Virgin Media vs BT FTTP

Anyone on BT fibre 900 and has a comparison with Virgin?

I work from home and have had my calls dropped 2 times today. I just want to know what peoples experience has been with BT FTTP in comparison to Virgin media fibre. I have a BT connection date of April something and am hoping people will tell me the BT is way better. I swore I would never join BT again after issues with them years ago but the will put my new connection in my office at the back of the house! I am super excited!!

Please pour cream and sugar on my cornflakes! No pi**ing in my cornflakes... please
virgin 350

In reply to a post by Blairian27:

I swore I would never join BT again

Then use one of the other ISPs that can do FTTP 900 such as Zen, TalkTalk Business, or others....

One thing i will say is If you can get a FTTP provider I would because virgin media's customer services and prices are outrageous.
I am currently on a slow package with VM M100 and getting 100 is like the probability of getting signal in a nuclear bunker.

The reason I personally would change is for three reasons.
The first is that the more people join FTTP the lower the prices get whereas the more people join virgin medas gig1 service the prices won't fall as virgin media hold the market and can do what they like in the long run.

The second reason is that Latency is so much worse on Virgin Media because they use Docsis and it simply makes website loading times longer than a slower VDSL (FTTC) or FTTP connection or at least a lot of the time.
I know its noticable from using both networks which i would prefer to have.

The third reason is that Customer service with VM is "like trying to ride a horse on a freeway" its simply a never ending battle, i know other providers are bad but having had talktalk and VM i know once FTTP is at mine next year I won't be having VM again not unless they go full fibre and pay me to join.

"The first is that the more people join FTTP the lower the prices get"

What????

what i meant was what openreach amongst others told me and also said in documentation on the website before it was deleted. This is also how it worked out in france there was a graph that showed that as take up of FTTP increased the cost passed on to the ISP decreased.

I meant that as overtime we all get the services openreach will get their money back which makes it viable for lower prices.

I'm not sure if you remember that FTTC originally had a high cost for customers but as more customers got the service the cost went down as they "paid it off".

I hope that clears up what i meant a little.

"Technology getting cheaper as adoption increases" is a very different statement to what you wrote though.

There's a lot of outlandish claims being made by this account in various threads, especially regarding access to Openreach staff which you would for sure be bound by an NDA to not share if they were true. I think it would be good for the whole forum community if you could just read over your posts and make sure that you're not making any exaggerations before you submit them.

Still not clear. You tend to waffle about other countries and what they do.

In reply to a post by broadband66:

"The first is that the more people join FTTP the lower the prices get"

What????

🤣🤣🤣 That's a cracker...did you know you can get 1Gbps service in London for £20? Except you can't.

I will do what you have said.
I'm extremely sorry and meant exactly what you stated below.
I contact Connecting Cambridgeshire for my openreach information as they are able to disclose to the public information.
I have never been asked not to disclose any information so I don't know anything about an NDA as i don't work for them.

Sorry about that at the time i wrote it i thought the service was live as i saw in a news article that stated they were up and running and the price was there so i assumed, however when i checked the site for you I realised whoever wrote the article was wrong which made me a fool for believing it I promise i will research this in advance in the future instead of believing media. I feel bad for giving false hope but from what i read it did sound like it was available however after checking the website i saw what your showing me and I promise to research and double check everything i say in the future as i really don't want a bad reputation.
I only ever mentioned that service as an article was sent to me on a discord server only with screenshots and i did not read into it until after which was a big mistake Sorry about everything.

I'm going to go off the forum for a while as i feel like i have caused confusion and i feel like i cannot be respected for my mistakes which I understand all I can say is sorry and when I do post anything I will thoroughly check every detail i think of.
I hope I can make up for my massive let down in the future.
My most sincere apologies.

In reply to a post by RR_The_IT_Guy:

I am currently on a slow package with VM M100 and getting 100 is like the probability of getting signal in a nuclear bunker.

Really depends which regional area and street you are connected to. Here I'm on m200 and I'm getting close to 200 all the time, ranging from 180 to 220. The upload is similar 17 to 20. I may be lucky.

To be fair you have a point there I'm in area 31 and the whole of my area not just my street are getting issues and we as a community are at a point where we regret choosing VM.

I did say that as i knew there were a lot of issues with the new gig one as the VM forums are backed with overutilization issues shown on the BMQ's.
I just don't want people to sign up to a service that does not deliver I hope you understand that.

VM customer services are absolutely abysmal and I wouldn't wish them on my worst enemy. Have you tried actually talking to them?

I've dropped M350 to go back to [censored] FTTC on about 70mbit because I refuse to deal with Vermin Media again. Awaiting Cityfibre finishing my area of Ipswich.

