I signed up to the Gig1 service recently after ditching VM many years ago and I have a few questions.
I opted for a technician just incase there are any faults, breaks, wires cut etc on the outside after years of being an Openreach customer but what I wanted to know is would the technician be willing to replace the inside faceplate and coax cable? Everytime I had an engineer call out with Openreach with BT or Zen the engineers often fitted us a fancy looking new socket and faceplate. The dsl cables also remain in good condition. The Virgin kit we have inside the property is ancient in comparison, not checked the box on the outside but the technician ought to take a look at that too as part of the setup right?
The second question is regarding the HUB. When I took out contracts with both BT and Zen both of them told me exactly what routers would be provided in the package details. Virgin just says Wifi HUB. Is this a hub3, hub4 or hub5 with the Gig1 service?
Third question with the Zen ISP I have never once ran into any issues with censorship / blocked websites unless we choose to block them via parental controls on specific devices on our end. No ISP enforcements. Is there a way to disable that without VPN's?
Fourth and final question I'm worried about peak time service utilisation. I get I'm given a 14 day window to back out, does that begin on the order date, or install date? I have Zen on a rolling month contract so if Virgin still sucks in the area, I'll just cancel. Is there any way I can find out how bad the overutilisation is in certain areas before the technician visits in a few weeks time? I know when we first switched to BT I found some positive local connection graphs with proper stats which stated speeds in the upper region of the dsl checker estimates on multiple connections within the local area (individual line conditions aside) and it's been stable for the most parts, one issue took multiple call-outs due to escalating corrosion on the wire near the telepole, but that's about it. With FTTC with good line conditions and a close enough by cabinet you half expect the stability, low latencies etc and are more concerned with the speed. With Virgin Media you have to be concerned about the full service and there's very little information available on how good or bad the service is in the local areas...
