cancel
Showing results for 
Search instead for 
Did you mean: 

BT Fibre vs Virgin Media.

Blairian7
On our wavelength

Below is Virgin Media on a good day. 

Virgin 350 on a good day.Virgin 350 on a good day.

Below is BT Fibre 900 on day one.

BT 900 day one!BT 900 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! 

12 REPLIES 12

ToffeeSurprise
Fibre optic

I pay the same price for these two services.

39f4f6a951d7d6e6d7c9a31498171f2585d828b2-20-04-2021

e2288da76332a5072ef69f0e10a9c96fcad864a6-20-04-2021

Can anyone guess which I'm discontinuing?

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.

 

unisoft
Well-informed

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).


@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.

Anonymous
Not applicable

@ToffeeSurprise wrote:


You're looking at something like 22% availability across the UK now for FTTP.


Shame i can't even get FTTC 


@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.


@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:

  • The awful Puma chipset issues.
  • Web sites being blocked due to bad VM/LG routing (SLC for example)
  • Virgin Media blocking NTP causing one of my applications to stop working - I had to enable a VPN just to get the clock to sync. Virgin Media were insisting they were not doing anything and that it was the NTP servers blocking them, despite the fact that you could ping them fine. They were clearly blocking NTP to all but a few servers like the Windows NTP server.
  • Multiple times where my connection went down for hours due to my router "not allowed" to access the network.
  • Multiple times where Virgin Media / Liberty Global broke Internet routing completely causing hours of outages.
  • Days of high packet loss due to a network fault (one caused entirely by HFC failure modes).
  • IPv6 implementation (or lack) resulting in Teredo tunnels causing issues. Partly an application issue, but no excuse not to do IPv6 these days.
  • High latency in gaming, hundreds of ms of lag spikes, 60-70ms pings at time to EU servers. Yes, I've actually had times where latency to Europe is comparable to what I get now to the east coast of the US. Some days latency in WoW has been so bad that I've quit the game in disgust for the night.
  • A day of lost service after upgrading to 1Gig because someone screwed 3.1 up, and customer service refused / were not able to reactivate the older Super Hub 3. And insisting this wouldn't help despite the service working fine on DOCSIS 3.0 up until the time I mysteriously upgraded and activated SH4.

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.


@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.

Anonymous
Not applicable
i only get DSL here 🙂 no VM or BT fiber. Star link is looking good for me soon 🙂