not rich, just expensive

By this time next week, I’ll be switching to Virgin Media as the provider of all my internet, phone and TV services. I used to use Virgin years back, when they were known as Cable & Wireless, but left when I moved to an uncabled area. I was also very happy with the service, but since moving to London, I’d been keen to give them another try. I’ve been with O2 for several years now, who have been excellent, but the copper lines in my part of south London are pretty crap, so the speeds not been anything special. The big thing that has put me off making the switch is the throttling and traffic shaping that Virgin do. I’ve decided to give it a go anyway and see how much of an effect these policies have on my daily usage. That, and I managed to snap £130 cashback through Quidco!

The one thing that makes me feel a little more comfortable with using Virgin, inspite of their traffic shaping, is how open they are about it. It’s generally accepted that most ISPs do this nowadays, especially in the US. At least Virgin are very clear what and when they will be restricting. I’ve negated some of their bandwidth throttling by taking their top-end 50MB package, which is excluded from those restrictions, but it’ll still be interesting to know whether these policies actually make a big difference to me. You read a lot of stuff online about how awful it is for certain people, but I’m starting to think Americans blow a lot of stuff out of proportion. Here’s hoping I’m right!