Anyone using VoIP through Virgin Media? Your comments please

Hello,

I would like to hear from people having broadband form Virgin Media and are using heavily VoIP (i.e running their own IP PBX inside their houses or offices)

a) What line do you have? Fibre? What speed?
b) Do you have residential service or Business? The Biz Plus maybe?
c) How many concurrent voip channels do you usually occupy? Are you still happy with it?
d) Are you using compression g729 codecs for this communication?
e) Any problems?

Anyone interested to share his experieces is most welcome!
Thank you

Unless business users are separated from residential users on dedicated channels I reiterate my concerns in this post (click). There are complaints of long standing over-utilisation issues in some Virgin areas, which would make VoIP unviable. If there are no such issues in your area, Virgin Biz or Biz Plus could be a very good product indeed. Ultimately, the only way of finding out about the quality of service in your area may be to sign up and be prepared to use the 28 day cancellation period if the service isn't up to standard.

Virgin Biz Plus isn't cheap - including VAT and the mandatory Virgin phone line, it's £55.49 a month once the six month reduced price offer ends. If there's FTTx over BT lines in your area, it's worth considering FTTx as an alternative, though you probably won't get true unlimited usage on a business tariff for that price. The maximum for FTTC is 80Mbps downstream with the speed decreasing with distance from the cabinet, unlike Virgin which has no dependency between distance and speed. BT FTTx usually offers faster upstream speed that Virgin does.

I didn't know that the phone line is mandatory. I don't want phone at all as I am coved fully with VoIP.

By BT FTTC I assume you mean BT Infinity? If yes, that's not active yet and not for the next year or so. SamKnows however states "FTTC status: Available in some areas".

BT FTTC means any FTTC service delivered via BT Openreach - not just Infinity / Infinity for Business. If BT Retail products like Infinity are available, any other ISP offering FTTC service via BT Wholesale can offer you FTTC, and if TalkTalk connect their network to the fibre infrastructure at the exchange, so can any TalkTalk reseller.

I'd try to get the most accurate information you can about FTTC availability and possible speed before proceeding further, so that you have a full understanding of the options. Does the BT Wholesale DSL checker say anything about FTTC or FTTP? Search by phone number if that works, otherwise by address. The postcode only checker tends to omit FTTC and FTTP even when it is planned or available.

If BT FTTx is an option, I would argue it's a better choice than Virgin Media for jitter sensitive services like VoIP. I consistently get the maximum possible MOS score of 4.2 when simulating 5 G.711 calls on the Visualware VoIP simulator - just now my result was MOS 4.2, no packet loss and 0.3ms jitter.


Whichever option you go for, I don't think you'll get out of paying for a phone line. A phone line appears to be mandatory for the Virgin small business products, whilst you will need a phone line for FTTC. You may persuade a business FTTC provider to rent a copper pair from BT Openreach and not bother to put voice service on it, though this kind of 'naked DSL' service is not common.

In reply to a post by David_W:

Whichever option you go for, I don't think you'll get out of paying for a phone line. A phone line appears to be mandatory for the Virgin small business products

When Telewest (as was) installed our cable line they stuck a phone extension socket on the wall in the server room. It has remained untouched since then, without any phone ever having been plugged into it.

I am using VoIP via Virgin Media and so far i am satisfied, especially in terms of quality of the connection. I heard that there are some cheaper provider on the market. however i haven't made proper research yet.
If you are willing to use VoIP, you should get some internal business communicator as well. I recomend Join by Voipswitch, i heard new update is comming soon, so you can search for info online.
It cut costs and increasing your managment, as well as VoIP.