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)

It's one of those things where if it works then it's fine. If your service went down overnight for a few minutes and came back up and you were on 1000/100 though it's not a guarantee that anybody at Virgin Media would be able to fix it, as mad as that sounds.

I'm fortunate that I've got BT FTTP in my area so I can stay on their 900/100 service or use other providers over the same fiber.

I had planned on moving to my own hardware rather than the 5X but that's gone out the window now.

If retentions call me and can offer me the actual service I'm after then I'll give it a go and thoroughly test it but I'll still be ready to jump ship.

In reply to a post by jchamier:

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

There is only so long they can rely on being the one option though. Openreach and smaller providers are still rolling out at a decent pace.

I'm lucky as I have OR FTTP and YouFibre, so I'll likely never have to suffer them again.

In reply to a post by Skie:

There is only so long they can rely on being the one option though. Openreach and smaller providers are still rolling out at a decent pace.

There are multiple problems in my area... 1) OR have no ducts; so retro fit is painful. 2) poles have been errected by one of the two AltNets which stops OR using them 3) many small blocks of flats where neither AltNet can get wayleave. VM's predecessors were in the street in the 1990s and have their own ducts, they have also agreed (20+ years ago) access to the flats.

I'm lucky as I have OR FTTP and YouFibre, so I'll likely never have to suffer them again.

Very useful; I would easily be with Hey! or Toob as they are both in my road, but neither can get a respond from the block owners (neither can I). At least VM can offer me 1000 / 100 but at £72/m I've decided I can live without.

I can see why OR have skipped the town so far... no ducts, and no poles, and lots of anti-pole locals means I suspect we might see OR FTTP in 2035....

In reply to a post by chriscdotcodotuk:

If retentions call me and can offer me the actual service I'm after then I'll give it a go and thoroughly test it but I'll still be ready to jump ship.

nexfibre's CEO needs to get a couple of additional ISPs on to the network, or VM's rubbish customer services will cost them income.

I used to be on them in London for ages. I even stupidly thought it would be a good idea to just get a new drop cable re-installed after we completely re-did the house, following pandemic. That was a mistake!

There are 3 things wrong with Virgin Murder as a customer:

1. The old HFC cable network is just heaving and tired in many franchise areas. It needs "a fork in it", as the yanks would say. The sooner it's dead and buried the better.

2. Customer Service is a contradiction in terms. It's as woeful now as it was when they took over my old Cable London / Telewest Blueyonder account some near twenty years ago.

3. Get better install/repair subbies. Openreach are far better in this regard.

In reply to a post by Pheasant:

There are 3 things wrong with Virgin Murder as a customer:
1. The old HFC cable network is just heaving and tired in many franchise areas. It needs "a fork in it", as the yanks would say. The sooner it's dead and buried the better.

In many areas there are just too many homes per segment, and as speeds have gone up, despite the move from DOCSIS 2.0 to 3.0 and 3.1, it just isn’t enough. Then you have the problems that each area was built by different firms to different quality standards, some have lots of RF noise ingress causing packet loss. Its a mixed bag.

At least if you follow ISPreview (used to be this sites news) the management have started the investment to replace the coax with a GPON FTTP deployment. Hopefully the 1990s ducts will be in better shape than OR’s non-duct DIG areas.

2. Customer Service is a contradiction in terms. It's as woeful now as it was when they took over my old Cable London / Telewest Blueyonder account some near twenty years ago.

The only workaround for this is to use the Community Forum.; those guys are great.

3. Get better install/repair subbies. Openreach are far better in this regard.

Still plenty of horror stories about OR subs.

Considering they're partly owned by Telefonica and Liberty Global its very hard to see them getting chummy with any other providers unfortunately.

Today I had a call from the retentions team who basically spent 15mins saying almost nothing of use other than "you cant upgrade to 2gig and you just have to leave and come back".

What an absolute joke that the retentions team, the team who try and keep customers, said "just leave". They did say I should send a formal complaint but that was it. Baffling really.

In reply to a post by chriscdotcodotuk:

Considering they're partly owned by Telefonica and Liberty Global its very hard to see them getting chummy with any other providers unfortunately.

