Virgin's broadband offerings put to test

Virgin's two broadband offerings gave widely disparate results after a lengthy survey by broadband specialist SamKnows.co.uk.

The statistics were compiled by monitoring 20 people per ISP around the UK, reports TechRadar.

While Virgin Media's cable service did well in many tests, its ADSL service - run through BT lines - was not up to the mark, which the company admitted was caused by 'network congestion'.

One of the other conclusions the report drew was that BT and PlusNet both used traffic shaping at peak times on non-port 80 traffic, but no other ISP did.

"The thing that surprised me the most is how similarly everyone performed (for the most part anyway)," Sam Crawford, the reports author, told TechRadar.

"Given all the negative press being banded around, I think a lot of people might be surprised by some of the results.

"Also, whilst raw speed is important, there are other aspects that some providers should be looking at even more closely - such as DNS servers, latency and core bandwidth."

A Virgin Media spokesperson told TechRadar that they were "working hard" to address the problem of network congestion.