Thinking of changing my home broadband to Infinity 2 from Virgin Media

[Davit2005]

The reliability of the Virgin seems to be slipping lately with the infamous SuperHub 2 ( which is a pile of ). I have to have the SuperHub 2 in Modem mode and use a third party router and this is the 3rd replacement. The engineer started feeding me all kinds of stuff last time he came to have a look even though I showed him what the problem was.

 

There is not a lot of difference in the cost with BT being currently about £4 a month more expensive.

 

Anyone on the Infinity 2 package??

[sted]

The reliability of the Virgin seems to be slipping lately with the infamous SuperHub 2 ( which is a pile of ). I have to have the SuperHub 2 in Modem mode and use a third party router and this is the 3rd replacement. The engineer started feeding me all kinds of stuff last time he came to have a look even though I showed him what the problem was.

 

There is not a lot of difference in the cost with BT being currently about £4 a month more expensive.

 

Anyone on the Infinity 2 package??

 

yes it depends how far you are from the roadside cab and how crowded it is i used to get 80 barely got 50 now and it seems worse than it used to be about streaming 1080p stuff though last few days it has got better

[synaesthesia]

You'll sacrifice speed certainly, even the best Infinity products can't get near Virgins basic packages. Reliability - well, it's BT isn't it. It would be difficult to choose the better of 2 evils and I'm not sure who'd be worse for actual customer support.

[Norphy]

I spent about 20 months with a BT Infinity line and then switched over to Virgin about 18 months ago because there was a special offer on and it was saving me about £10/m to switch to Virgin.

 

In terms of speed, the packages were similar (~70mbps vs 100mbps), for day to day browsing you can't really tell the difference. I found latency on the BT package to be better and streaming was smoother. BT was more reliable for me, we didn't have any downtime with BT but we've had some with Virgin. I'm also on my third superhub but unlike the OP, I've found it to work OK when it works. I think I have a newer version though.

 

BT has better upload speeds (6mbps on Virgin is pathetic) so if you're doing video conferencing or other things which need better upload speeds, BT may be the better bet.

[Blue_Cookeh]

We had no end of issues with VM. They were throttling us down to around 2Mbps for about 22 hours a day and they couldn't tell us why, despite admitting we were nowhere near their throttling group. This went on for about 2 months before I told them to get screwed and went over to BT Infinity. On VM we were getting 120Mbps, we get 76Mbps from BT at the moment and can't notice a difference in day to day browsing, and downloads are just as fast. Plus, we don't have to deal with VM's awful proxying that they shove YouTube etc through.

 

Admittedly the advertised speed is slower, and our broadband has cut out for a few minutes a few times in the past year but apart from that we've had no issues what so ever. I kind of hate VM with a passion now, their customer service was shocking and they showed no sign of remorse or effort to fix the problem.

Edited July 22, 2016 by Blue_Cookeh

[Achandler]

I looked at BT fibre but living in such a remote place as South Mancester... we aren't enabled for BT fibre nor will we be soon.

[Norphy]

I now live in SE London. I can't get FTTC either. Apparently the cabinet has it but I'm too far away from the cabinet. Roll on FTTP.

[Davit2005]

Thanks for all your replies so far.

 

Apart from a brief 2 year gap when VM really wound me up and I ended up going back to a 2Mbps TalkTalk deal I've been with Virgin, NTL and even as far back as Cable & Wireless.

[sted]

I now live in SE London. I can't get FTTC either. Apparently the cabinet has it but I'm too far away from the cabinet. Roll on FTTP.

might be a while bt seem really reluctant to do it as far as i can see theyd rather string the copper along for as long as they possibly can

[Davit2005]

As I've got my own firewall/router I will prob end up disabling the WiFi and using jus the NAT/Routing features on the hub has any one else done this??

 

I am a bit sad and have multiple vLANs at home so would need to setup routes on the hub is this possible??

[casey]

I think it really depends on where you live for the speed side of things. I can see the Virgin Media cabinet from my house and the street I live in only has houses on on side of the road and woods on the other so speed is never an issue for me. However in other parts of the city there's lots of student acommodation and people in those areas have real problems with the speed.

 

I have only had to have one SuperHub 2 replaced in the last 3 years or so, and that was an odd problem, it worked in full modem/router/wi-fi mode but not in modem only and VM just replaced it for me.