Understood, other than they keep saying they are a full fibre wholesale operator! (https://www.nexfibre.co.uk/)

Today I had a call from the retentions team who basically spent 15mins saying almost nothing of use other than "you cant upgrade to 2gig and you just have to leave and come back".

Likely need more training.

What an absolute joke that the retentions team, the team who try and keep customers, said "just leave". They did say I should send a formal complaint but that was it. Baffling really.

Probably don't really have a clue about nexfibre areas.

Several buildings in my area under my housing estate management have gone live with Nexfibre and I also noticed that those postcodes with Nexfibre turn the Virgin Media page to a dark grey theme instead of the usual red.

I also didn't know the Gig2 service was symmetrical for VM as I see 2000Mbps average download speed 200Mbps average upload speed in the bullet points.

This can be somewhat misleading for a customer wishing to consider taking VM via Nexfibre. Also £70 for Gig2 service is very expensive especially when you consider 3Gbps from Community Fibre is sold for £56 per month. I honestly don't know how they will attract a lot of customers on their network.

Nexfibre will indeed need to bring in more Altnets. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nexfibre#Wholesale_par... I see that it is rumoured that Zen Internet may join their network as TBC. Still Zen is also an expensive provider and will be difficult for them to compete with the cheaper Altnets.

Openreach FTTP or CityFibre are far better choices that would've excited me more. The strange thing is that I have little excitement for Nexfibre coming as my second FTTP overbuild after Community Fibre.

Probably the only compelling case for me to use VM is if it does not use CGNAT via Nexfibre. Is this the case for their service?

In reply to a post by BLaZiNgSPEED:

Probably the only compelling case for me to use VM is if it does not use CGNAT via Nexfibre. Is this the case for their service?

VM's IP network does not use CGNAT, it doesn't matter how you reach the VM network via Coax, or nexfibre. VM also does not have IPv6, widely reported.

There is the option of paying £5 extra a month for symmetrical speeds. I was paying £40.99 + £5 to get the Gig1 symmetrical speed.

I did a fair few speed tests yesterday during the day and early evening. with both my BT connection and the VM connection. I tested various speedtest servers, sometimes the same ones, sometimes whatever it thought was best and:

BT - All day. 910-920mb down, 110-115 up. Pings ranging from 4-8ms. 0% packet loss (one run had 1% loss). Responsiveness was about 31 down, 21 up.

VM - Day time, 1100-1140 down, 110 up. Pings ranging from 4-9ms. 0-5% packet loss. Responsiveness was about 40 down, 40 up.
VM - Evening time, 700-840 down, 105 up. Pings ranging from 8-15ms. 5-15% packet loss. Responsiveness was about 40 down, 70-130 up.

How odd.

Which speed test server were you using on the VM tests, and what is the address of your first hop on their network? Don't worry, this won't give away anything other than a very general location for you: it's likely a virtual interface / loopback on a BNG.

Ta.

In reply to a post by jchamier:

In reply to a post by BLaZiNgSPEED:

Probably the only compelling case for me to use VM is if it does not use CGNAT via Nexfibre. Is this the case for their service?

VM's IP network does not use CGNAT, it doesn't matter how you reach the VM network via Coax, or nexfibre. VM also does not have IPv6, widely reported.

Yeah, that is the only positive. The only reason I expressed concerns is due to Community Fibre only removing CGNAT for their 3Gbps package but all others are under CGNAT so port forwarding will be an issue.

But if CGNAT is not an issue for all packages under VM then that's somewhat of a relief. IPv6 is not so important after-all. I think IPv4 with port forwarding is far more important for the majority of users (particularly gamers) than having IPv6 but being under CGNAT.

I can sacrifice IPv6 like I did with TalkTalk but at least the main FTTC ISPs don't restrict port forwarding.

Nexfibre however, doesn't yet have any other ISPs on the network, so that means VM is the only choice for now and if there are any restrictions then you'll be stuck.
Luckily for me Community Fibre do offer far more reasonably priced packages except for the fact that there's no CGNAT for packages under 3Gbps.

In reply to a post by chriscdotcodotuk:

There is the option of paying £5 extra a month for symmetrical speeds. I was paying £40.99 + £5 to get the Gig1 symmetrical speed.

