Virgin Services in the Northeast

I live in Stockton on Tees and am currently in the process of moving house. The best thing is that I will be leaving behind the abomination that is TalkTalk. I now have to choose a BB provider.

I was thinking about Virgin cable as the area is capable of it but the most important factor for me is reliability. The missus and I work from home frequently and need a good solid bb service. I've read some good and bad reviews on Virgin but am interested in what people local to me who are on Virgin have to say about them. Is there anyone out there that could provide some info?

Equally is there anyone out there in my area on another ISP who they would recommend? Or if anyone knows of a better forum to get this kind of localised info please let me know.

Thanks in advance.

The problem with "local" when talking about a cable service is that is isn't by the town or even by the district it's down at the street level because an overloaded optical node which will only serve a few streets will mean you'll see abysmal performance and VM aren't renowned for fast fixes for congestion issues.

In the main cable is pretty reliable (apart from some areas suffering high congestion) but imo not quite as reliable as ADSL as there is much more active hardware out on the streets. I went for manyyears without any outages on ADSL at all but have seen a few short lived ones in the three years of so I've been on cable. I've also seen one period of abysmal performance that dragged on for months.

Your call.

I was looking into Plusnet for ADSL. They appear to have good review but more importantly they have a no contract option for phone and broadband. Costs a little more but I'm willing to pay the extra to trial them for a few months with the ability to leave at will.

my advice to you is DONT go anywhere near VM. Im from South Shields, and the service here is diabolical. Started at the start of the year, and as stated earlier, VM are known for taking absolutely forever to fix congestion issues. Planning permission is needed from the council to dig up streets and whatnot, and the whole process can take upwards of a year.

My advice is go with BT FTTC if its available in your area.

If you work from home and connectivity is important you need to look at response time and guarantees for resolving faults.

I use BTs BUSINESS Infinity service and have had an issue which needed resolving (I still had service). I could speak with the helpdesk one afternoon and the Technician would be here the next business morning or afternoon - a true next business day service. Phone support (UK based) is available 24 hours/day 365 days/year.

i live in billingham and find vm very good i'm on the 60mb and never get less than 55-56 no matter when i check speed.... i would recomend if i went with a bt line i'd be lucky to get 6mb

Quite far away from you, but still in the North East - I have had great service from VM for all I want - TV, Phone and rock solid up to 60MB Broadband delivered at always 50+ Good Luck.

Be careful about Virgin Media.

I used to live in Thornaby, while I was at Durham University, and the service provided by Virgin Media was appalling.

My area was suffering with a utilisation fault, and it took Virgin Media a grand total of 13 months to fix the fault. I had a 120mbit internet connection service from them, and I would get speeds in the evenings of 0.05mbit at best. It was mainly evenings and weekends that were the problem with speeds. If I used my connection at 2am or at some other ridiculously unsociable time, I'd get 120mbit or around 13/14mb/s download speed.

But it was just terrible. High pings, packet loss, unable to stream anything - BBC iPlayer, Youtube, Netflix, Sky GO. You name it, it didn't work.

I'm not sure whether they increased the capacity so that the problem won't occur again as my tenancy ran out before they'd repaired it.

Unfortauntely, Stockton-on-Tees is pretty poor for any ADSL provider - I was quoted 2mbit from BT when I was looking from a provider, and I don't think the Stockton exchange is enabled for FTTC either.

If you can ask some of your neighbours what Virgin Media is like, if they have a broadband service from them, then that could be your best bet.