# Virgin and Google sharing info



## Phyrebrat (Jul 12, 2015)

Hi.

At the moment I'm at my folks in Bournemouth and signed into my virgin.net account on my iPad as I wanted to access an attachment that is on my email application on my iMac in London.

A few moments ago I got an advisory email from google;



> Your Google Account urban******@virgin.netwas just used to sign in from Safari on iPad.



I'm no fan of Google at all and wonder what it is I have done to have associated my Virgin account with Google. And how I can undo it? I don't want Google administering _anything_ that isn't Google.

Any ideas?

Thanks

pH


----------



## Foxbat (Jul 12, 2015)

Perhaps this news item has something to do with it?

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technolo...ffers-Google-email-services-to-customers.html


----------



## Ray McCarthy (Jul 12, 2015)

> All four million Virgin Media broadband subscribers will be migrated across to Google’s mail services, doing away with the legacy email systems left over from the days of NTL and Telewest.


Totally unacceptable

People are PAYING Virgin. SMTP service, and a mail box is an accepted part of what you get from any ISP.
Google are USA based and do NOT meet EU privacy rules, signed into law in the UK.

Ofcom have the power to stop this customer abuse. But will they bother?

BTW, Liberty Global (UPC in Netherlands and Ireland) now own Virgin Broadband and will be merging UK and Irish Operations.


----------



## Phyrebrat (Jul 12, 2015)

I'm assuming I must have had an email at some point advising me of their plans to migrate?

I've been more and more unhappy with Virgin who I have stuck with since 2004 and wonder if I'll be out of the frying pan and into the fire if I change to Sky.

Thank you for the replies, *Ray* and *FB*

pH


----------



## Ray McCarthy (Jul 12, 2015)

I'm told that they abandoned the migration.
Google will not be providing email services:

Message from Virgin to customers about last January?


			
				Virgin Media said:
			
		

> Hello,
> Your email service is about to get a mini-makeover. This email will tell you what’s happening, how it affects you and what to do next.
> You might not know, but we worked hand-in-hand with Google to provide your email service. But now, they can no longer help us do this. So we’ve created our own. We’re looking forward to bringing you an even better service, jam-packed with more innovations over time.
> What’s happening
> ...



Sky are Murdoch empire Pay TV that have Broadband only as a service to help sell Pay TV. They mostly  have ADSL based on phone lines, very little fibre. You are better off with higher performance Cable Broadband from UPC's Virgin Media.


----------



## Mirannan (Jul 15, 2015)

I ran into a problem caused by Virgin's relationship with Google last night. Briefly, Virgin now rely on Google for their webmail service; as the webmail taps into the same data as when one uses an email program, I think it's quite likely that Virgin's email service is run by Google.

This caused a rather severe problem. Before the changeover, I had set up a Google account (for various business stuff) using my Virgin account as the reference. Briefly, this clash meant that I had to jump through hoops (including the setting up of a new Gmail account) to be able to access my Virgin email on the Web.

Virgin have a habit of doing things like this. Such as a traffic management policy for their "unlimited" broadband which is buried on some late page of their Ts and Cs. And the fact that they trumpet their unlimited-data mobile data tariff - and somehow forget to mention that they neither support 4G nor have any plans to do so. Despite the fact that they use the EE network for their infrastructure, and they make a big deal of selling 4G-capable phones.

But hey, what does one expect from a company whose founder started in business with music piracy?


----------



## Ray McCarthy (Jul 15, 2015)

1) Virgin Broadband was sold to UPC
2) UPC are supposed to be migrating everyone off Google to their own new service (started Jan 2015)
3) EVERY isp has a Traffic Policy. Unlimited is a lie and impossible. Ofcom should forbid use of the term.
4) Virgin / UPC don't have a Mobile service at all. They are just resellers, not even doing as much as Tesco.
5) Due to the channel space and way Ofcom sold the Licences, once LTE /4G has economic number of users it will be hardly better than 3G. Coverage of 4G is terrible.
6) Because 5 Data users on a Mast sector maxes out Mobile of any type, it ought to have a really low cap, 2G Byte to 4G Byte per rolling 30 days. Unlimited is (a) Stupid, (b) Not possible (c) A lie on Mobile. Currently voice and SMS subsidize Mobile Data. It should be priced for people that ONLY need on the go business data and it would be x4 better. Promoting Mobile for Video or home use is irresponsible. I'm looking at you Three and Vodafone.

