Forum Discussion

jcole's avatar
jcole
Joining in
18 days ago

Need redundancy in place

We have experienced persistent and unacceptable internet issues since joining Virgin Media 6 months ago. As professionals who work from home and rely on a stable connection for high-profile client pitches via video calls, internet outages are not just an inconvenience—they are a serious disruption to our business. We pay the highest tier contract simply because it is of such high importance to us to have a reliable connection



Does anyone know if I can get two service providers for one household? 



Can I for instance have BT alongside my Virgin Media Fibre connection?

I need to find a solution myself as I have stopped reaching out to Virgin Media support simply because the service has been so consistently poor that reporting issues feels like a waste of time. However, I can no longer ignore this after being completely without internet for the past three days. Furthermore, a review of our records shows that our connection has failed at least four times per month—this is entirely unacceptable for a service we are paying so much for.



no broadband
no internet
redundancy
  • RavenLunatic's avatar
    RavenLunatic
    On our wavelength
    18 days ago

    Yes, I have a backup BT fibre connection as a fail over for when VM goes down. 

  • jbrennand's avatar
    jbrennand
    Very Insightful Person
    18 days ago

    You are on a residential package that has no Service Level Agreement on connectivity, if you are running a Business you should be on a VM Business contract - which does have an SLA,

    That said, it is always wise to heve a back up in place - you can get a 5G unlimited data SIM for £20/month that could provide that.  Or a cheap second fibre package (if available) - VM will no longer connect two accounts to one household - you need an alternative provider

    B TW... are you sure it is the network connection that has gone down and not just experiencing wifi interference/flakiness?

    A BQM will provide evidence... see this...

    If you haven’t already, set up a free, secure and “offlsite”  - “Broadband Quality Monitor” to continually monitor the state of your connection and record any true network dropouts , latency issues, packet drops, etc - it will thus allow you to differentiate between those and simple wifi dropouts.  It does it 24/7/365 and it keeps a visual record of any/all of your network disconnections, useful data to have to match to the Network logs (in your Hub settings) and also in discussions with VM - note it will take a few hours to start seeing a sensible picture - post up the “link” to the “share live graph”.  Click the lower link (Share Live Graph) then, click generate. Copy the text in the Direct Link box, beware, there may be more text than you can see.  On here click the Link icon (2 links chain to the left of the camera icon) In the URL box paste the link you copied and then click OK
     https://www.thinkbroadband.com/broadband/monitoring/quality

  • Client62's avatar
    Client62
    Alessandro Volta
    18 days ago

    It would have helped to read about the exact nature of these persistent internet problems, how they manifest and what remedial action has been taken.

    For sure ISP issues can persist, but so can issues caused by end user equipment, its location and unreasonable expectation for Wi-Fi coverage in a home that is large and/or robustly built.

  • Tudor's avatar
    Tudor
    Very Insightful Person
    18 days ago

    You can certainly use two providers. I have VM and Open Infra fibre 1000/1000 connection. I use a Ubiquiti UDM Pro router which allows me to split the traffic 50/50 between the two ISPs. Of course this give automatic fallback. I have never been a believer of having a standby connection that you only use when the prime one fails. How do you know is it’s going to work today, even if you tested it yesterday.

    • RavenLunatic's avatar
      RavenLunatic
      On our wavelength
      17 days ago

      That's a good idea to split traffic 50/50, making sure the standby connection is working properly. Gives me something to think about when my contract is up.  My standby connection at the moment is only 36mb and I have TBB monitoring set up for both connections which I review daily.  I was thinking about switching my connections around when my contract is up getting 1.6gb symmetrical with BT/EE and dropping the VM to the lowest tier as a backup. I am thinking maybe 50/50 would be more secure redundancy wise.