Thought i would post this for those yet to join but are checking out how the land lays when problems arise etc. I believe both positive and negative feedback is worth time otherwise the playing field becomes a little bit skewed.
And no this is not all praise, only been with Virgin for 3 weeks now and already hit a glitch so here goes.
First i switched to virgin for 3 main reasons, firstly BT who have been rock solid are wanting to charge silly money for G.Fast and were not willing to budge (even for a 15 year plus customer), I could have gone Cityfibre where i live (Maidenhead) but the layout of the grounds is odd and i know it will be a painful experience and at my age i dont need any more annoyances lol.
Virgin was already installed hardware wise so i got a good deal (£7 less than BT for double the speed) and signed up.
Well i know experience is based on Locale, and how many users i understand the technicalities of how the network is shared so even though colleagues praised VM i knew that meant nothing in the scheme of things.
Anyway, Hardware arrived on time, let it update then rebooted into Modem Mode. Connecting to my Ubiquity Dream Machine and boom connection is live. Ran some speed tests and the speeds were similar to the upper speed stated when signing up.
One concern i had was all the reports of bad pings, now compared to BT which was stable at circa 5ms, Virgin averages at about 16-20ms, not as bad as i thought it would be so struck lucky there.
Well after one week however the service absolutely bombed, with downloads maxing at circa 70Mb and Uploads struggling at circa 5Mb.
So i decided if i needed to ever argue i should have evidence and setup a Speedtest Tracker, filtering the servers to the 2 consistent fast responders,
As you can see, something was wrong and it was not contention, so i checked the VM site and it stated no known issues so i thought i would monitor for a bit. However on Sep 3rd circa 4PM the internet constantly died with the dream machine logging endless disconnects (one for several hours) so i checked the VM site again and the checker immediately booked an Engineer visit.
This was impressive and definitely a plus, i did not have to face a long phone call trying to explain the situation, VM appeared to have it hand. I also got several emails updating on the issue which appears to actually be a local issue as you can see both the upload and download have for now recovered.
I always believe it is how an issue is dealt with that matters, stuff breaks but how the company handles it is what matters, sure if the service repeated like the above i may not be so positive lol however for now i cannot really complain.
I did check the VM Router to see why the upload was still a bit flaky and for now it shows just one channel connected (this may or may not be right not sure for the lower upload speed service how many channels are normal)
The Ping, latency and Jitter etc also look pretty stable now so as long as it stays like this i am actually a happy customer for now and thought i would take the time to say so, i appreciate every ones experience is different so YMMV, but for now i cant really complain.
