Is Virgin Media Broadband really as bad as reviews say?

[niket198]

So I moved into a new house, congrats to me. My old setup was a 4G+ mobile router with a SMARTY sim worked well for near enough a year! Signal is garbage in this new house though so since this is a long term place I've looked into ISPs. The only one who is even offering speeds faster than 100mbps in my area was Virgin and my friend recommends they are good so I have arranged to have someone come out to install it for me. Yet online, the company is absolutely blasted for poor customer service, slow speeds. Etc. Yet I was told if I did not get at least 250mbps of the 500mbps odd I have paid for I could back out though that's yet to be seen that's like half too! Why wouldn't I just be on a lower package at that point? I've had an experience with customer service as I contacted them about a extra I accidentally opted for and didn't want and they seemed a bit clueless honestly. Though being an IT guy I'd suppose I can use ethernet to test this and my laptop should be more than capable, with a usbc dongle of the maximum speeds offered.

[Client62]

Virgin Media's offshore support can be a frustration for sure.

It is very easy to order and forever end up paying for more bandwidth than is needed or used.

If placing an order, do so online so you are 100% clear of what contract you are buying and your details are correctly recorded.

[Roger_Gooner]

The main problem is complaints handling rather than the service itself. And my personal experience is that the broadband has been very reliable over the years.

If you sign up you can leave within 14 days without penalty.

[jpeg1]

"very reliable" with all that red ink on the BQM?   🙂 

[Roger_Gooner]

Yup, my broadband keeps chugging on. If it starts to play up I'll have something to report and I'll experience VM's customer service.

[IPFreely]

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@Client62 wrote:

It is very easy to order and forever end up paying for more bandwidth than is needed or used.

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Very true. If, for example, you don't notice 5-20% packet loss throughout the course of the day, enough to slow your connection to ADSL speeds and cause pages to load noticeably more slowly, you probably don't need 500 Mbit or Gig1.

VM are a mass market provider. It's fine while it works but if it doesn't and it's not something on the troubleshooting flow chart you're stuffed: the support is largely abysmal.

I should also mention that VM connections just aren't as responsive when browsing as some of their competition. The higher latency and occasionally asinine routing makes a notable difference.

[VMUser1812]

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@IPFreely wrote:

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@Client62 wrote:

It is very easy to order and forever end up paying for more bandwidth than is needed or used.

---

Very true. If, for example, you don't notice 5-20% packet loss throughout the course of the day, enough to slow your connection to ADSL speeds and cause pages to load noticeably more slowly, you probably don't need 500 Mbit or Gig1.

VM are a mass market provider. It's fine while it works but if it doesn't and it's not something on the troubleshooting flow chart you're stuffed: the support is largely abysmal.

I should also mention that VM connections just aren't as responsive when browsing as some of their competition. The higher latency and occasionally asinine routing makes a notable difference.

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And this, of course is entirely true.

It does show up the pointlessness of the oft-mentioned knee-jerk posts on here along the lines of ‘post up your hub stats’, ‘oh your downstream power is over x so there is definitely an issue which needs…..’

The truth is that these things are far, far more nuanced than it might look, you need to see the whole picture and (unfortunately) have a degree of understanding about how this stuff all works. Simply saying, ‘oh your ‘whatever’ level is this, so you will have problems’, is just never right!

Now consider the above example, the BQM looks bad, no? Except what does a BQM actually mean? It’s NOT a definitive view of your internet connection, but rather a view of how well a particular set of host machines can communicate with your hub. It is informative, but not indicative! But the user concerned is reporting no problems, for their particular use case. So what does that tell us?

It all depends on what you are doing, for most users, watching cat videos on Facebook, horrible packet loss will be fine; trying to participate in a multi-user Teams call, oh dear!  But if this impact ‘you’, well sorry about that but you are in the minority, so don’t expect VM to pull the stops out - ‘sucks to be you, really, doesn’t it - is the (unacknowledged, and it never will be), response?

[lsarcher]

I've had Virgin broadband for 13 years, has always worked fine for me, obviously there has been the occasional outage but not often and get the 1gb speed I pay for.

I do use my own router though with theirs in modem modem. I use an external DNS service too.

[Timwilky]

Offshore customer services are dire and to be avoided.

I have been stuck with the various cable co that is now VM since Telewest days and am desperate to leave, alas nobody wants to replace the aluminium (Not even copper) cable to my home with a nice fibre and give me modern speeds so having started on telewests superfast 10Mb I am now on VMs Gig1 service alas with  hub 4 that cannot deliver thier full speed. My home LAN is predominately 10GB and I have my wifi from 3 Asus RT-AX89X routers configured as an access point mesh, hub in modem mode connected to a pfSense firewall.

In the past 20 plus years I have experienced one serious 3 day outage where the undergound power to the main VM box failed and required the utilities co to dig up the road and replace the cable. offshore telling me it was my set up despite it being an area fault etc.

Issues  with VM.

Always last generation technologies,  insisting hub 4 is good enough and refusing to replace. No wiifi 6, rollout hub 5 with the much needed 2.5Gb connector but again last generation as not wifi 6e etc. Hubs are cheap nobbled devices that lack real gateway  functionality and have very poor wifi specs. They are designed so that the offshore script readers can support users with limited capability, rather than to deliver a functional secure internet gateway.

poor latency, poor upload speeds, 52Mb in the cloud storage era is pitiful.

Despite IPv6 being around for 20+ years it has not made it to VM.

OK VM are finally planning to roll out true fibre that should be capable of delivering responsive syncronous speed and we can get rid of Docsis limitations but that yet again is jam tomorrow and more likely next decade. Hopefully the will then alow users to connect their device directly to the ONT and get rid of any hub requirement.