No BT Fibre if there's already Virgin Media?

Hi. I recently moved house. My old house was in Glasgow City Centre, and benefited from BT Fibre - I had a real 73mb down, and I think it was 40mb up.

I work on websites in my spare time, and that up-speed was important to me - also when I upload photos.

So then I moved to a suburb which is awash with Virgin Media, I had no choice but to arrange 50mb internet with them. What doesn't seem to be possible with Virgin, is decent upload speeds - and there's not much sign of them planning on improving this.

I feel trapped - because there's no BT Fibre in the area - presumably because there's no demand because everybody's "cabled up"?

Is this a familiar story? It doesn't seem to be a very competitive market...

Couldn't you get a faster option with them? See this report from May, and this site a week and a half ago.

Your upstream previously would have been a sync of probably 19999kbps and actual throughput a bit less.

Edited by RobertoS (Wed 07-Sep-16 16:41:51)

Presence of Virgin Media means that its a commercial choice of whether Openreach go to an area or not, with the work in the rural areas Openreach is busy doing lots of stuff there rather than its pure commercial roll-out.

UK coverage:
- 9% of the UK has the choice of VM alone (commercial)
- 36% of the UK has the choice of either BT or VM (both commercial)
- 31% of the UK has the choice of BT alone (commercial)
- 15% of the UK has the choice of BT alone (subsidised by BDUK)
- 5% of the UK are expected to have a BT service, as subsidised work goes further

You are in the 9%

Right now, most of BT's ongoing work is to put more subsidised infrastructure in place ... which means it can only overlay VM coverage in an "incidental" way. Most of VM's expansion work is going to be close to existing coverage ... and seems likely to be in areas where BT have already covered.

So that means you're not very likely to get covered by BT in the near future.

Thanks for the replies- fascinating!

VM seems more expensive in general than BT and I chose the service that cost around the same. I could pay more for a bit faster upload, but it would be quite a lot more for just a bit faster.

I think the competition authorities should be looking at the number of homes which only have access to 1 high speed broadband option.

- Rob

I think the competition authorities should be looking at the number of homes which only have access to 1 high speed broadband option.

Why? The decision whether to provide a competing broadband service has to be a commercial decision. Are you suggesting that all bus routes must have at least two different operators or that you should have a choice as to which water supply or sewer you connect to. What's far more important is that there should be high speed broadband available, hence BDUK and the possibility of USO. Beyond that expansion has to be a commercial decision.

It's interesting that you are arguing that you should have access to at least 2 suppliers when a number of people are still fighting to get access to just one.

And to take your argument the other way then Virgin Media should be forced to roll out to the rest of the country to set up competition to BT.

Forcing VM to open its network to other suppliers would be a huge step forward

Edited by alwall (Thu 08-Sep-16 08:28:24)

I think it was just really clear, as part of my housemove, that this was the one commercial service that I had no choice over, and I didn't like that, especially as VM keep putting prices up...

What's wrong with the 200/12Mbps VM service I linked to articles about? Isn't that available?