Virgin/Three 5G Comparison and results

Hello, first post here, thanks. I've spent some time reading as much as I can on the forums since joining and trying to understand as much as I can whilst comparing these two connections that I have at the moment.

TLDR - Skip to the bold part.

I've been a VM customer for about 15 years and very rarely have any outage issues like so many around me do, but with their ever increasing pricing and reluctance to offer any other incentives, I have been looking for alternatives. The BT lines here are always busy and the speeds aren't great, so they've never really been a viable alternative. Whilst looking for a new phone contract I had seen the 5G service from Three, which seeing as I have a very large telecom tower around 200m from my house, with a recent 5G mast from Three installed, I thought I'd give it a go and see how it performs.

I don't have the knowledge about actualy connection quality and other things related with broadband and generally just go with speed tests for my infor. Low ping, jitter and loss, with high down and up speeds and that's about as far as I go. My son has moaned quite a lot about the Vm connection though whilst gaming, as he has experienced high ping and packet loss on his xbox, both hard wired and wireless. I can't say that I've noticed the same on my PC, but then I am a lot less active. There's sometimes buffering on streaming, but nothing to make things overly frustrating.

I've set a BQM for each line and have been running speed tests at different times during the day. The speeds from the Three service seem very good considering, although the 1X is always under half of the 6x speed, whereas virgin is a lot closer bwteen the two. The upload is consistently better with Three. I have 30 days to decide whether to keep this Three service and I expect that Virgin retentions will no doubt call with an offer within that time period, so I've split my load on both services and trying my best to do a fair comparision between the two.

Could some please check the BQM of the two and explain how they appear in a health/perfomance way and why would the 1x would be so much lower on the Three service, compared to the 6x? We have a very busy household with the kids gaming, netflix, iptv, home automation etc and would say that we're fairly heavy users, especially at the moment with everyone at home.

Virgin

Three

Virgin Speed

Three Speed

Not sure if it makes much difference, but the VM is using a HUB 3 in modem mode and an old Archer C9 Router.
The Three is with the Huawei CP Pro.



Thank you very much for any input.

Edited by Leedslee (Wed 27-Jan-21 13:49:21)