Broadband speed

[GarryL]

I have been a virgin customer for 10 years. I currently am out of contract and am looking to upgrade for faster Broadband. But reading on here is anyone actually happy with the service and speeds, it doesn't look like it. 

[goslow]

The nature of a support forum is that it tends to attract customers who have got a problem of some description. There are not that many topics which are posted on here to heap praise on VM for a job well done.

Some of the regulars on here report that they hardly ever have issues with their VM connection. My own past experience with VM was that it was mostly fine but occasionally slow for no particularly obvious reason, often the problems were temporary and went away on their own.

Much might depend on the particular area a customer is located. A customer connected to 20+ year old infrastructure from a former cable TV company may have a worse experience than one connected to some of VM's newest areas.

That said, I have been using a BT FTTP connection for the past couple of years and it has been faultless. So if you are considering a move from VM, and you have some other highspeed options available, they might be worth a look. (Your other recent topic ref speed suggests you may have a connection problem of some sort)

[big-luap]

Had the 1GIG package for 2 years now. The first 18 months my home system ran at 1000 mbit which gave speed test results of 960mbit. Not fully understanding the reason for this, I then spoke to some nerds on Discord from a PC magazine, to find out the if your devices supported 2.5GBit ethernet you also needed the rest of your network to also support it. ie switches also needed to support 2.5 Gbit, this then gives you the same speed to the PC as VM gaurrantee to the HUB. nb you need a smart managed switch which controls Energy Efficient Ethernet to be able to get the full speed, but that is another story. 

as to the service, have had a few problems which have been resolved usually within 24/48 hrs. The only one that took longer was when they decided to rewire the road, due to the cables being over 20 years old, but was only offline for about 30 mins. 

Was with NTL then Virgin, so about 28 years & a change of address.

[Adduxi]

When it's good, it's good.  When it's bad, then the problems start.  Do you have any other providers in your area?  Altnets seem to give a really good price v speed at the moment.  Also some smaller ISP's provide 12 month contracts with NO price increases, e.g. Aquiss.

I had VM and BT for many years running concurrently, and had more outages with VM.  However they were usually only glitches.  I think in 20+ years I only had to ring VM a couple of times, and from memory, never had to call BT.

[Ash_]

I have been a VM customer for over 12 years now and the majority if the time it's been great. 

As GoSlow pointed out - people only come to the forums when they have issues or need support. 

Just upgraded to the 1gig package and I am not getting the speeds advertised even over 2.5gig. I suspect my local cabinet has a lot of traffic to it and the cable laid to my property is over 15 years old too. 

On the whole, though I have been happy with VM. 

[Adduxi]

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@Ash_ wrote:

I have been a VM customer for over 12 years now and the majority if the time it's been great. 

<snip>. I suspect my local cabinet has a lot of traffic to it and the cable laid to my property is over 15 years old too. 

 Cable shouldn't be an issue, my old NTL cable would have been older.  Setup a BQM to monitor the incoming circuit.  This should show up any over subscription problems.  www.thinkbroadband.com/ping