See longer explanation (from Power Point slides shown to an Irish Minster) 
http://www.radioway.info/comparewireless/img1.html


Tesco have their "mobile" non-business for sale as Three bought O2, the real carrier, and Three don't do good wholesale deals, nor indeed know how to run a network, everything Three does is outsourced.


----------



## Ray McCarthy (Jul 21, 2015)

It seems loads of people DIDN'T get migrated back from Google to Virgin as claimed by Virgin
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/07/21/google_ends_isp_email_support/

Also today Virgin misplaced the User Interface to most users Web Space.



			
				A Customer of Virgin said:
			
		

> Virgin media have lost the client interface to enable them to manage the users own web space.
> It took 4 persons before I could make them understand I was not expecting them to supply me with a web building package just the ability to reset the webspace.
> I suspect my space has become corrupted.



Well it's all Twitter and Facebook today rather than Bebo and Myspace. Geocities (apart from Japan) bulldozed long ago.


----------



## Venusian Broon (Jul 25, 2015)

Ray McCarthy said:


> You are better off with higher performance Cable Broadband from UPC's Virgin Media.



In the UK only 47% of all households or so can be physically reached by cable broadband - at least that was the case about 10 years ago. They stopped digging to other existing houses more or less after the tech bubble of 2001. They will probably dig to new builds and housing though, so probably that percentage is slowly rising over time, but very slowly. Therefore there is a good chance that if you sign up for Virgin broadband, instead of cable you will get exactly the same ADSL technology that BT/Sky/Talktalk use. So just a word of caution. (Although BT wholesale is pushing fibre to the kerb, obviously in urban high density areas, and 'fibre' is available to many now. Clearly not fibre all the way to the house, but close enough to push up average bandwidth significantly)

EDIT - or they may not supply you at all. No virgin cable anywhere near me at the moment it appears when I tried their postcode checker....


----------



## Ray McCarthy (Jul 25, 2015)

Also Fibre fed exchanges and cabinets are dishonestly advertised as Fibre in UK & Ireland.
Above 200m you can't get FAST broadband on Copper. Above 800 to 900m over copper, any fibre somewhere else only maybe reduces contention and even VDSL then is no better than ADSL2+



Venusian Broon said:


> Therefore there is a good chance that if you sign up for Virgin broadband, instead of cable you will get exactly the same ADSL technology that BT/Sky/Talktalk use.


Or worse. Sky for instance only has their own gear in about 1/3 or less of areas they sell in UK and none at all in Ireland (Here entirely re-sold Eircom).

I didn't realise UPC UK (Virgin Broadband)  was reselling BT ADSL. The UPC in Ireland only sells their own cable (ex NTL and Chorus).

47% sounds like optimistically high media/advertising spin.  It's claimed 50% of properties here are passed by cable. I'm fairly sure that's nuts. But I haven't worked in the Industry since 2009. Cable was HUGE in the major Irish Cities because of demand for BBC / ITV long before satellite. Eventually the Government even passed a law saying the cable companies had to pay The UK broadcasters. UPC bought the two biggest companies. Longford still has its own provider and for years Casey Cable, Dungarvan, County Waterford (still separate) was the only real broadband provider in Ireland!


----------



## Mirannan (Jul 25, 2015)

Regarding Virgin cable, it's copper but rather different from most copper broadband because the cable is coax. This is presumably because the system is designed to carry TV signals, which presumably need a lot of data throughput. It's also a semi-interesting fact that many of the Virgin cable ducts in the street don't actually have any cable in them; when installing their broadband/TV they put in the coax from the nearest distribution box a few hundred yards away.

