pings then Virgin, but if it does kick in, it'll be higher.

I don't get any DLM on my line, and I'm happy with the switch.

Thanks dude :)

My cabinet/exchange is about 60 yards up me street, you can almost see it from my house. Then there's another one about 140-160 yards in the other direction with a sticker on it that says "Fibre is in your area". I haven't checked the closer one for a similar sticker. What do these distances sound like as regards performance? Any ideas? Cheers

I don't have/know BT, but generally this is not a good advice when it comes to docsis systems.
Frequencies are dynamically handed out to the client modems, so restarting the modem at peak hours could actually help to get a "less used/clearer" one.
Additional adaptive equalizers and filters should only kick in if there is a ingress or if burst/impulse noise breaks into the stream somewhere but not with normal operation, so it might be simple throttle by the ISP.
Perhaps digging up the email address of the sysadmin of the ISP and asking him kindly not to throttle doom/quake packets would worth a try:)

Just my two cents.

pretty much the exact same thing with me here but i'm on talktalk (they use BT's DLM system too).

when DLM is off, I get a fastpath and uninterleaved connection, which gives me 40mb dl/4 ul (I'm paying for 38/3 or something), and 2 ping from the south east UK (Maidstone) -> London. when DLM is on, I get about 12mb dl/0.5 ul and about 28 ping to London, plus my connection randomly drops for like a minute and then comes back up again, and this happens several times a day.

Ironically DLM is only supposed to kick in when your connection is "unstable", although my connection is completely stable when DLM is off, so I'm guessing that's just zionist BT propaganda and it's just random. or BT/TalkTalk are just huge fuckups, I could believe either story.

anyway, hoping it works out for you. when DLM is off, you can't really fault the service for what you pay.

your upload ping

I guess it's just your location. I've been on Virgin here for a few years & it's been fine...the only thing that made me look at going from 30mb virgin to 17mb BT was the price (after an annual price hike) but then I called virgin & they matched the 17mb price while increasing me to 50mb

i had 75 down fibre in a major city with no complaints, great connection. bt is fucking terrishit when it comes to customer service though, sending engineers when necessary and generally not giving you a tumour trying to deal with issues though, so caveat emptor.

Cheers

Read title as "Virgin to Infinity"

I've been a Virgin fibre (50mbs) user for over 4 years.

:(

I ordered infinity a week or so ago, just 2 days ago, Virgin phoned me because I'd cancelled with them to offer me a better deal - £27. Still not as cheap as BT's £24.49 so I'm going to stick with the switch. Hopefully it will be a better service.

Another thing, I've only opted for the basic 20Gb a month download limit. I've never really kept tabs on my monthly bandwidth use but me and my girlfriend just use the internet for general browsing including streaming music and the odd video and then I'll play Quake Live a 2-4 hours a week. Surely 20Gb a month will be ample for this kind of use. I have the option for 40Gb for an extra £2 a month.

I cant see you regretting it - admittedly my old standard ADSL was lower pinging for gaming as could force the interleaving off (dlm kicked in on my line as mentioned above, went from like 12 to 20-25 but still it beats your virgin ive seen you playing on).

I used to be on a 20gb package when i was on 20 meg adsl (now on 80/20 fttc) and it really wasnt hard to burn through it, streaming and the like kills it quick.

Cheers dude

20 gb is literally nothing if you and your girlfriend use netflix or that kind of thing. i can use that in a day having a twitch stream on my second monitor while i work. if you have any issues with ping it wouldn't hurt to try wtfast, usually lowers my ping by around 10 ms and it never goes up or down with it. networx is a decent bandwidth usage monitor if you want to know exactly how much you're using (bandwidth caps are complete bullshit.)

BT and Sky are best atm, others do some kind of traffic management/traffic shaping and virgin can only give you like 3mb upload.

*Update*
Just this morning got infinity installed. Instantly happy with the performance - pinging a very solid 14/15 to UK servers and a very solid 28-29 to German. With infinity I've got 25% better pings and a much more solid connection for a cheaper price than I was paying :)

I'm considering switching from Virgin to BT myself, my line went down for second time in a month last night, which is just 1 time to many for me, and they quoted me on intermittent service until the 30th of March "due to repair work in my area".

Needless to say I am not happy, I get random ping spikes and when it's stable I get about 20-25 to UK servers. JDMYO where about in the UK you based? I'm in zone 3 London but I'm South African and didn't really know much about ISPs and such other than reviews online. Considering the infrastructure and distance to Maidenhead I always suspected my ping was rather shitty.

Anyway this thread couldn't have come at a better time for me, these past couple of days I've had more reliable 4g on my phone than I have on Virgin 158/10 fibre.

I live in Hertfordshire - 20-30 miles north of you (depending if you are in the north or south side of zone3) and even on my old ADSL, with interleaving forced off, used to ping 14 to the maidenhead servers.

The underlying infrastructure (the countries, not your ISP's) isn't really the problem (well unless you end up on some terrible routing, or a horrendous overloaded ISP).

Ive seen people in Scotland ping sub 20 without problem - where you are in the UK is likely the least of your worries.

I'm actually up north in the South Yorkshire area dude. I can't speak highly enough about the switch, the new infinity connection is just so solid - the ping fluctuates like 1ms no matter what servers you play on. I was playing on a dutch server the other day with 20-21 solid :) Compared to Virgin it's like cheating :)

virgin media - solid warp innit m8™

only topped my top polak wifi)) $$$