on 22-04-2021 01:39
Below is Virgin Media on a good day.
Below is BT Fibre 900 on day one.
If you can... leave Virgin Media. They think speed is everything. 1 year of disconnects and packet loss and dropped call and lost income with virgin because they don't understand or care about stability. Speed is everything... Now they are not king of speed anymore and BT services are 100% better. Customer services based in UK. Will not go back to Virgin and would advise you to avoid them at all costs. BT 100mbs will be better the Virgin 1gb. Trust me. I rolled back to Virgin 350mb from 1gb after a day!
on 22-04-2021 03:15
I pay the same price for these two services.
Can anyone guess which I'm discontinuing?
22-04-2021 11:21 - edited 22-04-2021 11:24
It's a brand new service with new equipment and not so many customers yet as most of us can't even get access to it.
I'd imagine the other new contenders, such as VX Fibre, City Fibre and others will be similar.
Compare that to VM, in which in some cases the equipment is 20 years old.
Yes, VM could have spent more on infrastructure and made less profits, but it didn't.
I'll be interested to see a comparison in another few years.
on 22-04-2021 12:30
An there you have it in a nutshell.
Rising subscriptions usually way over inflation, yearly at least, bar one.
Still over utilisation and nodes that need splitting amongst need for increased upstream and decent modem to access the service that can handle 1GB+ speeds on LAN ports.
Most of us have had good speeds at some point only to hit with an issue or issues at some point in their lifecycle.
Only a couple of years ago, it was the old CMTS (Motorola/River Delta) that whole towns, villages were plagued by the "single thread download" issue and the usual denial of most Virgin staff (bar one!) to admit it. CMTS swapped out overnight (as the apparatus room was too small in this particular town to have old and new in it) and voila! service good again. Single thread was great issue too. Pay for 200mbps at the time get max of 5MBPS on file downloads from a browser. And all the excuses about being network being fine - you know the rest of those excuses about being your own setup and equipment (even if you work in IT for a major employer doing international technical design and roll outs).
22-04-2021 17:18 - edited 22-04-2021 17:19
@Z92 wrote:It's a brand new service with new equipment and not so many customers yet as most of us can't even get access to it.
I'd imagine the other new contenders, such as VX Fibre, City Fibre and others will be similar.
Compare that to VM, in which in some cases the equipment is 20 years old.
Yes, VM could have spent more on infrastructure and made less profits, but it didn't.
I'll be interested to see a comparison in another few years.
You're looking at something like 22% availability across the UK now for FTTP. Openreach at current rate are doing about 500K properties per quarter, about 4-5x the rate Virgin Media are expanding which is approximately 100K premises per quarter. That's to say nothing of City Fibre, which at most recent rate was about 70K premises per quarter and they're ramping up operations due to multiple contracts so this will likely go up significantly.
It's not particularly reasonable to say "but the equipment is 20 years old" if someone says "I'm not going to spend a penny on upgrading that 20 year old equipment". Or if Virgin Media expand using legacy services (i.e. HFC). The DOCSIS 3.0/3.1 stuff will also be recent as well, 3.1 isn't even available everywhere yet.
DOCSIS 3.0 is a 2006 standard, 3.1 is a 2013 standard. For comparison GPON and XGPON are 2004 and 2010 standards respectively. So the technology is actually older than the appropriate DOCSIS standards. RFoG standard is also 2010.
Openreach have started building like crazy after stagnating because they're terrified of altnets swooping in. Meanwhile Virgin Media have a huge amount of work to do if they want to seriously upgrade their network since upgrades were deferred due to bean counters wanting to make themselves look good.
If I was running a service where my only real selling point of speed was quickly diminishing, and my competitors were increasing their service footprint at a rate I can't begin to compete with, offering a better, more reliable, cheaper service, and I had huge amounts of work to do due to underinvestment, I would be terrified.
Oh and more people leaving for better competitors means even less funds for my upgrades.
Not a good time to be Virgin Media.
on 22-04-2021 17:23
@ToffeeSurprise wrote:You're looking at something like 22% availability across the UK now for FTTP.
Shame i can't even get FTTC
22-04-2021 17:35 - edited 22-04-2021 17:37
@ToffeeSurprise wrote:
@Z92 wrote:It's a brand new service with new equipment and not so many customers yet as most of us can't even get access to it.
I'd imagine the other new contenders, such as VX Fibre, City Fibre and others will be similar.
Compare that to VM, in which in some cases the equipment is 20 years old.
Yes, VM could have spent more on infrastructure and made less profits, but it didn't.
I'll be interested to see a comparison in another few years.
Not a good time to be Virgin Media.
This is very true. they have an uphill battle ahead over the coming years as FTTP from Openreach and altnets rapidly expands across the country.
VM has been marketed on speed for many years but what will be their major selling point a few years from now? As things stand, prices are high, customer service is rock bottom, upload/latency are well behind the FTTP providers. Once the speed advantage has gone, what is left.
on 22-04-2021 17:47
@unisoft wrote:An there you have it in a nutshell.
Rising subscriptions usually way over inflation, yearly at least, bar one.
Still over utilisation and nodes that need splitting amongst need for increased upstream and decent modem to access the service that can handle 1GB+ speeds on LAN ports.
Most of us have had good speeds at some point only to hit with an issue or issues at some point in their lifecycle.
Only a couple of years ago, it was the old CMTS (Motorola/River Delta) that whole towns, villages were plagued by the "single thread download" issue and the usual denial of most Virgin staff (bar one!) to admit it. CMTS swapped out overnight (as the apparatus room was too small in this particular town to have old and new in it) and voila! service good again. Single thread was great issue too. Pay for 200mbps at the time get max of 5MBPS on file downloads from a browser. And all the excuses about being network being fine - you know the rest of those excuses about being your own setup and equipment (even if you work in IT for a major employer doing international technical design and roll outs).
I forgot about the single thread issue as it didn't really impact me thankfully. Same with the Protocol 41 stuff.
Stuff that has seriously impacted me:
And here's the best part: all of the above is on one of the better Virgin Media connections out there. God help those with worse connections in oversubscribed areas.
on 22-04-2021 17:49
@Anonymous wrote:
@ToffeeSurprise wrote:You're looking at something like 22% availability across the UK now for FTTP.
Shame i can't even get FTTC
I couldn't either actually, it's why I had to go with VM to begin with. The only BT service was ADSL which I might have been able to get 2Mbps down out of.
on 22-04-2021 17:53