Leaving VM after something like 27 years

I was with VM for 20+ years and left 18 months ago under similar circumstances to you.

The thing that kept me with VM all that time was the speed advantage they had at my address. When BT FTTP came along there was a suitable alternative.

The quality of the BT connection is far superior to the one from VM with the infrastructure being installed just a few years ago compared with VM's 20+ year old infrastructure from the days of NTL.

Hopefully you will find the change is a good one.

Community Fibre Engineers turned up today, looked around and said I'd need a hoist to get the wiring installed, my 'oh dear the install will be delayed' sensor started tingling as I've had stuff like this from Virgin Engineers before! But my pessimistic side needs to be lowered just like the ultra low ping times of Community Fibre 🙂 Saj called somebody and 15 mins later a van with a hoist appeared, they listened to how I wanted it cabled outside and inside, tidied up and left.

Nice, easy and simple and I'm now posting from the new Community Fibre broadband.

Initial impressions?

1) Their router seems to have way more coverage, I'm in my furthest point on the ground floor typing this, with the Virgin Hub3 and 5 this just wouldn't work without a repeater in between.

2) I can now disable uPNP, hoo-ray, port forwarding just never worked for me with the Virgin hub 3, never tried with the 5, unless the rule had been added via uPNP, any port forwarding settings that I added would simply disappear. I think I posted about this here way back when, didn't get a solution so was forced to enable uPNP.

3) Their router supports DDNS which is handy, I currently have this configured on my Asus repeater which fires a Cron job in the repeater to fetch and update my actual internet IP, I can now do this within the router.

4) I've read that this router also support VPNs, I'll be honest I've not found where yet so this could be incorrect but if it does then another plus point as again I currently do this in my Asus repeater which results in a complicated config.

Early days, and I full well know and understand the statement 'the grass is never greener ....' but so far I'm actually impressed, will be sure to post a grumble as and when it all goes pie eyed 🙂

Quick update in case it helps others

Encountered my first sort of issue. I have CCTV installed and can access it both via a VPN and being naughty via port forwarding. Out over the weekend I noticed that I couldn’t access it remotely via port forwarding. Got home and checked the config and it was all there. Did some reading and it seems that CF use CGNAT on IPv4 so as you’re effectively sharing an IPv4 address you can’t port forward.

Looked over at their website and not a single mention of this so called them and they confirmed that port forwarding would only work on their 3gbs package.

Lodged a complaint which they are reviewing as I had called them before signing up and told them how I use the internet but this wasn’t pointed out.

No real big issue per-se and port forwarding does work on IPv6 but the issue there is that not all mobile networks support it, certainly O2 doesn’t which is where my wife’s mobile has ended up.

Apart from this no other issues. Not a single WiFi disconnect for the week that it has been installed and I have now discovered that I can’t get signal at the bottom of my garden now, that was covered by Virgin pod so will have to look at getting a repeater to cover this off.