Virgin Out of International Bandwith!

Hi Guys,

The recent problems VM has with connectivity is due to the fact that either a)they ran out of international bandwith or b)western cape has run out of international bandwith.

Tonight is a good example. Fed up with all the stalling of surfing & uploads/downloads, I decided to register on this forum and state my case (aka complaining:

I pinged this local site, and got nicely 700 ms response.
Surfing this forum site (and other SA sites) no problem.

I sign-up here, and had to get the registration key from my yahoo email account. Horrors. Took 20 minutes to eventually log in there and read my email. (Jokingly on the side I told my wife, see, I am going to follow this link now back to this site and it is going to open up withing 30 seconds. Low and behold, 24 seconds to load this whole page.)

I also pinged yahoo.com, and also go a very decent 700 - 900 ms response.
However, when you try to http them (or any other international site) things just became a horror.

Nevermind to try and download something from an international site. The download just stops usually pretty soon. And then you have to try again, which costs money.

I really hope VM will buy more international bandwith.

Another funny is that the other night at 1:30am I decided to call 123 and ask why I am getting disconnected (unrelated to the above mentioned problem) and the chap told me in a very bright and optimistic voice that 1:30am is prime time on a Sunday morning for downloads and this is very normal! (I just said thank you for that info and hung up..)

Oh, a third gripe is that I can't use the online credit card facility to top-up. I registered my credit card with them, and tried top-up via the menu options on my phone. Just got the OOOPS, the service is unavailable. So I phoned up 123 and had them charge me over the phone. This week I ran out of money and decided to try again. Another oops, not avialable. Again I phoned 123 and they told me I should try typing in *124*2*amount*credit card 4 digites* pin code*# or something like that. Again, guess what, OOPS! Service not available. I phoned 123 again. Got another story. Told them again to just charge me over the phone, and I got my R200 top-up.

My conclusions for tonight are:

A) They ran out of international bandwith in peak times.
B) The top-up on the phone doesn't work.
C) They are still the cheapest, but they are getting on my nerves now.
D) How much does it cost to lay my own undersea cable?!?!?

You're spot on with the international bandwidth issue. I have the same problem

I've had something similar going on with my Virgin Sim too. It connects fine, but then nothing happens . I however remain connected all the time, just nothing coming through. On all my downloads i also noticed this effect where it downloads a few kilobytes then stops then downloads some more and stops...as if it's taking turns to give me some bandwidth.

Anyway things got too slow, gave up switched back to my MTN sim.

I am experiencing the same problems too. Funny though, HTTPS traffic seems unaffected (its slow as usual but works faster than HTTP traffic). Try using https://www.megaproxy.com. Nice tool to use when problems like this come up (as with any int proxy be careful when giving out personal info).

I'd say they are having a problem with HTTP proxy. Overloaded?!

Thank you zoic for that international proxy, I will try that and see if https is working better than http.

I will try https with my yahoo account too.

Yes, it does look like they are round robin the bandwidth between their subscribers.

All in all, not a very happy situation at the moment.

The question is, do they have currently more subscribers than they have bandwidth for? If so, should we move back to VC or MTN?

I tried the international proxy, and cnn.com opened up in 25 seconds, same as local sites.

Then I tried cnn.com without the proxy and it took 3 minutes to open. I must say, I was bit surprised it opened at all!

I guess its pretty much a open and shut case. HTTP is overloaded.

I predict that VM is going to start loosing customers if they don't very fast get some more international bandwith. (I said it first.)

Same here, last night tried to look up a movie quickly on imdb.com - no joy. I am also considering chucking Virgin. I spend about R50 per month on Virgin, so 100 MB. The slowness is really frustrating now that I don't think that 50c/MB makes up for it. Might as well take the plunge and add a few bucks more and use 3G.

ajax said:

Same here, last night tried to look up a movie quickly on imdb.com - no joy. I am also considering chucking Virgin. I spend about R50 per month on Virgin, so 100 MB. The slowness is really frustrating now that I don't think that 50c/MB makes up for it. Might as well take the plunge and add a few bucks more and use 3G.

Click to expand...

I use VM for the day to day stuff, when it is running, and MTN as the backup. MTN is up more constantly. Even ar R1/MB it does not break the bank, but I would rather be paying R0.50c per MB. VM and their support are useless.

Currently VM is up and running.

sean

Hey guys

Having the same problem as well. I reckon that they didn't realise that there would be such a big demand for Internet access on their network. I don't know of anybody who uses them for voice and I know 4 people who use their Internet service! I reckon that they should buy more bandwidth. This might be a Cell C issue though because VM use their network.

Do you think if I set up a VPN connection between Virgin and my ADSL line with Hamachi or something similar and access international via my ADSL at home it'll give better performance? Think I might try that.

Maybe VM is getting one of those 2/30GB deals from openweb

pkid said:

Hey guys

Having the same problem as well. I reckon that they didn't realise that there would be such a big demand for Internet access on their network. I don't know of anybody who uses them for voice and I know 4 people who use their Internet service! I reckon that they should buy more bandwidth. This might be a Cell C issue though because VM use their network.

Click to expand...

Brfanson's Elves thinking aloud:
Err...let's make the data really cheap, at 50c a Meg that'll be the cheapest of the lot....err...but I don't think anyone will use it much so we won't provide a lot of bandwidth.....durrr..

Maybe they planned on increasing bandwidth only after attracting a large number of frequent users. That point has been passed a while back though

Even though the service might be bad and the customers unhappy, perhaps they won't care until they start loosing customers.

If their business model is such that they only look at attrition, then I doubt we will see more bandwith for a while. People will have to start leaving their service before they will buy more bandwidth.

Besides, in a perfect world the business wants to supply zero service for 100% profit, while the customer wants 100% service at zero cost.

Lets home VM knows where the line is, othewise we will have to start leaving to help them understand where the line is.

But wasn't the original plan to support VM to get the other operators to reduce data prices?

Syndyre said:

Do you think if I set up a VPN connection between Virgin and my ADSL line with Hamachi or something similar and access international via my ADSL at home it'll give better performance? Think I might try that.

Click to expand...

Please let us know if you have any luck with VPN. It has never worked for me on Virgin. They might be like Vodacom and have to set up a separate APN that allows VPN. I have no problems with VPN on MTN using the internet APN or the MyMTN APN.

ginggs said:

Please let us know if you have any luck with VPN. It has never worked for me on Virgin. They might be like Vodacom and have to set up a separate APN that allows VPN. I have no problems with VPN on MTN using the internet APN or the MyMTN APN.

Click to expand...

Going to try and get it working tonight so I'll see how it goes.

Btw does anyone know if browsing over a VPN would use more bandwidth than doing it directly? On the Virgin side I mean.

Syndyre said:

Btw does anyone know if browsing over a VPN would use more bandwidth than doing it directly? On the Virgin side I mean.

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Yes, it would. There is an overhead when using a VPN protocol. I tried to find some kind of indication as to how much of an overhead, but all I could find was an article saying PPTP has a relatively low overhead making it faster than other VPN protocols and L2TP has an extra layer of data integrity making it slower.

Well, bandwidth isn't something they can run out of. They use it and then pay for it. They just have a slow connection(s) and on some days like yesterday and today it seems extra slow. Try the proxy (196.31.116.241). Seems it has better international links and/or higher priority plus it fetches the data before you request it.

Syndyre said:

Btw does anyone know if browsing over a VPN would use more bandwidth than doing it directly? On the Virgin side I mean.

Click to expand...

As an alternative try setting up a password protected proxy. It uses relatively little extra bandwidth and should work on any connection.