Virgin Media - How (bad) are they?

[roorooroo]

As a follow up, i signed up 12 days ago and all seems okay..some stuff in the router log looks a bit negative but speed is great so far.
I'll continue to update the thread hopefully to benefit anyone else thinking of signing up too.

[wasabi]

They are good as long as if you connect to the internet through wi-fi you connect their "Superhub" modem and router which is anything but super to a better router such the Asus RT-N56U or RT-N66U. You will get much better signal, speeds and reliability that way.

The superhub 2 is much better. I got an upgrade a few weeks back when I upgraded to the XL package. My biggest problem with the old superhub was wired connections being painfully slow - I had to use a separate gig switch to get decent performance. The new mk2's inbuilt switch is much faster IMO.

[Apex]

Still rather use my own [which i am]

I might upgrade to the 120Mb service in a few months when the bills have had time to settle down but so far the 60Mb service has been good enough

[MrRockliffe]

I've not personally had good experience with them. Poor customer service and internet would complete shut down at 7 - nothing I could do about it.

I'm now with Sky and really like them. Having said that my uncle has the opposite opinion to me. You can always try them and if they're that poor threaten to just leave because of poor service. If you're paying for a service which doesn't meet their own requirements then you should have the right to leave.

[dokko]

I'd rather throw my tv out the window than go anywhere near sky again.

Awful company full of morons barely capable of answering a telephone nevermind sort out any issues you are having. I was hung up on, my account lost, then deleted, then lied too, didn't gets the call backs I needed, had to ring them, billed for services I never received, lie too again, spoke rudely too, had my carpet ruined, living room flood from a botched install job and finally expected to wait an infinite amount of time until they sorted out a line issue while still paying the full amount for the services. After that they then still tried to bill us threatening us with bailiffs when it's them who owe us for damages to our property.

Oh, the cheeky swines then send me a letter asking me to come back and save 25%!

I had left virgin after not being overalls impressed with them as well, within two weeks I was back.

Virgin is the lesser of two evils, I'm sure of it now but no doubt will forget this in about 5 years time when a good sky deal gets waved in front of my face.

[roorooroo]

All going well VM Broadband wise bar a few weird router errors. Although i'm not best pleased that i received a letter yesterday stating an £8.75 price rise in February, a full 5 weeks after haggling my deal!

[CoolHotCold]

VM are fine, till you have the youtube issues.

It's something that VM are really bad at getting right.

[Dwevan]

I've been with them for about 3 years now, all at different houses however. In Nottingham where I am, there is major, major throttling of speeds around 6-8pm (all us students) but then it is fine later.

Otherwise good, definitely worth the money as unlimited download limit

[Dwevan]

Ahh, I've just seen that you've signed up your getting much much better speeds than me

[1stRaven]

I was with them for about 10 years, from the dial-up days, to 640kbps broadband and then, eventually, to 20mbps. I had to leave them in 2011 when we moved house to a non-cabled area. My personal experience was pretty positive - outages were very occasional and usually resolved within a few hours anyway (I can only remember one that went into a second day).

I can't comment on their routers as for the past 5-6 years I've always used my own routers with custom DD-WRT firmware (which, incidentally, are much easier to set up on Virgin as DD-WRT is primarily designed for cable routers rather than DSL routers).

When I was still them, the TV service was good but didn't have as many channels as Sky, but I think that has changed now anyway. The VOD stuff was cool too, you could stream entire series with no ads for free, if you're on one of the better packages.

Yes the Indian call centres are frustrating, but with the low number of outages and the fact that I work in IT anyway, I found I hardly ever needed to contact them.

I've done the same as you. My own router = rock steady wireless and speeds are there. I don't think I have ever had to call them to fix an issue in the last 7 years as I have mainly done it myself.

[bloodkil]

When I was with them last year, we just had fault after fault after fault, and at peak times it would slow to 0.5Mbit/s down, I feel it was a good decision to leave

[Poley09]

I am on virgin media, and although it is really fast, it has a tendency to drop the connection every half hour to an hour for a few seconds, which is as you can imagine very annoying.

EDIT: By really fast i mean i get 3MB/s download speed which is crazy i think

[iamlorro]

I was on VM, but moved house, and only had the option of infinity.

The only times I had problems the indian call centres were pretty good at sporting it out - if you know what they're going to ask, and they are technically minded, rather than script based then they are quick at sorting the issues out...
(I think i had 3 issues in 2 years)

Another upvote for DDWRT - i'm not a network whizz, but I managed to setup my Dlink DIR615 on it without too many problems ... i like it so much i use it now rather than the homehub!

[james.daly91]

I've been with VM for six months at my house currently and they seem to go through phases. Most of the time they are ok (not the fastest, not the slowest, despite having the 30mb bundle or whatever it is), but then some times (particularly around peak periods) it becomes impossible to game due to significant jumps in ping and download speeds just plummeting. Part of this was due to a faulty installation at the start but then some of it we've just not been able to resolve (despite numerous hours on the phone to their tech people).

Also, as someone else said, run far away from their wireless hub. You can link your own wireless hub to their modem (essentially you turn their hub into an internet modem instead of router) but this cuts the internet speed down (talking 3mb/s download to 800kb/s download). The coverage of their "superhub" is abysmal, so unless you plan on sitting next to the router, get your own router or use a wireless extender to bounce the signal further (netgear do an excellent wireless extender, available from amazon).

Hope this helps

Edit: also, noticed someone mention indian call centres. If you call during business hours and avoid weekend calls, you can usually get through to the English call centre, and occasionally at the weekends as well (although I haven't worked out what time the weekend centres run yet).

[Apex]

I've been with VM for six months at my house currently and they seem to go through phases. Most of the time they are ok (not the fastest, not the slowest, despite having the 30mb bundle or whatever it is), but then some times (particularly around peak periods) it becomes impossible to game due to significant jumps in ping and download speeds just plummeting. Part of this was due to a faulty installation at the start but then some of it we've just not been able to resolve (despite numerous hours on the phone to their tech people).

Also, as someone else said, run far away from their wireless hub. You can link your own wireless hub to their modem (essentially you turn their hub into an internet modem instead of router) but this cuts the internet speed down (talking 3mb/s download to 800kb/s download). The coverage of their "superhub" is abysmal, so unless you plan on sitting next to the router, get your own router or use a wireless extender to bounce the signal further (netgear do an excellent wireless extender, available from amazon).

Hope this helps

Edit: also, noticed someone mention indian call centres. If you call during business hours and avoid weekend calls, you can usually get through to the English call centre, and occasionally at the weekends as well (although I haven't worked out what time the weekend centres run yet).

The bit in bold isn't true if you use a decent router with the VM SuperHub in modem mode

See



That is pretty much wire speed for my 60Mb package.

[tekmon]

Overall I think they're pretty good.

Gaming has been solid for years, low ping. Any downtime seems to be maintenance every few months.

Youtube has had some small brief issues in the past but can't be sure its just not youtubes servers. For 6 months YT has been very good.