Forum Discussion

ntadmin's avatar
ntadmin
Joining in
7 months ago

WiFi significantly worse than previous provider

I am a new customer, first experience of virgin media. The wired connections seem pretty good and very stable. However, I have fairly regular complaints from my family about the wifi ever since switching. I have had no complaints for the past 3-4 years. The wifi base is is exactly the same position. I have a Hub 3.0.

Today I ran the service checked on the hub and it said I had a weak signal to a desktop Mac-mini a mere 4m from the Hub. Computers in places that used to work perfectly are losing the wifi signal.

I know that this house does not need more "wifi bases" - I had it working perfectly with the previous provider with a single base unit. How do we get this working?

  • Client62's avatar
    Client62
    Alessandro Volta

    Buy a Wi-Fi Mesh with enough nodes to cover the house.

    • ntadmin's avatar
      ntadmin
      Joining in

      I appreciate that that may solve the problem. But before I do that, could you help me to understand why the WiFi from the VM router shouldn't be as good as I had with my previous provider?

  • legacy1's avatar
    legacy1
    Alessandro Volta

    I suggest a better wifi router with 1Gb ports and put hub in modem mode

     


    ntadmin wrote:

    could you help me to understand why the WiFi from the VM router shouldn't be as good as I had with my previous provider?


    Because VM are cheap on the wifi hardware and will not make it better other ISP give you a better router 

  • Client62's avatar
    Client62
    Alessandro Volta

    Our Hub 3 it works well to the end of our drive about 20M !

    I don't care what the Hub's diagnostic reports says because it reports spurious issues that do not exist such as Ethernet problems where a device is 10/100 and not able to connect at 1000 Mb/s. Not a fault at all.

    We use these Hub 3 settings for max stability and for compatibility with modern devices.



     



    • Steven_L's avatar
      Steven_L
      Forum Team

      Hello ntadmin,

      Welcome to the community and thanks for taking the time to post here on the forums. I’m sorry to hear of the issues that you’re having with your WiFi connection at the moment. 

      Having looked into the issues on our system, I can see that your downstream power levels seem to be a bit on the higher side, so we would need to arrange a technician visit to resolve the problems.

      Kind Regards,

      Steven_L

  • Thank you @Client62, I will give those a go and see if that stabilises things.

  • jb66's avatar
    jb66
    Very Insightful Person

    The hub3 is not a very good router, if your comparing it to the likes of a BThub it will fall short of expectations.  I'd suggest buying a used Asus router from Ebay which will increase the range.

    • Cardiffman282's avatar
      Cardiffman282
      Trouble shooter

      Hub 3 wifi is weaker than a Bud shandy. Stick the cheap lump of plastic into modem mode and get a better router. 

  • Sadly the wifi performance continues to be the worst I have seen in years. I am really very disappointed and shocked that the wifi is this bad and beginning to regret switching Virgin. @virgin - is this really the best you can do?

  • I thought that I would provide an update in case anyone else has the same issue and finds this thread from a search engine ...

    @Steven_L responded in the thread and arranged (via DM) to get an engineer. The engineer came, checked all the connections (they were fine) and replaced the router/wifi box. This resulted in a minor improvement for a bit, but it was still way worse than my previous supplier: unstable wifi, and some parts of the house basically not working usably.

    So I contacted @Steven_L again and he arranged for a Hub 5 to be sent to me as a replacement. It is substantially better in every way: the web interface works at a reasonable speed, the internet connection is as expected (ie at the predicted speed and stable) and the wifi (a) reaches the whole house and (b) is stable.

    So: switching to Hub 5 seems to have solved things. Thank you @Steven_L for arranging things.

    • Kath_P's avatar
      Kath_P
      Forum Team

      Hi ntadmin, 

      Thanks for coming back to the thread to update for other people to see what the overall resolution was. We're glad things are resolved for you now. 

      If you have any further issues, be sure to pop back to us in the Community 😊

      Thanks,