If you are a Virgin Broadband user, I would like to hear your thoughts and feedback on the service - the good, the bad, benefits, issues, anything you can tell me about your experiences with the service, speed, coverage, limitations, etc.

A couple of friends are considering signing up and I too may consider it in the future.

Cheers

Well my sister has not said anything bad about it.

It has worked great for us and I know many friends who have also joined who are happy (2 returned because of bad signal).

We only had ADSL1 beforehand and now are getting much better speeds, can actually watch YouTube now. Therefore we have gone over our download limits each month, but that is still faster than our old service. just wish you could choose a higher download plan.

Phone support is fairly bad - slow to answer, long cue, but once you make it through they are nice to deal with and have always solved issues quickly.

We have the broadband at home service and have only filled in the form to move our home phone the other day so i don't know how well that works.

They say that you can't use it anywhere but home, but I live in the Eastern suburbs of Melbourne and we went on holidays to the Gold Coast so I brought it along to see if it would work. Plugged it in and it just started up and worked without any issues for two weeks solid. Downloaded heaps, used the wireless all over the apartment and when I placed it on the balcony I could use it by the pool, 10 floors down.

I am still recommending it to everyone I know. What can you lose. Use it for 3 weeks and it it is crap return it for no cost. There is no risk. And no I don't work for them.

There is a very good reason for telling you not to move the service without telling them, if someone calls 000 the phone tells you where it is but in the case of your VOIP it tells them where is registered at if you called emergency from the Gold Coast emergency would have been dispatched to your home in Melbourne.

I've considered them, but is there any way at all of getting more downloads?

Don't forget guys, no P2P with them, and no things like VOIP.

It's for your mother, and sister, to move up from dial-up, and not your geeks.

Well the lack of VOIP doesn't really matter unless you're big on international, cos you get free calls across AU out of the box anyway.

I was just using the lack of VOIP as an example.

What if you wanted to use iChat with video?

No go with the Virgin offering.

What if you wanted to do Screen Sharing in Leopard?

May just also be a no go.

ichat works. voip (skype) works..

but its not designed for you illegal downloaders..

PS, its great...!

have to say it has been ok, though when I moved to Brisbane my area is a poor reception so speed is down.

Also Skype works ok and I do video with the wife.

Would recommend it, just make sure the area has coverage.

As to moving it around, they seem to tolerate a period of time. The problem is also they gave you a Melbourne number and when you were on the Gold Coast they were routing calls to you at their cost. So after a while they put a stop to that and change your number.

One thing I didn't like when I moved was that when they changed my number the service was offline for 5 days (no internet no phone). Pretty poor and they didn't tell me upfront. Took to the 3rd call to the help line (very long waits) before someone said "oh yeah your account is down for at least the next 3 days). Poor service.

Mmm, ok. I saw an ad for Virgin Broadband/phone package last night, thought it might have been an option. Of course, the word "free" did nothing but put up flags for me... and sure enough, free = 2GB only... and as noted above - couldn't do any p2p... (just read their "fair use" policy - wow, why are they so worried about bandwidth??)

what is exactly peer to peer? would something like my net fone (voip) work? also does the normal landline phone plug into the wireless router, or does it need a separate box? and finally, is there hefty extra downloads fees after the 2gb is reached?

thanks

have to say as an update, the service has dropped away a fair bit.

Seems from discussions at Whirlpool with their support guys that the service was really oversold and now has bandwith issues.

Hence the peer to peer problems a lot of users have. I don't really use that but they also have a DNS problem that leads to the internet being intermittent. As a result it keeps dropping the connection (so you have to manually set the DNS).

See discussion here http://http://forums.whirlpool.net.a...m?t=859808&p=9 for settings for each state and other issues.

I just got off the phone from VBB@H - after waiting the obligatory 20mins on hold - to find out that they have cancelled SMTP (ie: outgoing server) access.

Nice. But the best bit is that I had to ring up myself and wait on hold to find this out. The call-centre operator was nice enough, and can't do anything about it, so there was no use venting on him. However, I find this Optus-like behaviour (don't get me started...) VERY UNCOOL.

I guess I'd class myself as a power-user when it comes to the net, but even from an everyday Joe's perspective, I don't see how Virgin's offering is remotely attractive.

I have them for my iPhone, but I find it hard to understand how far they missed the mark with wireless broadband :/