Home Connection

[MatthewL]

Following today's VM outage it has made me think even more about moving ISP, my offerings are slim as there is no FTTC via BT circuits, my options are mobile broadband or a dedicated fibre connection.

 

What do you have at home? I have created a a basic poll covering the options available, obviously with a BT circuit could be a host of ISP's but gives me an idea of what types of connection people are running. I think I have covered them all but if not shout up. If you have multiple connections for fail over or just have the luxury select what you have.

 

I pay £47 or there about's for 200Mb from Virgin for mine currently.

Edited April 27, 2020 by MatthewL

[XiJ]

I’m on virgin - broadband only for £31 (200mb). To be honest it’s always been very good and rarely do we have drop outs.

 

For anything prolonged (by which I mean an hour or two) I tether my phone - currently Vodafone. That will do for iPads and laptop at least.

[Localtechie]

Sky FTTC.

 

We are 0.3 miles away from a cabinet so max of 30mbps.

 

It's on the edge of acceptable in 2020 and when 3 of us are watching HD video it struggles. No 4K playback and sometimes it grinds to a halt.

 

No sign of virgin coming to the town and BT are not interested in FTTP. The only chance of faster speed is with 5G when that arrives late 2021.

 

However according to the government it's a "superfast" connection so all good.

[Edu-IT]

Virgin is usually fine. Something strange going on tonight!

 

Have unlimited data backup via Three.

[Norphy]

I have Virgin. The main reason I have them is that generally speaking, they actually hit their advertised speeds which is more than you can say for most DSL services. Today has been a bit flaky (I live in SE London) but usually they’re ok.

 

Their supplied routers are getting progressively worse though. The Arris thing provided to me the last time around is atrocious.

[Davit2005]

Twice left VM because of lousy support. I was originally with Cable and Wireless, then NTL and it got so much worse when Virgin Media took over. They also ran the local grid which was used at the school I worked at for IT going back a few years, the support was even worse. 3 months to get them to open up ports for Exchange and Blackberry, on going email issues with office attachments for 6 months till they admitted a fault with the router.

 

Also having cloud backups at home the upload speed is dreadful with VM, I don't need the download speed so much. On BT Business FTTC with Cloud Voice and have a backup of 4G.

[caffrey]

I'm with Virgin and I get charged £68 pm for 200Mbps plus a phone line I'm forced to have that I don't use, expensive but the alternatives are poor in comparison

[Michael]

I use VM Voom Business fibre at home, which gives me 350/7 down/up for £32+ taxes per month.

 

Virgin do charge a premium for faster uploads to seems.

[hardtailstar]

I never usually have issues with virgin apart from the support is a bunch of script readers which is irritating.

[XiJ]

Yeah support is just script readers and ‘we’ll send an engineer’ I haven’t need to really lean on it tho.

 

I’d take 50mbps less download and add it to the upload though!

[maark]

virgin - was paying £58 month for 100MB and phone I don't need and standard tivo box - they wanted extra for v2 tv box.

gone up to £66 as the £8 month loyalty discount they gave me last time I moaned has expired.

Will have to do the annual phone call threatening to leave to get another discount and try and get a newer tivo even though they are not much good on catch-up and on-demand.

max speed seems to be 60MB away from virgin around here. For new virgin users it is £30 a month for a year followed by £60 a month.

Speed not too bad but not 100 percent reliable. Am considering moving to another provider if i can get speed.

[ICTDirect_Dave]

We pay a chunk for virgin (£75) but have 300MB broadband and a huge TV package which works nicely for us. the V6 box is far better than the old TiVO.

 

Connectivity is superb most of the time, though the 'superhub' is terrible! I use it in modem mode linked to an ASUS router and have very few issues.

I'd consider moving for a cheaper deal that provided similar speeds, but we have so many connected devices (multiple iPads, laptops, tell, Desktop etc) that 76Mb isn't close to being fast enough these days and no other providers can currently go above this for us.

 

Bring on FTTP!

[Andycat]

Sky Broadband Superfast, around 60mb. No throttling (Virgin was allegedly 200mb but throttled a lot at peak times). Sky seems far better at the moment so far.

[ICTDirect_Dave]

Sky Broadband Superfast, around 60mb. No throttling (Virgin was allegedly 200mb but throttled a lot at peak times). Sky seems far better at the moment so far.

