Virgin Media Contracts

I was recently advised by some friends off www.adslguide.org that new legislation from Ofcom state that any service provider can only charge u a maximum of £120 if you decide to end a contract early [within 12 months] minus your present bill :)

I was also told that VM are offering new & existing customers their new flagship 50mb product at a reduced price of £28 a month excluding £50 installation fee's and a new 12 month contract.

This tempting offer must simply point at the fact the new flagship product will shortly be the attention of traffic shaping though on a different network to existing broadband products I find this quite baffling, personally I have felt traffic shaping to be a massive hindrance. For example whilst during the day I need to download a Linux distro I have to wait 5x times longer than usual due to being capped though I have not hit my download limit, this was more severe on the 20mb product hence why i downgraded and new 12 month contract. I am only 6 months away now from reaching the end of the contract and I might be tempted to try the 21CN ADSL2 products on offer, I was a trialist last year for entanet's 21cn product and I must admit I was happy with the latency and sync speeds, I was syncing at 19MB with an attenuation of 17DB and a 10DB SNR level so further scope for tweaks

anyway the initial purpose of this blog was to clarify how upset I am at how Virgin media automatically reset 12 months contracts if you decide to downgrade or upgrade your package deal, I think this tactic was to offset the apparent loses at the new Ofcom ruling imo and since Telewest merged with NTL and were bought out by Virgin they have always had the same attitude, f*ck existing customers, we will focus on capturing new customers. Telewest were probbably the best ISP [if u had cable in the area]back in the old days with no traffic shaping, high service levels and excellent latency for gaming