Virgin Media the only available Fibre?

Hello everyone,
my first post here!
My name is Darren and I live in England.
So nice to meet you guys first of all.

I currently live in East Midlands and am about to move to a new home.
At the moment my ISP is Sky with which I have Fibre Unlimited, I always have been very happy with it so imagine my disappointment when they told me I could not take it over to the new home!!
What a disaster!
So I looked at an alternative and found out no one but Virgin media provides fibre in that area...
A quick trustpilot read to find out over 700 opinions were all bad (1 star!!) and my morale was gone....
I now have 10mbit up and am being transferred to 1.3 (*sigh sob*) so I thought switching operator would be a good idea, but the only one that does seems to be utter C***.

To you all a couple of questions:
how do I find out if they're going to activate it in my area and if not... is Virgin so bad?

Thanks
Time to head off to bed now!
Talk tomorrow guys!

Chunks of East Midlands will have the FTTC (fibre) service that Sky and TalkTalk and others sell so the key is the exact location (postcode) or failing that town/village.

To get 10 Mbps up from Virgin would mean ordering their 152 Mbps service.

The experience from Virgin varies a lot from area to area, so pay heed to reviews from those in the exact area you are moving to.

Good morning,
it's really difficult for me to find area-specific reviews and I don't know anyone in the neighbourhood yet.
Is there any way to see if it's going to be available soon?

The Virgin 152 is ok; what worries me is the bandwidth cap policy they adopt

We need to know a lot more (e.g. postcode) to offer advice on how soon or not.

Given the name of the town might be enough to identify which county project covers you for the improvements to fibre coverage, BUT if Virgin Media already widely available in the area public money may not bring another fibre service to you.

Sent it via PM.
Thanks in advance!
Really depressed at the idea it might never be an option.

Really depressed at the idea it might never be an option.

Personally I would like to have the option of Virgin but there is even less chance of Virgin installing where I am than of BT installing anywhere else in the country. At least you have an option - there are a large number that still have no option for fast internet.

As pointed out Virgin is very hit and miss, some areas it's amazing others it's awful, A good friend of mine for instance at his house was getting max speed all the time and had no issues so when he moved house which had Virgin media again he snapped it up.
Straight away he had issues, Pings over 400, Downloads and uploads all over the place with downloads rarely getting over 2meg, Uploads were lucky to hit 0.3, Even though he was paying for 100meg or so. Turns out that the subscribed/utilisation was very high in his new places area and they had a fix in place to get more bandwidth a month away.
He decided to stay and live with it for now as they said it would sort the issue (He did also have no probs at previous place also after all), The date came and went and when he phoned up was told it was delayed for a couple months, Again he waited and again the date was missed and pushed back another month, This time it was done and all was fine...............for 4 days before the speed plummeted again.
Fed up he phoned up and asked to leave and after a small fight they agreed to terminate his service.

If you check Virgin Media forum there are complaints about the same thing on many different places so you can always look to see if your new area is on the forum, If it is stay away for sure, If not be wary and email about the area asking if any issues about over ulilisation or any complaints about speed in general.

It really depends where you are I think as to how good the service is. I'm in Northampton and Virgin is the only option I have for fibre. I'm on the 120Mb and should be 152Mb by the end of next month. I've been very happy with the service - no complaints at all.

I'm just browsing the (Virgin) forum to see if I get some info about it...

U need to post here: http://www.cableforum.co.uk/board/12/ and put your post code and ask someone who live the same as your post code to see if virgin media is high utilisation in the area!


I used to be with virgin media 152/12 but I left them last February because fed up of high utilisation, so I went onto FTTC instead and never look back at Virgin ever again. They used to be good when it was with telewest cable.

I agree here.

The real problem is that, with a shared medium and no control over the neighbours, the VM offering can go south without warning at any time.

Even though VM have the potential of being the fastest (way beyond the speed I actually need), they also have the potential of being the most unusable.