I would certainly take BT FTTP over Vermin, who in my 4 years with them had *so many* random downtimes, outages etc.

The upload is a lot better as well, and you can go via an isp like Zen who actually have decent CS.

I have unfortunately its a completely abysmal experience the last engineer i had smashed my lamp and refused to pay for it so luckily I knew his boss happened to live near me so when i saw him go past at the usual time and flagged him down and he said he would "sort it out", he never did. So i had to file a complaint and that got sorted after 10 phone calls each for two hours.
I'll tell you one thing if i could leave I would but they are refusing to follow the ofcom policies so i'm stuck.
I know one thing I get downtime every night at 1AM its like if they schedule the annoyance.
I can get FTTC 80 down 20up however its my understanding that the previous owner of the house had a bonded connection so i can get 160down 40up however I am not sure on that as there was a line failure back when i was on ADSL so they had to swap the line.
the cab is literally less than 100 M away and visible from my window.
I know september 2022 cant come soon enough for the FTTP

Proper bonded FTTC services aren’t universally available from all providers.

You’d need to approach someone like A&A or Cerberus I think do them. And they won’t simply be 2 x the average going rate of individual FTTC connections as there is additional setup and ongoing overhead required for the bonding to work.

Doesn’t stop you rolling your own solution and exercising your IT skills though.

Thanks for your message

I did speak to A&A and even got a quote from Cerberus for FTTPoD a while back (a little expensive especially considering there is a Aggregation node a street away something like £6000-9000 i can't remember exactly but i guess supply and demand).

I get what your saying I mean i'll give virgin till the date the network van dude gave me and see what happens and if its not fixed i will initiate Ofcom speed tests with them again and then will move over to whoever is suitable considering costs.

Round here people are getting rid of VM and neighbours gone to FTTC.

I am the first with FTTP installed (yesterday) and so far all is good - 1Mbps sync but BT Business can only off me 300Mbps. Testing on a wireless connection earlier seeing around 310 down 40 up - and will try wired at some point. Latency is down at sub 5mS (TBB), and if Mr S could change the graph scale I could see more accurately.

Using BTs Cloud voice, that is fine too.



Co-incidentally a tall vehicle pulled down two drop wires belonging to neighbours. One reported to BT Consumer/Residential yesterday PM and he was back up by lunchtime with a new drop wire.

Nice gotta love that stuff.
I can't wait
let us know how your tests go I know i use fresh ping to check my latency in more detail maybe give it a go just to see obviously its not as good as the BMQ here which has more info so I use a mix of tools.

In reply to a post by MHC:

I am the first with FTTP installed (yesterday) and so far all is good - 1Mbps sync but BT Business can only off me 300Mbps

Two typos?

Definitely one - not used to typing G, second probably predictive text.

You'll have to wean yourself off that copper nomenclature. No 'sync' as such with FTTP....😎😀

Could not think of an alternate word ... The hub tells me it is a 1000 FTTX link, will get exact words later. That is way higher than the 300 Mbps restriction on my service.

That's the Ethernet link speed between your hub and the ONT. The reason it's 1000 and not 300 is because the speed of Ethernet is standardised and there's no such thing as a 300mb/s Ethernet link-speed. The next speed down is "fast ethernet" (100mb/s) which is slower than your 300mb/s service so a link-speed of at least 1000mb/s is required in order to deliver a 300mb/s service.

And FWIW, the link speed over the fibre itself is fixed: it's 2.4Gbps in the downstream direction, and 1.2Gbps in the upstream direction. One link can be shared between up to 32 properties.

When you buy a particular speed of service, say "330/50", then packets are delayed and/or dropped to ensure that on average you don't exceed that level of traffic.

In reply to a post by candlerb:

When you buy a particular speed of service, say "330/50", then packets are delayed and/or dropped to ensure that on average you don't exceed that level of traffic.

I would hope sincerely that they don't drop packets to achieve an average throughput. I can't think of anything more stupid.

In reply to a post by jabuzzard:

I would hope sincerely that they don't drop packets to achieve an average throughput. I can't think of anything more stupid.

Packets have to be dropped in order to signal to TCP to slow down(*).

Usually the policer has some sort of "leaky bucket" algorithm, which allows you to burst and then starts dropping packets until your average throughput falls to the right level.

The alternative is to put packets in queues and pull them out at a limited rate - but that gives rise to buffer bloat, i.e. large latency. If the sender keeps sending above the permitted rate then the queue is going to fill up anyway, at which point you're back to dropping packets.

An intermediate approach is Random Early Drop - where a small amount of packet loss is introduced before the queue is full. This gives an early hint to TCP to start slowing down.

(*) OK, there's Explicit Congestion Notification, but that's not yet fully deployed AFAIK.