Virgin Media as ISP

We're currently using RM as our ISP, paying £1200 pa for 2Mb. With Smartcache this copes surprisingly well on our network of 300-odd machines.

However I think we are paying over the odds, and will need faster speeds soon. RM will offer ADSL Max which according to Samknows Broadband - Broadband Availability Checker may give us 5Mb but at an eye-watering £2500 pa.

Virgin Media offer 20Mb for £50 pm (half what we're paying for 2Mb but is there a catch? Anyone using Virgin Media in a school?

ntl:Telewest Business - Business Broadband - Blazing fast 20Mb business broadband

We used to be with NTL:Telewest before moving to EMBC. The 2 meg line was uncapped so we hit up to 4 meg at times ... we looked at moving to 8 or 10 but the install costs were horrible at the time. This is often a hidden cost.

The service is spot on ... for a raw feed with complete control for yourself, but see previous discussions about RBCs and NEN for other points.

You also need to make sure you have your own firewall, be it an appliance or a home-built system. Then also look at your filtering options.

Have a look at contention rates in your area too ... remember that 20 meg is *not* always 20 meg. Also check your upload speeds ... for some things you want to do (externally hosted sites, VLEs, etc) you may need decent upload speeds.

we use


Fluidata | BURST | ADSL2 | ADSL 2+ | 20 Mb/s down and 2.6 Mb/s up

and must say its been a very good service and offers bonding lines for 40mb

I have a customer using a Virgin Media Public Service cable connection in a private school in North London.
It performs really well in conjunction with a Sophos WS1000 appliance.
It also seems to be a reasonably priced solution for the 150 or so users it services.

The customer service however is another matter, even when communicating with the publicsector department it seems that everything you ever do with VM requires you to do it twice.
Report a fault - do it twice before you get a response.
Call them for any other enquiry - it will take at least two calls to get an answer.
Book them to do a job they will probably have to come twice to do it.
VM, NTL, Telewest whatever they call themselves clearly are still having customer service issues.

PS, I use them at home too and I am pleased with the performance so I would give them 9/10
But my customer service score is still only a meager 2/10

When they came to install the cable at my home at 07:30am on a Saturday the guy broke his only drill bit in my door frame and I had to get my own toolkit out and fit the cable myself or be faced with another weeks wait for a second installation slot!

Virgin Media is a pile of sh1t.

Services up and down more times than a whores knickers, terrible customer support, rip off prices & they make up the terms and conditions on useage as and when it suits them. AVOID at all costs.
In fact I would say they are worse than Sophos. [ And if you know me thats saying something ]

We have a fibre connection to ZEN at 60meg. The service is pretty good, not sure on the cost though.

We're with Synetrix LGFL here. 100Mbps Up and Down. Although, at times it seems worse than my connection at home. I think we pay in the region of £14k-£17k.

Will be taken over by RM at the end of this year, I wonder what their service will be like...

If you look at Virgin - make sure that you get it in writing that you won't be hit by the new traffic management stuff - its already live on the domestic side - so if you use over a certain amount of bandwidth between 10am and 9pm, your connection is reduced from 20M to 5Mb for 5 hours. Rumours on the ng's suggest this might be pushed to the business connections as well.