I survived a day with Virgin Media (Nexfiber FTTP)

I've been with BT FTTP 900/100 for the past 2+ years and the service has been awesome. I had VM cover my village with their new network of FTTP and thought I'd take the jump to see how it was with the plan to jump to Gig2 symetrical.

The install went well as it was a case of using under drive ducts already in place and when the installer came it all went well again. Lovely 1140mb up and down as expected.

Fast forward a few hours and they'd given me a lovely speed boost which resulted in me dropping to 1140/100.

I spent the next few hours on chat trying to get my faster upload sorted and spoke about Gig2 which to them didn't exist.

More hours on the phone the next day and the service was still 1140/100 but they promised me 2000/2000.

Another chat with support and they told me that the solution was to dial up and press 1/1/4 which is the cancellations line! Sure enough I'd only been signed up a day so I went with it.

After dealing with their support for maybe 5 hours over the space of a day I decided I didn't want to risk signing up to them for longer.

Coupled with this my BT line NEVER dropped below 900mb down. Day, afternoon, night etc always >900mb. Within the first 12hrs I had seen peak speeds of 600mb at times!

After being told outright lies, promised various things that they then retracted I can't be dealing with this.

Shame as I spent money upgrading my switch gear to handle the potential speed bump but at least internal transfers are faster now.

Edited by chriscdotcodotuk (Sat 26-Oct-24 19:18:20)

Sounds like you need to add "over nexfibre" to the title of your post.

Majority of the country can't get Gig 2 with VM.

I'll ping the mods as this forum itself has (Cable) after the name, which nexfibre certainly isn't cable or DOCSIS at any stage.

Edited by jchamier (Sat 26-Oct-24 17:39:26)

Seems to be a common complaint on the VM forums that provisioning errors seem to be impossible for their customer service team to fix - they prefer to dispatch techs all the time who can't do anything.

Yeah I posted under VM as it was the most logical place even though it's full FTTP.

I honestly thought because it was new to my area I wouldn't suffer the normal contention issues that VM seems to suffer regularly

After I swapped back to my BT connection my kids thanked me for making the internet quicker. The stability of the BT connection is leaps and bounds better which I'm honestly shocked about.

The BT connection goes ONT > Edge router > 2.5G Switches > WiFi APs.
The VM connection went 5X > 2.5G Switches > WiFi APs

Virgins customer services is atrocious. Still.

Its sad as I used to be on VM at a previous property 5+ years ago. I was on whatever their top package was at all times and I'd often get invited to trying new services. Over the space of ten years I think I had 3 or 4 drop outs and suffered contention issues for a few weeks but apart from that it was amazing.

One day was too much for me this time round.

In reply to a post by chriscdotcodotuk:

Yeah I posted under VM as it was the most logical place even though it's full FTTP.

Assuming you are nexfibre it should be quite different to the two DOCSIS areas, either lightning (external ONT to Coax) or traditional coax cable.

I honestly thought because it was new to my area I wouldn't suffer the normal contention issues that VM seems to suffer regularly

I've been on VM old 1990s coax cable here in Farnborough (Surrey/Hants area) for 5 years now and I haven't seen this issues. The coax DOCSIS area problems are all seriously regional.

After I swapped back to my BT connection my kids thanked me for making the internet quicker. The stability of the BT connection is leaps and bounds better which I'm honestly shocked about.

Glad you were able to switch back.

Something is obviously wrong either with the local nexfibre bit, or with the ISP connection to nexfibre. Maybe in a few years there will be other ISPs on the nexfibre infrastructure giving you price competition with the OR network.

In reply to a post by Skie:

Virgins customer services is atrocious. Still.

If only VM had a good level of customer services, the potential of their network(s) would be so much greater. But their reputation is appalling, it surely puts off many potential customers. My first reaction to anyone considering VM would be to very much advise against them.

Unless they are the only choice. I could go back to FTTC at 30mbps; but here VM is the only high speed option.

Hm, I'm on Gig2 symmetric and not had issues like that. I've removed the Hub5X and am using an XGSPON SFP+ module directly into a CCR2004. My 10G and 25G stuff connects directly in to that with 10G downlink to a unifi Pro Max switch.

I can solidly hit 2G down and up.

Will fully agree that Vermin customer service is awful. They are also not the most reliable, but I have a 500/500 gigaclear line as backup and automatic failover.

Edited by nemeth782 (Sun 27-Oct-24 13:28:10)