Maybe someone can answer for me what I think is an interesting question. The cable coming into my house has a capacity greater than my broadband speed, obviously so because it's quite possible to run broadband at full speed while watching TV (and even recording two other channels at the same time!) What data throughput can coaxial cable manage?


----------



## Venusian Broon (Jul 25, 2015)

Mirannan said:


> Maybe someone can answer for me what I think is an interesting question. The cable coming into my house has a capacity greater than my broadband speed, obviously so because it's quite possible to run broadband at full speed while watching TV (and even recording two other channels at the same time!) What data throughput can coaxial cable manage?



Your set up sounds like mine, but my Freeview comes in from the flat aerial and goes through a youview box/harddrive. Thus at least for me watching basic TV and recording two programs at once doesn't involve the broadband. Perhaps that's the same for you?

As for cable, I have forgotten the figure for broadcast bandwidth they tend to use - off the top of my head I'd guess that about 1-2 Gb/s is at least what they need for the broadcast tv services - but just looking at the channel numbers they offer, I see Virgin can offer over 230+ with 46 in HD. By comparison Freeview offers 60 with 12 HD, according t'internet. Using about 4 Mb/s for a standard channel and 14 Mb/s for an HD channel then that gives a cable capacity of ~1.5 Gb/s in the Virgin case. (close enough to my guess!) I'm sure there are others that know this backwards though, so I expect to be corrected...

I can access a whole bunch of other channels outside the basic Freeview simple view channels - like netflix or BBC iplayer, because the youview box is also connected to my broadband, but if I'm not touching them, then I'm not using much broadband at all - although I see the box talking to the hub all the time... (I haven't noticed what happens when I watch stuff that is clearly being downloaded and therefore must be coming from the broadband and if this is slowing my internet as I tend to be doing only one or the other!)


----------



## Ray McCarthy (Jul 25, 2015)

Mirannan said:


> The cable coming into my house has a capacity greater than my broadband speed, obviously so because it's quite possible to run broadband at full speed while watching TV


Copper phone wire is Cat3 twisted pair. Designed for analogue up to 0.04MHz
Coax is for up to 500MHz on really old stuff (1960s) and up to 2200MHz now, though they only use up to about 850MHz.
Also phone cable is noisy and has crosstalk to other cables in the bundles. Coax is much more noise free, allowing about 4x to 16x more data in the same data clock speed*.
Fibre has more capacity than coax. But Coax has a capacity of about 88 downstream channels each of 8MHz Each can be multiple TV channels (up to about 20 SD or 8 HD) or Modem data, each maybe 80Mbps to 160Mbps depending on noise level. Those channels can be shared to several modems. Or when a Cable distribution street cabinet is fibre fed, the cable is not shared so much and one modem can use up to 5 channels, or 400Mbps to 800Mbps of data.

On a fully digital Cable system there may be up to 60 channels dedicated to modems. The speed isn't affected by cable length.

Because phone cable was only designed for audio (analogue phone) for 900m the maximum is about 20Mbps. At 3km it might only be 2Mbps. The VDSL speeds above 22Mbps only apply on very short phone wires from a fibre fed cabinet or less than 500m from an exchange.

EDIT:
Was called away.
So one coax from fibre fed cabinet might simultaneously have 300 TV channels, mix of SD & HD,  and perhaps 10,000 Mbps of data. The TV is "broadcast" so any number of setboxes (thousands easily) can be fed. If the cable is for 50 houses then simultaneous data per house is 10,000 / 50 = 200Mbps. But only some people are doing really simultaneous stuff, so in practice they can sell 240Mbps (you need less than 0.9km of phone wire to have a 1/10th of that) and even if they only dedicate 1,000Mbps of coax to data then mostly you'll get nearly 240Mbps.