I was worried about this when we moved to virgin, however at peak times it rarely dropped below 150mb on my initial 200mb connection and now rarely does it drop close to 200mb on my 300mb connection.

 

Still far faster than the compeition.

[chris11256]

TalkTalk here and get about 30 Mbps normally. No faster options available until Cityfibre finish their Southend rollout.

[Andycat]

I was worried about this when we moved to virgin, however at peak times it rarely dropped below 150mb on my initial 200mb connection and now rarely does it drop close to 200mb on my 300mb connection.

 

Still far faster than the compeition.

 

I didn't notice whilst I had Virgin, but since moving to back Sky (after the usual haggle/cancel) it feels a lot faster and more reliable than Virgin.

 

Absolutely no data to back this up though :-)

[pete]

Vodafone phone and home office fibre package (Essentials Superfast 2). £25/month for 50-72mb down, 11-12mb up depending on time of day.

 

Generally pretty good. The supplied router should be replaced with something decent.

[LeMarchand]

Virgin. Rarely have problems with the line/speeds. Not so keen on their service or prices, though.

[Jobos]

I’m with Plusnet and pay £35 for phone and broadband although we rarely use the phone. Speed is consistent 69Mbs and unlimited. I was with Virgin before Plusnet and although connection speed was good most of the time throughput was poor and constant problems with the Virgin proxy.

 

Support was not the best either and Virgin never got to the bottom of why I couldn’t change my email password. I even gave them my current password to try themselves but they couldn’t change it either.

 

So in a nutshell I’m paying more now with Plusnet but it’s reliable and trouble free. The Plusnet contract is up in July so I’ll look around but will probably try to get the price dropped rather than move ISPs.

[Davit2005]

I use VM Voom Business fibre at home, which gives me 350/7 down/up for £32+ taxes per month.

 

Virgin do charge a premium for faster uploads to seems.

 

That is not too bad price wise. What is business support like, but I guess that depends on the engineer/day? The one issue I had so far with BT in 4 years was a dodgy external connection which they found pretty quick.

 

I pay £68 a month all in for FTTC, 5 IP addresses, cloud VOIP, 4G backup, 46Mb down/16Mb up. I may review the Cloud Voice at renewal as already running a 3cx system and have a few phones and a trunk set up and all working, calls are even cheaper too.

 

As I have an extensive home network with multiple subnets and with multiple IPv6 networks I don't really want to change though. BT gave me a /56 which I was really happy about although I had to workout all the IPv6 IP addressing to get the Internet working myself, the router they supplied wasn't capable of routing IPv6 networks to my seperate firewall so I used a trusty DrayTek.

Edited April 28, 2020 by Davit2005

[Michael]

That is not too bad price wise. What is business support like, but I guess that depends on the engineer/day? The one issue I had so far with BT in 4 years was a dodgy external connection which they found pretty quick.

 

I've never had to call on an engineer; the technology is sound and outages regardless of provider are always possible.

 

Absolute worse case scenario is I can tether to my phone via EE if Virgin was offline completely. I don't have any requirements for static IPs, as there are various free dynamic DNS services out there although Virgin offer them for a price.

 

My main criticism of Virgin (as well as other providers) are the upload speeds as I wrote earlier. Even on their Gig1 (1100Mb/s) offering, the upload is only 50Mb/s. I'd expect it to be much higher. Lease lines of slower bandwidths do feel a lot smoother/faster as a result.

[MatthewL]

Those running FTTP and dedicated fibres circuits at home, whats speeds are you getting and what you paying roughly?

[Edu-IT]

I’m on Virgin FTTP (Project Lightning?) and pay £25 for 108 Mbps including a VOIP line.

 

Edit: Includes their basic TV but I don’t use it as prefer Sky.

Edited April 28, 2020 by Edu-IT

[john]

Hyperoptic 1 Gig Symmetric Internet, I only currently get 150 symmetric as I don't pay for the full Gig but its just a click away and it speeds up. The flat also is full FTTP wired as well so its been well planned.

 

I got my mum onto B4RN in the autumn so dug the garden up and ran the fibre from the field behind the house and into hers and through to the router and set that up and that has made such an improvement from ADSL for her especially now she can video call etc which makes a difference now.

[Primus]

Lots of VM customers on here paying way over the odds - you need to speak to retentions!

 

Retentions will at the very least match new customer offers - you're all on different speeds so just check the VM website.