I did a fair few speed tests yesterday during the day and early evening. with both my BT connection and the VM connection. I tested various speedtest servers, sometimes the same ones, sometimes whatever it thought was best and:

BT - All day. 910-920mb down, 110-115 up. Pings ranging from 4-8ms. 0% packet loss (one run had 1% loss). Responsiveness was about 31 down, 21 up.

VM - Day time, 1100-1140 down, 110 up. Pings ranging from 4-9ms. 0-5% packet loss. Responsiveness was about 40 down, 40 up.
VM - Evening time, 700-840 down, 105 up. Pings ranging from 8-15ms. 5-15% packet loss. Responsiveness was about 40 down, 70-130 up.

So that means if you pay £70+£5 extra for Gig2 symmetrical and that's total £75 a month. That's certainly quite expensive. The packages are already expensive enough but to have to add another £5 a month on top isn't fair. Then I'm thinking to myself that Community Fibre £56 a month for 3Gbps symmetrical is the best choice yet I don't need that fast connection as all I needed is 500Mbps or 1Gbps for a cheaper price but not have CGNAT.

This leads me to the second point, that if nexfibre brings in more ISPs maybe it will become more competitive and VM will not be a monopoly as the only ISP on the network.
It will be interesting how performance compares in future when more ISPs join. Openreach FTTP I think is a better choice than nexfibre, far more ISPs on the network.

My management opted to give wayleave permission for VM/nexfibre instead. I don't know the logic behind this, they are a more expensive service in general & not going to attract many customers especially from social housing. Only reason I believe this to be the case is because our communal aerial TV system is managed by SCCI Alphatrack and they are also the ones in charge of installing the fibre optic cables for nexfibre.

In reply to a post by BLaZiNgSPEED:

if nexfibre brings in more ISPs maybe it will become more competitive and VM will not be a monopoly as the only ISP on the network.

That may be one reason why VM are dragging their heels on the wholesale issue. They'd have to deliver twice as many services for half the revenue per active line.

In reply to a post by BLaZiNgSPEED:

My management opted to give wayleave permission for VM/nexfibre instead. I don't know the logic behind this, they are a more expensive service in general & not going to attract many customers especially from social housing. Only reason I believe this to be the case is because our communal aerial TV system is managed by SCCI Alphatrack and they are also the ones in charge of installing the fibre optic cables for nexfibre.

A kickback is probably involved somewhere.

Your building management could of course give permission for *both* Openreach and VM/nexfibre.

Yes, I also believe that to be the case with VM and Nexfibre trying to hold as long as possible to gain maximum number of customers first before allowing Nexfibre to attract new ISPs.

It is a marketing strategy to solidify their customer base first probably in collaboration with Nexfibre. I may be wrong, but I think this is a conspiracy tactic and Nexfibre are delaying this deliberately to help VM gain more customers first.

They certainly know what they are doing. Also, from what I am reading Nexfibre (admitted) that they are cherry picking all the areas that do not have an existing Virgin Media Coax DOCSIS 3.1 Footprint like in our case. So, it is not surprising that they targeted our area and have upgraded to the new Nexfibre service since we do not have neither Virgin Media Coax or Openreach FTTP.

I believe eventually my building management will give permission to Openreach FTTP. In fact, I also think Openreach might express greater interest themselves to reach out to my management as having Community Fibre and VM will mean a loss of FTTC/ADSL customers.
There will come a point in future when the FTTC customer base will be emptied out but it is a matter of time. Even though an 80/20Mbps is more than sufficient for most of our needs, people will naturally switch to FTTP Altnets over time.

I have seen several places that do have several FTTP overbuilds just as some are mentioning here of having Nexfibre and Openreach FTTP.

It's a funny situation, 10 years ago I couldn't convince my management to sign to 1 Altnet at that time (Hyperoptic). I was even the Hyperoptic Champion and couldn't do anything to persuade them saying FTTP wasn't in their priority.

But now they have given permission to both Community Fibre and Virgin Media. Probably they now realise this is not rocket science. Or maybe they have these Altnets where they live so they were naturally more accepting to give this permission.

In reply to a post by BLaZiNgSPEED:

Yes, I also believe that to be the case with VM and Nexfibre trying to hold as long as possible to gain maximum number of customers first before allowing Nexfibre to attract new ISPs.