We're currently looking to move. FTTC availability & speed are key criteria for us (to the extent I stopped to chat with an Openreach engineer while looking at properties today); presence of VM as a backup option is a nice-to-have, but not a must-have.

Virgin is quite hit and miss although it will beat ADSL speeds on Sky.

It's very area specific, even street specific due to the nature of it.

That said I think it's your best option and I would opt for it. Most people have no issues

Hah.
Wish we would of had the opportunity to think about that when taking the house...
I'm gonna be stuck with it for at least a year.

What I'm left with at the moment is Sky broadband (23£/mo) for 14Mb dl and 1.3Mb ul...
With roughly 10 quid more (what I'm paying now for sky fiber) I can push VM and hope for the best.
Hopefully it won't easily go below 14Mb/s.

In reply to a post by WWWombat:

I agree here.

The real problem is that, with a shared medium and no control over the neighbours, the VM offering can go south without warning at any time.

Even though VM have the potential of being the fastest (way beyond the speed I actually need), they also have the potential of being the most unusable.

We're currently looking to move. FTTC availability & speed are key criteria for us (to the extent I stopped to chat with an Openreach engineer while looking at properties today); presence of VM as a backup option is a nice-to-have, but not a must-have.

Order it and see. Can't remember the cooling off period, seem to think it was 14 days though this could be wrong.

In reply to a post by brandscill:

Order it and see. Can't remember the cooling off period, seem to think it was 14 days though this could be wrong.

Be careful once your 14 days cooling off period has surpassed than soon after 14 days, from excellent speed bang boom went downhills with congestion problem and u stuck with 12 months contract!

I guess that's what's happend to you...?

In reply to a post by adslmax:

Be careful once your 14 days cooling off period has surpassed than soon after 14 days, from excellent speed bang boom went downhills with congestion problem and u stuck with 12 months contract!

In reply to a post by DarrenBricks:

I guess that's what's happend to you...?

In reply to a post by adslmax:

Be careful once your 14 days cooling off period has surpassed than soon after 14 days, from excellent speed bang boom went downhills with congestion problem and u stuck with 12 months contract!

Yes it happen to me 2 months after 14 days cooling off periods and never get resolved.

What kind of speeds are you getting?

In reply to a post by DarrenBricks:

What kind of speeds are you getting?

From 152/12 down to 35/8 with ping over 399ms

aargh that ping hurts my innards.
Still 8Mb upload is not that shabby.

Edited by deleted (Thu 11-Sep-14 11:01:16)

In reply to a post by DarrenBricks:

aargh that ping hurts my innards.
Still 8Mb upload is not that shabby.

Yes u can try virgin media for 14 days cooling off period. But soon after 14 days, it still your own risk! can't tell if it was good for 12 months or not? But, I will NEVER go back to virgin media ever again.

Edited by adslmax (Thu 11-Sep-14 11:09:50)

Well if you have ONLY Virgin media or just normal broadband (maxed at 17/1.3 in the BEST case scenario) at 10 quid less, would you still abandon them?

I spent many years stumbling along with BT and or traditional BB, latterly ADSL24.

Then along came Coms and their FUP.

Moved to Xilo, nice people but two major outages.

Signed up with Virgin Media phone + BB, 8Mb flakey to 152Mb solid in less than an hour!

Should have done it years ago.

Hammy

Nice one Hammy!
Can I ask whereabouts do you live?
I know it means nothing, but...

VM is not too bad. I usually get around 140Mb to 160Mb during the evening.

http://www.speedtest.net/my-result/3753054312

I'm wondering right now, if I got the other package (50Mb DL) would it suffer the same kind of problems?
If it goes down, will there still be a minimum of let's say 18Mb DL or would it degrade proportionally (5Mb/s)?
Also no clue what kind of upload speeds come with that package.

It might, it might not.

No minimum, all depends on what everyone else is doing with the connection

Ah, a proper Russian roulette.
I get it now.
Thanks guys.