wow it took me half an hour today to add a comment on this article. I am a working woman who uses internet in the evening to look Doctor Who, but amazingly I am in the top 5 internet users....how can that be possible, I am only watching this programme and look at google sites (not downloading). I CANNOT EVEN USE INTERNET DURING THE DAY AND EVENING (WHAT ABOUT UNLIMITED BROADBAND)...and I still have 'internet' for one year.....I can seriously cry. Can we not start a war and lawsuit against Virgin. I am paying for not being able to watch internet. I should have stayed at Sky.

Berkett talks a load of bollocks he either wants to destroy the internet compleatly for profit..

if you want the internet to be like tv and you are restirctied to what your isp let you use then Neil Berkett is your man..

if you want every other isp to follow in this madness then Neil Berkett is your man...

or if you belive like i do that the internet works fine, only for the fact that all the isp's out there are undercutting each other for the cheap broadband and not spending money on updateing lines and hardware then you would be wise to boycot virgin compleatly the few pounds more you spend on a better isp like BT would be much better in the long run for us all if you want the internet to stay as it is hit MY Berkett where it hurts right in his bollocks by getting him the sack when people start to leave virgin for there nazi view on how the internet should be run...


Just switch ISP. Net neutrality isn't a load of bollocks just virgin wants to push around the little guys and make more money from the big companys. Small web pages should be given the same bandwith as bigger ones. Basicly if this goes though at little or no cost to them they take more money from big companys and give smaller sites slower speeds, in my opinion looks like time to change provider.

I think that this thing of not-Internet
neutrality is just a load of b...s!

However...this is already so since if you have a cable connection you go faster than someone with ISDN or 56k,
but it's an hardware thing and this makes sense...

The idea of "speeding up" the sending of this or that "content" if someone pays you is just c...p, since in a year
or so you could bet your ass that the most speeded up thing would be "advertising"!!

...and who's the idiot who'd pay to get advertising faster?? >DD

Check out not so Virgin:

http://notvirgin.moonfruit.com/

Virgin Media dont even have their own staff for their broadband support. , Neil Berkett should look at the treatment the staff put up with at the Albert Dock in Liverpool. No notice shift changes, no pay rise in years, most of the TSC call centre staff unable to get their bonus, Adecco not living up to the VIRGIN brand values, no support for a worker injured at work from Adecco. Constant lies from the company. Lets remember this company really is just NTL/Telewst with a hint of Virgin.

stupid old man! When will he realise the people that have grown up with the internet in their lives do not just go on the same websites, the internet if full of a plethora of sites, and it not the ISPs job to be slowing our access even further because those small niche websites refuse to pay the big red monster!! I want to access whatever i want without any staggering of internet speeds. It is amazing how the ISP are getting p**sed off that the BBC are not playing their game (good on the BBC) but ISPs fail to understand that Youtube, dailymotion, Gofish, tudou, and various other video streaming sites have been used by the population for years!!! they are just trying to make some extra money as the TV companies do not want to pay them. I pay for unlimited internet at 8mb (i think...never get even half of that)- i did not pay fro virgin to decide which websites i can view at 8mb and which ones i cannot!! Go to hell virgin! my contract runs out in august and if this does go ahead BT hear i come!! Net neutrality is not "b*ll*cks" it is a reality is the USA!

im on 10 meg for the past two months ive had less than 1/2 a meg keep getting through to a call centre in india they keep telling me there is a problem in your area this has been going on for 2 months last phone call to indian call centre i flipped and said i will take my business elsewhere the person on the other end of the phone pretty well said take your business elsewhere because he aint bothered 
not what you want to here when you've been with a company for quite some time i for one will be getting my bt line reactivated

if Virgin play this game their users need to migrate to other suppliers the power is with users not ISPs

So I guess virgin want to loose my business, my parents business, my friends business, their families business... all because of a foolish idea they can make more money...

Personally I will be switching to BT, the Devil you Know.....

Its people like him who giv ISPs the bad rep. Mr Ooh-look-at-me-I-am-the-new-boss-and-dont-give-a-toss-abt-you-peasants, ought to get his head in order and do what Virgin does best - sugar-coat things up a bit, big,bold,nice n red, lotsa red and then even more red, oh and loadsa small(-er?) tiny text.

The solution to this economy's achilles heel, ISP problem: 

Get the East Asian companies from SKorea, Japan, Taiwan, Singapore to get here and set base. Im sure BT and the gang aren't afraid of a bit of competition...I mean ... customers love them right? 

Any loyal Virgin/BT/TalkTalk fans out there opposed to net-neutrality "b*****cks" ?

Burkett sneered? Really? Did he? Don't you guys go turning into my local 5 o'clock news, please. 

I understand the guy may be a complete corporate fascist. But I don't need or want that kind of subjective drama in my tech reporting. Besides, there may be little he can do and is just tooting the business-is-God horn to earn cozy spot on Uncle Branson's lap during the next balloon ride around the world.

Just the facts, please. Just the facts.

... so long as nobody has any alternative.
But if you're a customer and you've got an alternative, I suggest you choose the alternative.

let battle commence. Virgin are a mess anyway. We all know Branson wants out.

tbh I dont think they can throttle paying customers without losing them, er, if you see what I mean. I mean they may want to throttle us and make us into pasties to sell on Virgin railways for all I know, but that would probably reduce revenues in the long term even if we pay by direct debit, seriously though if we pay for higher bandwidths they have to give us that as a minimum rate or face much finger wagging and tututting. 

But if they get dosh from site owners then they could lift the cap on bandwidths for those sites, which might work well for the masses with 2 vmbits BB (vmbit is short for virginmegabit which is approx 2.5x smaller than your standard mbit) who dont understand that MSN is not the internet. 