It is a marketing strategy to solidify their customer base first probably in collaboration with Nexfibre. I may be wrong, but I think this is a conspiracy tactic and Nexfibre are delaying this deliberately to help VM gain more customers first.

Indeed you are. Nexfibre have been actively speaking with ISPs to sign them up and at least two have run trial deployments. They have nothing agreed yet for commercial reasons not conspiratorial ones. The necessary infrastructure to connect ISPs that aren't VMO2 is awaiting the first order, it's already been planned and budgeted. VMO2 will be building the infrastructure to allow others to connect to Nexfibre and compete with them.

In reply to a post by BLaZiNgSPEED:

Also, from what I am reading Nexfibre (admitted) that they are cherry picking all the areas that do not have an existing Virgin Media Coax DOCSIS 3.1 Footprint like in our case. So, it is not surprising that they targeted our area and have upgraded to the new Nexfibre service since we do not have neither Virgin Media Coax or Openreach FTTP.

Nexfibre are 2/3rds owned by the owners of VMO2, Liberty Global and Telefonica. They make extensive use of VMO2's network and they contracted out their build to VMO2. VMO2 are already upwards of a quarter through upgrading their existing cable network to full fibre. It would make absolutely no sense for Nexfibre to build in those areas in order to compete with their majority owners.

Basically Nexfibre are there to allow Liberty Global and Telefonica to cover more premises without incurring increased regulation and, even then, VMO2 are going wholesale themselves and separating their network into a new NetCo partly to try and avoid the ire of the regulator. This is not a secret or a conspiracy.

I went to run a few wireless speed tests as I've disconnected my device from my main network and the speeds were all over the place. London servers, Maidstone servers (I'm near sittingbourne so this is closest to me) and they were jumping from 650 down to 150 down and anywhere up to 6% packet loss and 4ms jitter. Its 4pm on a sunday afternoon.

Pings are all a bit worse than on BT (7-10ms) vs a steady 6ms. Throughput speeds are better most of the time on VM but I'm sat right next to the hub and my home wifi maxes out at 600mb (ish) most of the time vs the 5X which does far faster. I've seen wireless speeds of 900mb on it so this 650 is as fast as it's actually running.

brnt-bng-1-sub.network.virginmedia.net --> brnt-core-2a-ae15-11.network.virginmedia.net. -->

In reply to a post by chriscdotcodotuk:

I went to run a few wireless speed tests as I've disconnected my device from my main network and the speeds were all over the place.

If you post some names, happy to try on my doscis coax connection, but WiFi can easily be the the issue, more so on weekends when families are all using devices across your neighbourhood than mid week.

I don't know anything in sittingbourne, but bbc.co.uk is a staple for testing:

Pinging bbc.co.uk [151.101.64.81] with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 151.101.64.81: bytes=32 time=19ms TTL=59
Reply from 151.101.64.81: bytes=32 time=15ms TTL=59
Reply from 151.101.64.81: bytes=32 time=14ms TTL=59
Reply from 151.101.64.81: bytes=32 time=14ms TTL=59
Ping statistics for 151.101.64.81:
    Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
    Minimum = 14ms, Maximum = 19ms, Average = 15ms

and Traceroute

Tracing route to bbc.co.uk [151.101.64.81]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

  1    <1 ms    <1 ms    <1 ms  my.home.router [192.x.x.x]
  2     *        *        *     Request timed out.
  3    15 ms    12 ms    25 ms  glfd-core-2b-ae18-650.network.virginmedia.net [80.7.14.113]
  4     *        *        *     Request timed out.
  5    16 ms    14 ms    12 ms  eislou2-ic-4-ae0-0.network.virginmedia.net [62.254.59.130]
  6     *        *        *     Request timed out.
  7    14 ms    13 ms    13 ms  151.101.64.81

Edited by jchamier (Sun 03-Nov-24 15:57:20)

Sorry I was simply pointing out my first hop out of the house was as I shared.

Wifi wise I'm quite fortunate in that I basically pick up my own network and very rarely one other if I'm at the back of my house.

Where I was located doing those tests I was less than 20cm from the 5X and >>5m from the nearest AP for my main network.

