I'm with Virgin Media too, and it's a hell of a system shock after switching from Zen (2mg home, old ipstream service). I paid ú34 a month for the 2MB but now I know where the money went. Rock solid reliability, consistent service and incredibly smart technical gurus when you need help. I moved to VM for ú37 and got 10Mb which was swiftly upgraded to 20Mbit. I occasionally saw that speed, but have had 5-6 seperate billing issues each of which required hours on the phone to multiple departments (the end result is still messed up but it works so i've given up trying). I spent Sept-Dec 08 getting less than 5Mb since my area was oversubscribed and has only last month gone back to normal.

But above all that, I've been traffic managed as well several times. They introduced the policy months after I signed up and had it been there beforehand, I would have stuck with ADSL and found a ADSL2 or datastream package on a BT line. My bandwidth drops to pathetic speeds for hours after hitting a pitiful limit that's in force every day of the week. Worse than the lower speed though, is that they QoS your line to buggery and back, putting your packets to the lowest possible priority. The net effect is latency goes through the roof. It took me 5-10 mins to get into Eve to change a skill on Friday when it last happened, and another 3 to open my character screen.

Traffic management is a horrid, heavy handed punishment as it effectively takes away the 'broad' in the broadband service I'm paying quite a lot for, making the connection nigh unusable for even web browsing as it takes so long for even a web page to load. I'd rather a 'daytime' limit over the course of a month, or an option to pay for excess bandwidth usage. The downtime is horrendous and the tech support staff only know one solution (turn the modem off and on again). Unfortunately, it's in their Ts&Cs that they can get away with pretty much what they want, but I'm hoping to leave and 12 month contract or not (must be over by now) be damned. I spend days downloading nothing, then find 9gigs of things to download and have to spend the rest of the evening without the ability to use the connection for anything else (and the 9 gigs of stuff slows to a crawl halfway thru so can't even use that )

Anyone here on Be? What speeds do you get? How far do you live from your exchange if you know? What's their service like? Do they do newsgroups? What's it like for P2P/torrenting? Online gaming? They're site predicts my old bt line could handle 10 megs...I'd rather get a solid 10megs than an unpredicatable 20megs (though they are moving to 50megs soon )