Neowin.net

In my opinion, what Neil Berkett is saying is "Bollocks".

If UK ISPs put money into improving the infrastructure rather than constantly pumping up speeds on, what is, lets face it, already overcrowded networks, they wouldn't have bandwidth issues in the first place. Do ISPs not think they make enough money as it is? I personally class this as blackmail, attempting to get a bit more money out of people (or in this case, the BBC). And if they want money from the BBC for their iPlayer, why not go after ITV (for their online player), Channel 4 (4od) or even Google while they're at it (for Youtube).

All I can say is the moment Virgin Media implement something like this, I'm taking my £85 per month elsewhere.

Last edited by bmaher on 13 Apr 2008 - 21:45

if "Bollocks" means that your fine with losing a bulk of your customers, than fine with me

I hope that the Internet2 project (or whatever it is called) will help solve these issues with ISPs throttling bandwidth.

And yes, the idea that it is "Bollocks" is ridiculous.

ISPs rock because they provide us with Internet access, but I haven't forgotten who actually started the original Internet that caught on like wildfire. It certainly wasn't any company or corporation.

In my experience, Virgin Media is "Bollocks". Clean up your own house before insulting others.

I left Virgin Media last month after being a customer with Telewest/Blueyonder/VirginMedia since our street was first cabled around 1993. Since the NTL merger and then the VirginMedia branding the service quality has plummeted - we now have regular Internet outages in the evenings (when support, coincidentally, switches to India)

As Internet access is important in our house I went for the top-rated ISP on ispreview.co.uk. For the £25 per month I was paying Virgin Media for a 4Mb connection, I'm now getting around 7Mb/s and haven't had a single slowdown or outage yet. Best of all, there are no call centres and the support team is based in Guildford.

Hearing the CEO of VM come out and say something like this really does remind you that they've become a company where squeezing the most money for the least expenditure has become the order of the day. A very common business practise but ultimately self-defeating when your customers begin to walk away.

Oh, I'm so sorry that you can't charge more than you already do, you greedy ******.

I hope they get so much backlash from that statement that they demote him to janitor.

at the end of the day lets face it bandwidth isn't petrol, net neutrality will probably drive down this apparent cost of bandwidth which seems to be so expensive according to some ISPs who do it to make more money in return for their poor infrastructure and blame it on too many customers to be deceiving for their own good.

exactly the type of response i'd expect from Virgin Media. Clueless set of money grabbing d**ks
I always liked Branson. When he bought out NTL i hoped for bigger and better things.... unfortunately he's more interested in getting his car into space than he is providing me with a useful internet connection. ho hum

All my friends on PSN that use Virgin Media can't even host games without lagging to high heaven. Their connections are bollocks.

Sky broadband is their saviour. :p

Dang it! I wanted to hear what else was bollocks!

Branson just allowed the name Virgin to be used, his company really has little to do with it I bet. Virgin Media seem more interested in getting celebs for their TV adverts than anything else. When are these companies going to step up and sort the infrastructure problem ?

he sounds like a right c**t.

Everything about Virgin Media is "bollocks". The service, the support, even the statements from the high-up CEO's.
As pretty much the only cable provider in the UK, they should be leading the charge against BT and putting up some stiff competition, but all they do is **** up constantly.

Virgin media is ****, BT is ****, we can't win really because if you want to use a 3rd party ISP, you have to have one of their lines anyway.

Put yourself in the company's shoes, for a moment. What if you ran an ISP and suddenly some site came on-line that brought your hardware to its knees and took your available bandwidth down to a soda straw? I doubt that Virgin wants to screw any of its customers or make anyone angry, but it's not possible to upgrade bandwidth overnight- physically or financially. You also have to look at it from a business standpoint. What does Virgin stand to gain by spending millions of dollars immediately on infratstucture upgrades? How many customers will it lose if it doesn't? Are competing ISPs having the same issues? Throttling the top 10% high-use customers might make sense at least in the short term in order to keep the other 90% happy. As bandwidth use continues to skyrocket, it will remain hard for ISPs to keep up with it, and there has to be a good business case to do so. Companies are no more made of money than you or I.

Not a good time to be a virginmedia customer.

Extended STM times are being introduced as well.

I can live with the current STM rules but as soon as this accumulation of "bollocks" starts to effect my use of the service I'm off.

This is a no-brainer. It has nothing to do with what was originally intended or the 'philosophy' of the internet. It is about the ISP thinking that they have the right to throttle what you are paying good money for. ISPs provide a service: access to the internet. You pay for the size of the pipe you want. So does the water company. But if the water company decided to throttle back your water supply unless you paid a premium, there would be rioting in the streets. This is all about the ISPs trying to implement a QOS (Quality of Service) that benefits them. They want to charge VIP prices for their corporate bandwith hogs and let the rest of us fight for the scraps. But don't worry, it WILL happen. Execs and lobbyists want the bandwidth, and the rest of the automotons who want to update their MySpace page will write a few angry blogs, and no one ouside of their buddy list will care. What is right and what is profitable is rarely in agreement, and this is no exception. Yay capitalism.

The only thing that is bollocks, is the pathetic state of the UK's internet infrastructure.