If Virgin tried to actually lower speeds for special rate customers (any more than they are already) then people will go to competitors with higher actual bandwidths and that means BT phone lines for ADSL BB and find ISPs who practice net neutrality and maybe even give you the bandwidth you pay for. (pfff)

So as Virgin stand to lose BB customers and phone customers as well they better tread carefully, is all.

Virgin TV is still crapass as well btw, FYI

I pay for access to the internet. I do not pay for the ISP to control what i have access to at a fast speed and what i have access to at a slow speed. Fair enough at busy times shaping of internet speed can occur until bandwidth issues are improved, but to begin raking in money, and starting a new business model, from preferential sites, so a customer who visits unpreferred sites is disadvantaged is absurd!! We pay to see the sites WE want to visit/see, we do not pay for Virgin to be paid again for us to see sites at a reasonable speed!! Neil that is boll**ks! and if you go ahead with that i will move to ANY ISP that believes in some form of net neutrality.

Well done Virgin. You just lost yourself a hell-load of customers, including myself, I'll be switching providers to one that supports my freedoms soon as my contract is finished aswell.

And I'll be spreading the word for switching.


He's a knobhead and Branson is a knobhead. 
I preferred Telewest. I'm changing my isp.

i guess the multi-billion porn inductry can finally have their say...

Neil Berkett seems to be doing his best to lose as many customers as possible. First the Phorm BS and now this. Madness.

awful support at Virgin and peak time internet is mostly 5Mbit.

mind you after 12 and during morning I do get 20Mbit... but i had to call virgin support twice and have a huge go at them asking why they are capping my connection during none peak times

I've got virgin 20mb,and even on peak times can sustain a 10mb downspeed over easynews etc.

If they bring this in,on top of their traffic shaping (download 3.5gb or more a day in peak times and they cap you to 5mb) then they can shove their 12 month agreement where the sun probably shines often.

I will end the contract, like 1000's of others, and they can see my hairy ass in court. Fed up of ISP's interfering.

I pay for a 20mb connection, I should be able to choose what I get fast, F&^% what he thinks.

It dosent say in the small print up to 20mb or up to 2mb if they dont pay us a premium as well.

Not content to throttle bandwidth on premium accounts, Should be working on increasing the capacity not bimbling on about this.
Idiot.

My experience is that the bus lane at virgin is already full, and the "fast lanes" are either closed due to roadworks which are grossly under funded or have severe pot holes everywhere.

Waiting for contract to expire........

raging asshat! I will certainly no longer be a Virgin customer once my contract finishes in June.

I for one fail to see how my 20mbit connection could possibly be much more of a buslane, running at the average of 3 to 4 mbit that it does (sometimes as low as 0.5 mbit). Plus their technical support would be funny if your werent paying premium rate to contact somebody in india who is of absolutely no help whatsoever and who is not allowed to contact Virgin employees in the UK to check vital information.

I sincerely recommend anybody with Virgin very swiftly jump ship and vote with their feet as to what we think of them controlling the speed at which we view things.

But at peak times buses in bus lanes travel faster than the rest of the congested traffic. That's the whole point of a separate lane for buses.

In times of congestion, the bus lane is the quickest...

I've been a Virgin.net customer since the late 1990s on dialup, almost a decade before it was bought by NTL

Recently the peak usage caps have been so draconian that my 8mb adsl goes from 750kb/s to under 10Kb/s from 4pm till 12am. 
Magically at midnight, every day it goes up to 750+ again until 4pm teh next day.

They state in the T&Cs that they throttle at peak times but you are still supposed to get 512mbit (60kb's) and the latency is worse than dialup anyway.


Oh well, I've looked into Be Unlimited and they offer triple speed for the same price £18 a month (24mb down 1.5 up). Also, I emailed them about caps and they said some of their users download 1000gb a month and they don't mind, even at peak times. 

Cya virgin can I have my MAC code pls kthx bai.

Wow. I'm glad I didn't get that dedicated Virgin cable line put in after all; first they say ok to spying on customer downloads, and now they're advocating the idea that some 'nilsen family selected' content is going to be delivered faster......wtf.
I hardly use a damn thing online that most people seem to be into.

What I would say is that it's perfectly reasonable for ISPs to prioritise the likes of game traffic, as some do.....there's nothing wrong with having special-interest ISPs.
But - Virgin have sole contract on the fibre-optic networks in this country (cause they bought it from NTL), so except for in about two UK cities you are limited to at best 8Mb over the phonelines.
(there is a 30Mb service available in a couple of places, I have no idea how good it is)

That is also sad to hear that the throughput is so much less than it should be on fibre - their adverts are lies too then.

Bet Wi-Max & wireless access companies are pleased though.

This the first step towards internet control, facism, communism, big brother, or whatever you want to call it. It has now raised its ugly head and has come out of the shadows. The is age is the first time in history that everyone can access everything, with no controls. Stop these people.

Ok, so any provider who wants there contant faster should pay all the ISP's what those ISP's want to get high bandwidth through the network. Lol! that'll never catch on. What kind os stupid company is going to pay loads of ISP's to get higher throughput. If noone pays then the ISP will be stuffed :)

i'm not sure how bus lanes work in Foreign, but here in Norway it's usually the least congested lane of them all, making it the fast lane.
Sadly, we don't have any Ferrari buses, but the ones we have seem to be able to keep up with the speed limit just fine.

my experience of virgin media is truly awful ...nothing surprises me on how low they will go to squeeze more money out of there a rapidly failing internet service!

soo glad i got rid of em after paying for 20mb service and getting a fluctuating 512k ..this is the bit where they must laffing there balls off at you 
..you the punter has to pay 25pminute for the privilage to speak to a halfwit