QUICK POLL.... Virgin Media -V- Sky Broadband

[MrsForgetful]

we are a very 'techy' home...various gadgets using wi-fi....gaming....HD vids etc....

me and dh have decided to change to sky for tv...and thought we'd bung in broadband too....

then we told ds1.....and he has flipped out.

basically...he is moaning nonstop that it will be too slow for the gaming/downloading illegal music

we have signed up for the 'up to' 20meg service... and i am aware that we will probably never get 20megs!!!

so what i'm interested in is those of you with teenagers...gaming and socialising on line...will SKY cripple them....or will they still be able to do everything they do now.

Is that Virgin cable? I currently have both Sky ASDL and Virgin cable; For me the 10MBS Sky service maxes out at about 7MBPS true (showing a nominal 8MBPS) whereas cable gives a true 10MBPS on the 10MBPS service.

But the real killer with ADSL is the reliability - some days it keeps dropping out, which would make gaming impossible (although I am too old for that kind of thing these days ).

If that was too technical, the answer is that you can't beat a good cable connection for gaming.

no- that was a brilliant answer...my son has been on about the 'true mbps' ...but the question is...do i now tell him that HE is right...cos he's been warning me of exatly what you have described!

We haven't had Virgin, but my sister has it and it seems very slow compared to our Sky service. We've got the top service on it, and have no problems whatsoever.

Atm, I'm online on my laptop MNing, with a torrent DLing in the background. Dh is playing WoW on the other PC. We've never had a service dropout (and this is a fairly usual setup for us, sometimes the Dcs will be online as well, so we're quite demanding!)

We are in London though, and do generally seem to get a better service than other parts of the country (going by things people have said on MN)

I'm on Virgin - regularly have 2 windows open with separate flash based games, plus other stuff, often have similar open while H is on his computer.

Only had one major problem with them when the whole of our county was "off" for a day - nearly blardy killed me no MN or FB for a day

Seems a mix of answers but interesting all the same.

Some of us don't have the choice of either service (Sky's own broadband isn't on all exchanges, and as for cable...)

T+F - not sure a couple of Flash games give the link a serious load - can it handle streaming some TV show on iPlayer as well ?

serenity using a torrent will have dozens of connections active at once, and when her DH is also 'active' he'd moan if his gaming started to show network delays.

well it's FV and ZW (games on FB) which seem to take up a lot of memory space when playing them as well - certainly my internet does run a little quicker when I'm not on them

But re i-player - H is watching something on his computer right now, and I've got something on mine as well. Actually no - he's faffing around on youtube now.

thanks for all your replies....

evenings/weekends- normal to have 3 P.Cs (all uploading/downloading/streaming/gaming...and me MN'ing if i can get on the computers!!!)

additionally....

2 ps3's...online gaming...(CoD, guitar hero/rockband)

sometimes..... 3 PSP's....and 1 or 2 NintendoDS (pokemon gaming with friend down the road)

we are with virgin now...and though ds1 insists the speed is good...he says we have a good 'ping'....i am sick of how many times we have to reboot....

all my boys are autistic- so they don't handle unplanned interuptions to their activities....they like plenty of warning!!!
so... when several times a day we have to reboot- i have to deal with irriritable boys...

so if sky was 'fast enough' ...and didn't keep needing reboots...i'd be happy...my life would be easier.
however...if it meant that the boys games 'lagged' etc...i can understand they would be so fed up too.

(i do wish they did other things too...like go outside and play ...but...computers allow them to interact and socialise in ways that they find hard in real life due to their Aspergers)