Leaving VM after something like 27 years

[ILuvNips]

With my current contract coming to an end, prices shooting up and not being able to get a "good" deal I'll be leaving on the 8th November after being a customer for some 27 years. Anybody remember Videotron from way back when 🙂

Have to admit that I've never personally enjoy the merry go round that is contract renewal and seeing some of the deals that people are being offered on sites like HotUKDeals, I guess I am sick of over paying or not being offered these "good" deals. Current plan is to go with Community Fibre but I've not yet decided.

I do/did make use of the VM emails and I've slowly been transferring all my emails over to GMail, boy what a chore that is, didn't realise that I had an account with just about anything and everything on the internet 🙂

I was warned by the VM CS person that Community Fibre may slow up as more and more people subscribe but my ride with VM hasn't always been smooth, dare I say the words over-subscribed, peak usage or water in the green boxes and then taking years to resolve?!? Deep down I wish I didn't have to leave, could do without all the associated hassle but there again a change could be a good thing and my internet of late hasn't been that great.

Being a techie I'll probably still keep visiting these forums but as an observer, just need to go find the Community Fibre forums now ready for the first big whinge when things go wrong 🙂

[goslow]

I was with VM for 20+ years and left 18 months ago under similar circumstances to you.

The thing that kept me with VM all that time was the speed advantage they had at my address. When BT FTTP came along there was a suitable alternative.

The quality of the BT connection is far superior to the one from VM with the infrastructure being installed just a few years ago compared with VM's 20+ year old infrastructure from the days of NTL.

Hopefully you will find the change is a good one.

[ILuvNips]

Just signed up for Community Fibre, 150Mb at £17.99 for 24 months, so I’ve taken the plunge head first. Install date is this coming Friday so a good 10 or so days of overlap to compare.

My old hub 3 developed an issue, it was an old dog and since I’ve had a re-furbed hub 5 and WiFi within the house is just poor, it seems to disconnect 5-6 times during the day coming back 3 or so mins later. Been trying to get this resolved and just got sick of it, especially when the advice is to hard wire, how the hell do I hardwire mobile devices?!?

[Cardiffman282]

Let us know how it goes. 

[ILuvNips]

Community Fibre Engineers turned up today, looked around and said I'd need a hoist to get the wiring installed, my 'oh dear the install will be delayed' sensor started tingling as I've had stuff like this from Virgin Engineers before! But my pessimistic side needs to be lowered just like the ultra low ping times of Community Fibre 🙂 Saj called somebody and 15 mins later a van with a hoist appeared, they listened to how I wanted it cabled outside and inside, tidied up and left.

Nice, easy and simple and I'm now posting from the new Community Fibre broadband.

Initial impressions?

1) Their router seems to have way more coverage, I'm in my furthest point on the ground floor typing this, with the Virgin Hub3 and 5 this just wouldn't work without a repeater in between.

2) I can now disable uPNP, hoo-ray, port forwarding just never worked for me with the Virgin hub 3, never tried with the 5, unless the rule had been added via uPNP, any port forwarding settings that I added would simply disappear. I think I posted about this here way back when, didn't get a solution so was forced to enable uPNP.

3) Their router supports DDNS which is handy, I currently have this configured on my Asus repeater which fires a Cron job in the repeater to fetch and update my actual internet IP, I can now do this within the router.

4) I've read that this router also support VPNs, I'll be honest I've not found where yet so this could be incorrect but if it does then another plus point as again I currently do this in my Asus repeater which results in a complicated config.

Early days, and I full well know and understand the statement 'the grass is never greener ....' but so far I'm actually impressed, will be sure to post a grumble as and when it all goes pie eyed 🙂

[ILuvNips]

Quick update in case it helps others

Encountered my first sort of issue. I have CCTV installed and can access it both via a VPN and being naughty via port forwarding. Out over the weekend I noticed that I couldn’t access it remotely via port forwarding. Got home and checked the config and it was all there. Did some reading and it seems that CF use CGNAT on IPv4 so as you’re effectively sharing an IPv4 address you can’t port forward.

Looked over at their website and not a single mention of this so called them and they confirmed that port forwarding would only work on their 3gbs package.

Lodged a complaint which they are reviewing as I had called them before signing up and told them how I use the internet but this wasn’t pointed out.

No real big issue per-se and port forwarding does work on IPv6 but the issue there is that not all mobile networks support it, certainly O2 doesn’t which is where my wife’s mobile has ended up.

Apart from this no other issues. Not a single WiFi disconnect for the week that it has been installed and I have now discovered that I can’t get signal at the bottom of my garden now, that was covered by Virgin pod so will have to look at getting a repeater to cover this off. 

[interlinked]

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@ILuvNips wrote:
Looked over at their website and not a single mention of this so called them and they confirmed that port forwarding would only work on their 3gbs package.

The entire notion on having to pay for a whole 3Gbps package just to be able to perform a mediocre task as port forwarding is an interesting one. I'd have assumed that to be a standard feature and say that as someone doing so on 200mbps with no issue.