So we've just had a VM 100Mb/s fibre service activated. I was worried that with all the talk about them and their contractor Kelly likely to be problematic, but it's actually gone fairly smoothly, and apart from the ADSL backup not working yet, was actually delivered ahead of schedule. The Kelly contractors, a pair who laid the fibre, and a subcontractor who did the splicing turned up in the expected time frame and did their jobs effectively.
I did a speed test and the performance was a tad disappointing, it should be 50M symmetric but the best I could get was 34M down and 14M up with a ping time of 7ms, both from a netbook using web browser, and android phone using speedtest app. I wondered whether our side of the Cisco they installed shouldn't be on auto-negotiate but instead be fixed at 100M full duplex; this initially sped things up but it reverted back. So my questions are: * do VirginMedia generally set the customer side of their CPE to fixed speed/duplex or leave it on auto? * should we expect upload and download speeds with VM to run at the maximum contracted speed all the time? thanks very much Paul