In ADSL days they where allowed to provision the exchange poorly enough that contention was typically 48:1 rather than the 10:1 that cable might use. The theory being that if exchange had 500 broadband users at average 3Mbps (typical due to wire length) then instead of 500 x 3 = 1,500Mbps of  data capacity for exchange they only installed 31Mbps (in practice either 2, 10, or 100). Problem is at 8pm maybe many people ARE on line, so you get a 1/4 of speed or worse than at 3am.  When they upgrade exchange feed they market it as Fibre. You just get 3AM speed at 8pm, it's limited really by distance of copper twisted pair and cross talk, noise etc.


EDIT 2:
All Digital signals other than say Morse code are actually sent via coded analogue signals. The speed at which the signal changes is limited by the channel width (1.7MHz DAB, 8MHZ European cable and Terrestrial, 6MHz USA Cable and Terrestrial and 10MHz to 100MHz for Satellite). Phone wires use an adaptive channel width up to about 16MHz or more depending on length of wire, connection quality, crosstalk etc. Can be less than 1MHz as it's only designed for 0.04MHz).
If the power is higher or noise /crosstalk lower or both you can "code" more bits of data on each change. So Satellite which is really weak and noisy might have only 2 bits per change. Fibre might have 10 bits per change or more.  Microwave links perhaps 4 bits and Cable Coax maybe 8 bits (longer older) to 10 bits (newer fibre cabinet).
so an 8MHz microwave link might manage 30Mbps. On a coax Cable an 8MHz channel might be nearly 100Mbps.
Then part of the data is used for Forward Error Correction (FEC). This can be 1/2 on Satellite and only 1/8th Cable. It's usually high on phone wires.


----------



## Ursa major (Jul 25, 2015)

Ray McCarthy said:


> Above 200m you can't get FAST broadband on Copper.


What's the definition of Fast broadband?


Note: I have (BT) ADSL over copper, which over Christmas 2013 was working, although a bit shakily, when I couldn't make or receive any landline calls because the final few metres of cable from the hole in the ground to the hole in the outside wall of the house not only had deteriorated to such an extent that the twisted pair was exposed but, in some places, left the bare wires open to the elements (mostly wind-driven heavy rain). I'm about 300 or so metres along the road from an exchange building (a small one which will contain PTSL concentrators, not an exchange, plus the DSL head-end equipment). I get, at peak, 21.9Mbit/s (as seen by my laptop over its WiFi interface), and have occasionally seen 21.5+ for a few seconds in a row.


----------



## Ray McCarthy (Jul 25, 2015)

Ursa major said:


> definition of Fast broadband


More than 30Mbps (Ireland Official Definition).
I forget what UK says.
Some countries say minimum is 100MBps.


Ursa major said:


> I get, at peak, 21.9Mbit/s (


You need to test via ethernet cable.
But ADSL2+ has a MAXIMUM speed of 22Mbps in practice after overheads.
VDSL is *UP TO* 52 Mbps downstream and 16 Mbps upstream, but on shorter good wire. The equipment detects quality of line and by the time length is 900M it's not much better than ADSL2+, on longer  or poorer cable it switches to ADSL2+.
VDSL2 is UP TO 100Mbps but that needs low cross talk perfect cable probably less than 200m long. Note the Wikipedia and other article over-egg performance as based on sales brochures. Real BT cables are not as good. Some are even Aluminium which is worse again.  Above 1.5km in reality most VDSL2 gear will automatically switch to ADSL2+

Cat5e will do 1000Mbps at 100m using ethernet. It actually runs 4 x 250Mbps channels (one per pair) and echo cancels to run both directions on same pair at same time. Cat5e and Cat6 are immensely better cable than regular phone cable which is Cat3.  You can run full spec HDMI over 2 x Cat5e cables more than 50m spliced into a £1 HDMI cable.

Copper twisted pair phone cable is POINTLESS. It's actually cheaper to run fibre for a new housing estate and that gives over 200Mbps to everyone, no matter distance. Coax can easily deliver 240Mbps.
You can run fibre cheaply to any property you can run electricity to. You can even retro fit it up the sewage pipes or water main.

If EVERYONE had VDSL2 (100Mbps) the average would still be under 10Mbps. Anyone more than 2km wouldn't see much change (about 30%)


----------

