Some (at least initial) praise for Virgin Media

I'm just coming up to a week tomorrow of a new (old) Virgin Media Business installation and I have to say I'm pleasantly surprised. Obviously when you browse forums, typically (and understandably), things are somewhat negative. Having a block of 5 static IPs I saw endless threads of issues with the VM Hitron modem using a GRE tunnel to wrangle static IPs on the dynamic consumer product. I was assured by the UK-based sales guy that those issues were being sorted with a firmware that's being rolled out, and is standard on all newly supplied modems.

I say it was an old installation because about 15 years ago there was a residential NTL line which was disconnected after the contract expired because I recall getting about 10-20% of the 10mbps speed I was paying for at the time and they weren't interested in getting it sorted.

The line goes through the front garden to one of their older, bigger brown boxes on the side of the house. Back then the installer was fine going under the crawl space and feeding the line from the front to the back of the house up to the back bedroom/home office.

Because the line was so old I had expected it needed to be replaced in order to achieve the 350/20 speed I was paying for, but one contractor turned up in the morning and surveyed the line to say it was fine, changed a part in the brown box, and re-wired the new cabinet a couple of doors down. Two blokes came in the afternoon, changed the old splitter but retained the NTL box plate inside, setup the modem and got me running in about 20 minutes.

Since then I've had pretty consistent speeds of 350+ mbps and have had no issues with static IP allocation or the line dropping. I am however retaining my FTTC line and moving from Andrews & Arnold to a cheap Vodafone package as a failback, as they offer discounts for existing customers and included essentially genuine FOC line rental.

The only downside was having to deal with the install customer service team based in the Philippines -- no doubt Liberty Global, the US owner of VM, uses them for more than just VM for their various world-wide brands. They were present but sometimes hard to hear - the lines were never good (not a great sign for a communications company).

Nevertheless I'm a happy camper for now; the VMB package is meeting my expectations

Nice to hear, I have my internal install Saturday.

In reply to a post by ubernick:

I'm just coming up to a week tomorrow of a new (old) Virgin Media Business installation and I have to say I'm pleasantly surprised. Obviously when you browse forums, typically (and understandably), things are somewhat negative. Having a block of 5 static IPs I saw endless threads of issues with the VM Hitron modem using a GRE tunnel to wrangle static IPs on the dynamic consumer product. I was assured by the UK-based sales guy that those issues were being sorted with a firmware that's being rolled out, and is standard on all newly supplied modems.

I say it was an old installation because about 15 years ago there was a residential NTL line which was disconnected after the contract expired because I recall getting about 10-20% of the 10mbps speed I was paying for at the time and they weren't interested in getting it sorted.

The line goes through the front garden to one of their older, bigger brown boxes on the side of the house. Back then the installer was fine going under the crawl space and feeding the line from the front to the back of the house up to the back bedroom/home office.

Because the line was so old I had expected it needed to be replaced in order to achieve the 350/20 speed I was paying for, but one contractor turned up in the morning and surveyed the line to say it was fine, changed a part in the brown box, and re-wired the new cabinet a couple of doors down. Two blokes came in the afternoon, changed the old splitter but retained the NTL box plate inside, setup the modem and got me running in about 20 minutes.

Since then I've had pretty consistent speeds of 350+ mbps and have had no issues with static IP allocation or the line dropping. I am however retaining my FTTC line and moving from Andrews & Arnold to a cheap Vodafone package as a failback, as they offer discounts for existing customers and included essentially genuine FOC line rental.

The only downside was having to deal with the install customer service team based in the Philippines -- no doubt Liberty Global, the US owner of VM, uses them for more than just VM for their various world-wide brands. They were present but sometimes hard to hear - the lines were never good (not a great sign for a communications company).

Nevertheless I'm a happy camper for now; the VMB package is meeting my expectations
[/quote


It's nice to see someone have a positive exp but i would warn of caution of being a little too optimistic. It would be nice it was the case of the Static GRE issue being fixed but I mean it's longer overdue it's been 2 years in the making.

Moved from virgin home to business ordered with 5 static ip's, on install day downloads were slow. So customer services changed us over to a dynamic IP and things improved like magic. also have a backup line FTTC with vodafone.