My previous tests were all done whilst hard wired via 2.5g (nics and switches) where the massive speed issues and latency issues became apparent during the evenings.

VM are happy for me to go elsewhere and I'm happy to stay with BT. The connection is far far far more consistent around the clock and consistency is worth more to me than a few hundred mb headline speed. Sure, the upload would have been epic but such is life.

In reply to a post by chriscdotcodotuk:

VM are happy for me to go elsewhere and I'm happy to stay with BT. The connection is far far far more consistent around the clock and consistency is worth more to me than a few hundred mb headline speed. Sure, the upload would have been epic but such is life.

Yep, sounds like wherever nexfibre connect the local access network into the VM ISP network seems congested. I recall BRNT might be Brentford, one of the old regional areas for either CableTel, NTL, C&W Consumer or Telewest.

Edited by jchamier (Sun 03-Nov-24 20:04:31)

In reply to a post by jchamier:

Yep, sounds like wherever nexfibre connect the local access network into the VM ISP network seems congested. I recall BRNT might be Brentford, one of the old regional areas for either CableTel, NTL, C&W Consumer or Telewest.

Brentford is a backbone site. Most of the BNGs are going into backbone sites. These are big aggregation points for cable customers so inevitably will have some sites going through them that are congested. Makes sense to put the BNGs deeper into the network where lots of older cable areas come together and the sites that most resemble full on data centres rather than hub sites are. Cooling, power, connectivity and unlike cable no distance restrictions and can just add more and more BNGs fed by big data links as all digital.

BNG placement and access network congestion on sites connected to them are correlated but no causation there: Brentford is part of both the core London network and the backbone national network.

BNGs in Birmingham and Leeds, also backbone sites.

The actual interconnect site between Nexfibre and VM is probably the one mentioned on the cabinets then customers probably go over EVPN-VPWS on VM's network to get to the BNGs.

Cable you go IP where your cable connection terminates, this you come off the Nexfibre OLT and go onto a VLAN which is carried across VM's network to a BNG.

In reply to a post by chriscdotcodotuk:

I went to run a few wireless speed tests as I've disconnected my device from my main network and the speeds were all over the place. London servers, Maidstone servers (I'm near sittingbourne so this is closest to me) and they were jumping from 650 down to 150 down and anywhere up to 6% packet loss and 4ms jitter. Its 4pm on a sunday afternoon.

Pings are all a bit worse than on BT (7-10ms) vs a steady 6ms. Throughput speeds are better most of the time on VM but I'm sat right next to the hub and my home wifi maxes out at 600mb (ish) most of the time vs the 5X which does far faster. I've seen wireless speeds of 900mb on it so this 650 is as fast as it's actually running.

brnt-bng-1-sub.network.virginmedia.net --> brnt-core-2a-ae15-11.network.virginmedia.net. -->

Ta. The slightly longer pings make sense, can explain those easily enough. The wireless... yes. Not much use having 1.1 Gb day and night if cabled when most of what you're doing is wireless that is all over the place, not even close much of the time.

Thanks for indulging me.

Not so much for you given you're on your way but for folks more generally when looking for the closest test aim for the one closest to the BNG rather than your own location. VM's address ranges tend to be localised due to the cable network heritage but the shortest distance across the network is actually from BNG to the speed test server.

I was only being lazy testing the speed wirelessly as you asked at that point but when I tested before I tested via two wired machines (2.5gb connections) and the speeds recorded every half hour went from 1140 all the way down to 600mb later in the evening with the uploads going from 108mb down to 60mb in the evening.

Pings started off nice with 3.6ms results to a few locations in London but as the day progressed those 3.6-4.2ms pings slowly crept up to more like 8-12ms with some outliers sitting at 15-20ms.

During the day packet loss was a nice steady 0% but again in the evening you'd get results that'd range from 4% to the highest I saw of 18%.

I tested the connection whilst saturating the line with "linux iso files" and during the day the speed tests just plodded along and zero loss. During the evening the files were coming down/up a lot slower but the speed tests failed just as poorly.

I think over the space of 8 hours I must have ran 60+ speed tests trying different things to get different results.

