Forum Discussion

MalcolmH54's avatar
MalcolmH54
Tuning in
2 years ago
Solved

Less than a week in and won’t renew at end of contract

I simply cannot believe how poor Virgin Wi-Fi is. The drop off in speed throughout my house is incredible. 

I have the M250 offering and get that speed next to the router, in the furthest rooms that is dropping to 20 - 25 Mbps. Compare that with my previous BT service high gives only 67Mbps by the router but still maintains over 60 in the furthest rooms.

Someone will say that Virgin guarantee at least 30Mbps throughout your house, but on my deal you have to pay an extra £8 pcm to have the wherewithal to deliver Virgins guarantee, unless you have a Gbps deal (surely the Wi-Fi router isn’t that bad as to make speeds less than30Mbps possible with that input speed?) or to have taken out the Volt package.

For me, the Virgin guarantee 8s literally worthless.

  • HUB3? If so, that's a big reason in itself. You can try another WiFi channel to see if any better but it's likely to be on "AUTO". I'm not sure how many other access points are near your house trying to use the same frequencies either.

    Either get your own router (many Asus are great) and use VM's hub in "Modem Mode" with potentially your own extenders/Mesh Wifi to extend the signal even further, or pay Virgin for their extenders as not free on your package level. The latter is what you will try to be sold if you ring in. I think you can cancel VM within 14 days too, though a forum staff is better to advise on options around that.

  • unisoft's avatar
    unisoft
    Knows their stuff

    HUB3? If so, that's a big reason in itself. You can try another WiFi channel to see if any better but it's likely to be on "AUTO". I'm not sure how many other access points are near your house trying to use the same frequencies either.

    Either get your own router (many Asus are great) and use VM's hub in "Modem Mode" with potentially your own extenders/Mesh Wifi to extend the signal even further, or pay Virgin for their extenders as not free on your package level. The latter is what you will try to be sold if you ring in. I think you can cancel VM within 14 days too, though a forum staff is better to advise on options around that.

    • MalcolmH54's avatar
      MalcolmH54
      Tuning in

      Thanks for your answer, I am no sure which hub I have, as a new installation it would have been nice to think that I have the latest.  Virgin must know that their Wi-Fi is, basically carp. I do have 14 days cancellation, I will think on that. However, it may be worth adding an O2 sim as (a) that should entitle me to an upgrade of the input speed by 50% (which may address the degradation to less than 30Mbps) and (b) as far as I can see would enable me to get free pods if (a) doesn’t address the issue.

  • japitts's avatar
    japitts
    Very Insightful Person

    Also remember VM supply a broadband connection, and free routers. The routers they supply will never be top-spec, and providing your own wireless equipment will always outperform whatever an ISP supplies.

    • MalcolmH54's avatar
      MalcolmH54
      Tuning in

      There is no such thing as a free router. BT didn’t charge me a separate fee for their router which seemed to work more efficiently than the Virgin one,

  • Maybe your devices are dropping to the 2.4GHz band, rather than maintaining 5GHz?

    You can check this in the connected devices section of the HUB web interface (192.168.0.1).

    You could trying splitting the bands into two SSIDs.