Well I have spent 3 pretty fruitless days with Virgin Media tech support trying to get what has worked for me for over a decade back working again. I have a bit of a sprawling house and a home office at the end of a 100 foot garden. I had a solution that was working perfectly for me which was a Hub 3 in modem mode and all of the heavy lifting left to my wired ethernet network of 6 trusty Apple Airport Extremes all linked together through a Netgear Gigabit switch. Then after over 10 years of flawless use I started getting all kinds of strange things happening. I checked that my network was all working well before calling the nightmare that is Virgin Media tech support. I was told they don't support third party equipment and so I needed to stop using my Apple Airport Extremes for them to help. I said that I hadn't put the network in for fun, but because Virgin Media's wi-fi can't support my needs as it can't provide the wi-fi coverage. They said it could support my needs so with zero confidence I decommissioned my Apple equipment and switched the Hub back into Router mode. I then linked the Hub directly to my Netgear gigabit switch and, after a lot of moving things around, got all of my wired connections to work again delivering my full broadband speed to all of my devices.
As instructed my Virgin Media Tech Support, I then tested the Hub's wi-fi coverage using the Virgin Media Connect app and it only covered half of my house and, unsurprisingly, absolutely zero coverage for my office. So I was told, don't worry we have Pods (Virgin's mesh network extensions) that can extend the wi-fi coverage no problem. I asked well I am going to need at least two, probably three, of those for my house and one for my office. I would also like the Pods to be wired to my gigabit switch so they each get the full broadband speed. In particular, I needed the one for my home office at the end of the garden to be wired to the 40 metre ethernet cable running from my house as it is physically impossible for the wi-fi signal to get there using wireless mesh signalling. I learnt that Virgin's pods can't be connected through ethernet - what a HUGE design flaw! I then said can you recommend an extender I can use instead of a Pod for my office - they couldn't and recommended I install a 3rd party router. So I said I had a third party router and you told me I shouldn't be using that - so you are now completely contradicting yourselves. I said if I put that back in will you work with me work out what is going on to cause problems? They said no they wouldn't. So no solution from Virgin Media tech support. I do appreciate that not everyone has a sprawling house or a home office at the end of their garden, but I must be far from unique. Virgin Media cannot support people like me so don't use them.
Abandoned completely by Virgin Media tech support with no solution to meet my requirements I then had to go back to some good old-fashioned discussion groups for Apple Airport - many people still use them despite them no longer being made by Apple - they are bulletproof. I also don't think the situation would be any better if I had spent £500 on a brand new mesh third party system like eero. In fact I know it wouldn't as I bought one and experienced exactly the same problems with Virgin Media's broadband so sent it back for a refund. What I discovered through a lot of research that, while Apple's support guidance states that Apple Airport equipment has to have at least one unit operating as a router you can, with a bit of persistence, get them ALL to operate in Bridge mode. This is critical to the Hub in Router mode and an Airport Extreme operating as a router not both allocating IP addresses on the network because that causes chaos for your devices. So what I stumbled on is a solution that works PERFECTLY. You set up the Airport Extremes to have exactly the same wireless network name as the Hub and the same wi-fi password. You select the option to Create a new Apple network for each Airport Extreme with these same settings, but set ALL of them to operate in Bridge mode - you may have to go back into the Airport settings to put each unit in Bridge mode as it may not default to this on original set-up. What a miracle! A Virgin wi-fi network extended through my wired together Airport Extremes through my Netgear gigabit switch that gives me wireless speeds of over 500 MBPS across my entire house and in my home office.
So I have fixed the problem caused by Virgin's broadband network with zero help from their team.