The faff of swapping over network gear to test on a 2.5gb connection just to get more data was not / is not worth it to me so I just took the wireless data as an example. during the middle of the day today I did get >900mb on the wireless whilst simultaneously doing a speed test on my other wireless network using BT just to see if the RF noise and congestion would cause an issue, it didnt. The BT line did 600mb whilst the VM did 924mb both on their own wireless connections.

The issue that I saw gave me horrible flashbacks to an over congested exchange from maybe 10yrs ago when I was a VM customer. They resolved the issue but nightly the connection would become almost unusable.

To be clear, the devices I care about are hard wired but the tests were being lazy

Edited by chriscdotcodotuk (Mon 04-Nov-24 16:56:02)

I'm in Watford, which was cabled up very early - Jones Cable Media, before being taken over by NTL and eventually Virgin. I switched back to BT back in the NTL days and had gone over to Fibre to the Premises a while back - with a 108M down, 20M up connection with vodafone at present. It only costs £22 /month and is quite sufficient for my needs. The road had been dug up over the last month - replacing the gas main, and so it appears, putting in new Virgin fibre. A couple of days ago I had someone knock on the door offering a free 6 month trial of their latest system - supposedly a 2Gb/s connection, and their TV offering. No obligations beyond the 6 months, and the promise of £200 of Amazon vouchers for providing feedback regarding the service. I couldn't refuse!

They installed the fibre into the house the next day - and did a much better job than Openreach using grometts to go through walls, and made a very neat job of the work using a good number of cable cleats and much more intelligent routing. It is a slightly different system with fibre to the router - the Openreach is fibre to a wall box, then cable the last couple of metres to the router. So far, performance has been solid 800 to 850 Mbps down (almost certainly limited by my home network; -Gigabit wired ethernet or Wifi 5) and 200 to 250 Mb/s up.

However, if I were to continue with it beyond the 6 months, they would want about £130/month, so I see it as a nice to have, but not worth paying such a hefty premium. The TV package is of little use to me either; There isn't exactly a lot worth watching across all the extra channels now available to me.

In reply to a post by jerrytaff2:

A couple of days ago I had someone knock on the door offering a free 6 month trial of their latest system - supposedly a 2Gb/s connection, and their TV offering. No obligations beyond the 6 months, and the promise of £200 of Amazon vouchers for providing feedback regarding the service. I couldn't refuse!

They installed the fibre into the house the next day - and did a much better job than Openreach using grometts to go through walls, and made a very neat job of the work using a good number of cable cleats and much more intelligent routing. It is a slightly different system with fibre to the router - the Openreach is fibre to a wall box, then cable the last couple of metres to the router. So far, performance has been solid 800 to 850 Mbps down (almost certainly limited by my home network; -Gigabit wired ethernet or Wifi 5) and 200 to 250 Mb/s up.

Blimey, it lives! Thanks for this. Take it they didn't touch the existing coaxial cable in your home, any idea if they removed the cable between pavement and your home?

They laid the fibre in a new trench through the garden, but brought it from the existing access point in the pavement to the same place on the outside wall of the house - They removed the old grey junction box there, and the cable from that box into the house. They replaced it with a much larger (brown) junction box and, fibre which had to be routed across the front of the house and through our integral garage, and into the office.

I suspect that they removed the old cable from the street into that box, but I'm not sure. It was academic as far as I was concerned, as the cable hadn't been used for years.

They didn't touch any of the old cabling in the house, but I'd removed some of the internal wiring when redecorating, and the old TV feed is buried somewhere under the floor of an extension I had built a few years back,

Well I'm back again! I decided to just give them another go. Go all in and get the 2gig symmetrical connection from the very start to see if it was the changing of stuff that caused issues.

I'm here after a month of heavy usage and I have to report that evening speeds have been awesome until now. Last night there was an hour long outage from 23:30 -> 00:30 but that was quite a wide spread issue

Speed tests are all showing over 2000 each way and on a few of the London test servers they're down in the 3ms pings.

The kids games all work smoothly without the crazy packet loss I was seeing before.

I'm still using the supplied hub but its hooked into the rest of my network. Currently I don't need to do anything different as it's working just fine.

When I was happy with how it was working I upgraded the home wifi to Wifi7 gear and it's nice to have wireless speeds throughout most of my house sitting between 1200 and 1500mb up and down.