 

Outages are incredibly rare where I am, probably only 3 in the last 10-12 years. Luck of the draw I guess.

[sted]

I think it really depends on where you live for the speed side of things. I can see the Virgin Media cabinet from my house and the street I live in only has houses on on side of the road and woods on the other so speed is never an issue for me. However in other parts of the city there's lots of student acommodation and people in those areas have real problems with the speed.

 

I have only had to have one SuperHub 2 replaced in the last 3 years or so, and that was an odd problem, it worked in full modem/router/wi-fi mode but not in modem only and VM just replaced it for me.

 

Outages are incredibly rare where I am, probably only 3 in the last 10-12 years. Luck of the draw I guess.

part of the issue with virgin is though its all one company the cabling/equipment has been installed by many companies over many years and i suspect a lot of it was whatever the company that was bought out by someone who was bought out to eventually become virgin was whatever was cheapest at the time so their network is probably a complete patchwork of random stuff

[Davit2005]

 

I have only had to have one SuperHub 2 replaced in the last 3 years or so, and that was an odd problem, it worked in full modem/router/wi-fi mode but not in modem only and VM just replaced it for me.

 

.

 

Mine was the opposite No routing or WiFi but fine in Modem only mode so got an old media box with 2 LAN ports running Sophos UTM 9 with home license.

 

Even a director at work had same issue and so I suggested switching to Modem Only and using seperate Ethernet router which worked for him as well.

 

Got my own PostFix server at home jus outgoing for internal services but this should work fine as it jus uses standard mail ports.

Edited July 22, 2016 by Davit2005

[Guest obsidianpillar]

We're very happy with Virgin Media. I convinced them to send me the SuperHub 3 which is a marked improvement. The use/support of VOIP in the units is a sign of things to come.

 

However, lots of features lost. You can only have it on a Class C IP Address scheme, no option to change it. User interface has been changed to make it a lot more end user friendly, but at the expense of advanced features. I don't think you could setup a DMZ on it when I looked, although that may have changed. They don't support RADIUS which was a killer for me.

 

I ended up moving to a Sophos, then to Smoothwall,then to pfSense box which works a lot better. Although you get diverted to deepest darkest Asia to their call centres, if you blind them with technical details that it beyond their standard scripted response it'll normally get escalated and you'll get what you need/want 9/10 of the time. Always ask for the head engineer to be sent out for your area, they know what they're talking about (or at least in my area they do) which gets the problem sorted, even if you have to wait another day or two..

[ass17]

As I've got my own firewall/router I will prob end up disabling the WiFi and using jus the NAT/Routing features on the hub has any one else done this??

 

I am a bit sad and have multiple vLANs at home so would need to setup routes on the hub is this possible??

 

I have my super hub in modem mode connect to my switch (VLAN'd), my Sophos UTM does all the routing, nating, web filtering, firewalling etc... And a separate Ubiquiti AC Lite Access Point.

 

If you need to see a diagram I can supply on request.

[Davit2005]

I have my super hub in modem mode connect to my switch (VLAN'd), my Sophos UTM does all the routing, nating, web filtering, firewalling etc... And a separate Ubiquiti AC Lite Access Point.

 

If you need to see a diagram I can supply on request.

 

Thanks :-)

 

Done more or less the same thing.

 

Sophos running doing Firewall, NAT, Remote Access, etc.. . Seperate Layer 3 switch doing intervLan routing but I have had the Sophos setup to do internal routing as well before I got the Layer 3 swtitch ;-) .

Edited July 26, 2016 by Davit2005

[Davit2005]

Well I am now on Infinity 2 and happy with it.

 

The download is slower than VM package but really un-noticable for what I need. What has made a huge impact is the Upload speed which is 150% quicker and this is def noticable when using VPN to connect to home, it connects much quicker and there is no delay like before on my HTML 5 VPN portal.

 

The change over was sweet as a nut, if only business connections can run as smooth as this

 

Currently getting about 40Mb download and 15Mb upload but I expect this to increase, I've tested this about 4am in the morning and it is consistent. Expect it to get better as the line gets used to the traffic if not I'll be contacting BT to investigate as the report does show an impacted connection.