For about six or seven days we've been experiencing an unstable connection, which is most noticeable when streaming (e.g. iPlayer, Netflix) and videoconferencing (which 3 out of 4 of us in the household use when working from home). These are all things we've been doing on a daily basis for the last three years without any particular issue. Most days we have to switch to a mobile phone hotspot (or several) to be able to connect stably to our work meetings. As I teach over Zoom, my work has been very badly affected. I've been running some monitoring software for about 36 hours, which shows periodic packet loss and other issues.
Virgin customer services 'tested' the line and did the usual reboot yesterday, and pronounced everything 'fixed' (although they'd been unable to see a problem in the first place from their end, so I'm not sure what they thought they were fixing), however the issues are as bad if not worse today. I requested a technician but they refused to send one and said that they would monitor the situation from their end and give me a call back within a couple of days if there were any problems. I don't have much confidence in this happening.
I've had to order a 5G hub with data sim (on a one-month rolling contract basis) at my own expense to be able to teach my Zoom classes
We signed up for a new 18-month contract a few days ago, at the same time cancelling our TV and landline contracts, as we didn't use them, and going broadband-only, at the same speed as before. (I'm assuming that the instability starting at about the same time is just a coincidence? I can't think of why the two would be connected). I'm thinking of cancelling as we're within the fourteen day 'cooling off' period (which I assume we've got, although come to think of it, I can't even be sure this is the case). Should I give them a few days' grace or just cancel and go with another provider?
