Thinking of ditching BT landline/BB and going Virgin Media, am I mad?

drinkturps

For over half a year my BT Broadband (FTTC) is struggling to reach its advertised speeds. I've logged multiple faults and they do something and it works great for a month or so and then slows down again, it's been re-wired, tested inside and out twice now. They guarantee a minimum service and I'm not hitting it. I'm at a point where I'm getting sick of it, yes it works but I'm paying a lot of money for something that is not working as advertised. Also planning on ditching the landline totally as with unlimited calls on the mobiles what's the point of keeping it? It cost me 50p on the landline to order a takeaway on a local call!!

I don't have many suppliers in my area but what I can get is Virgin Media M350 or M500. It looks a significant improvement but wanted to know, how is it for online gaming (good pings?), downloading games, streaming TV and gerneral quality of service. Is it reliable?

Just wanted to understand other peoples experiences with Virgin as the good folk here are more likely tuned to my broadband usage than some other forums.

nofear01

I have never had an issues (other than when locally it's down), I have the 350mbs, I find it stable and would recommend it.

maghouse

I have VM - 200mpbs speed - regularly get 220/230 & 15/20 - very rare it drops out altogether.
It does sometimes drop during peak hours as most providers do - sometimes down to 50-100 ..
Generally - very good service.
I am a city dweller so probably helps

maghouse

PS - I stream a lot of HD music and use SkyQ through broadband with no issues ...

Will I Aint

I had BT for years and for remote working it was a nightmare with the amount of outages i experienced.  I've been a VM customer ever since and not regretted it, outages are rare and when they occur are fixed quickly in my experience.

To be fair to the other providers, i think alot of reliability issues stem from overhead wires.  My street has no telegraph poles so assume as service from BT would be much more stable than i had previously.

Hampy1972

Broadband, you can't touch the speeds of Virgin Media, i'm running over 400 mbs.
For TV, Sky are the best if you can afford it, personally me, I rather have the high bandwidth speeds than have Sky ( I can do what I like, just need the bandwidth)

BT?, I know some folks are happy with their service, they can't match VM on speed but it is suppose to more reliable.

I call VM around March every year (renewal time) give them the usual ( I am thinking of leaving blah blah blah) get sky sports free for 6 months sometimes or a discount...

You don't ask!
You don't get!

Will I Aint

i've got virgin for 200m BB and Sky Q as i just couldn't get on with the virgin media tv box and lack of 4k content.  

For the OP i think in terms of getting advertised speeds it also matters how many customers are in your area.  I've just run a speed test and got 201 down 21 up and 7 ping, I don't need speeds above 200 and i chose a gamers bundle as there are no download limits or throttling.

The Superhub 3 is crap in my opinion, awful GUI and unresponsive so you could put in modem mode and add your own wireless access point.  I ran wired connections down to my main area with managed and unmanged switches.  If you are simply after a turn it on and leave it person then the superhub will be fine for an average user, might just be me whinging but there is no way any respectable software would have visble password on entry as default.

Hampy1972

Superhub 3 is what I have, I was thinking off replacing it with my own one (Like a decent ASUS) but thought nah, it's OK, does the job. Running a Cat 6 back of the house downstairs to some gigabyte switches, Hub3 is upstairs in the study.
Wired is the best way, for laptops and tablets sticking to wifi. For heavy duty media streaming from the NAS drives, gotta be wired. Agreed about the Tivo box, tits on Tarzan would have more use LOL!

Will I Aint

waiting for the new nvidia shield, don't think it will have wifi6 but would allow for wireless streaming from NAS. I've got steels downstairs and the wifi is a bit ropey, not sure about investing in mesh or justing running a AP from the wired point.

sykotik

It's all good  and well saying VM can hit speeds of XXXMbps  which is better than BT
but what you may have to consider is your line from the cabinet to the house! ,  
can the line/cable handle the higher speeds ?

i had loads of trouble with one  ISP's ( sky)  a few years a go, i should of been getting speeds of about 37Mbps but was only getting 23/25 by the time it got to my house , ( most house's in my street hit the 34/36 speeds)
after countless calls to sky and engineers  coming out to try and find a fault  ( which their couldn't find ),
i ditch sky and went with Vodafone , which at first was great , i was getting speeds of about 35/36 ( not sure how )
but over a few months    or so , my speeds had dropped to 25/27 , after speaking to vodafone about it , they sent an engineer out , who basically said ( and he seemed to know what he was talking about )  Is that my line/cable  to house was degrading and that the 25/27 was the limit i was going to get ,
until my line/cable  is knackered totally  , there isn't anything i can do , as im getting over the guaranteed speed ( 21Mbps) with  vodafone ,


so before taking the huff with BT , just make sure ( not sure how you could go about it tho ) that the line/cable is working perfectly !..