@ukhardy07

That's amazing! I thought Netflix required a minimum 25Mbps stream in order to watch 4K Ultra HD? Therefore to watch two different 4K streams on two TV's, surely you'd need a minimum speed of 50Mbps?

Maybe it's because I currently have the Sky SR102 router, which is reliable but doesn't have the latest tech built in i.e. no 802.11ac or 5 Ghz channel and only has 100Mb ethernet ports.

I did have the BT Home Hub 5a when I was with BT previously but the 5Ghz channel gave me nothing but problems with all of my devices, which is why I switched to Sky.

I think the solution for me now is to stick with FTTC. The BT Infinity 1 Unlimited broadband offer is looking pretty nice. I get their latest router as well, a small increase in download speeds and at least guaranteed minimum connection speeds, something that Virgin can't offer. I would stick with Sky if they bumped up their download speeds.

That's it! Mind made up now. Sticking with FTTC and will look into Virgin again in 12 month's time.

Happy Christmas/holidays everyone!

Edited by deleted (Sat 24-Dec-16 15:26:59)

Homehub 5A has issues with 5Ghz, well it did back on the old firmwares.

Sky Hub is a bad device over wireless so I would not recommend.

When you get your homehub 6 (aka smarthub) please split the bands and connect to the one with a -5 wherever possible. Also disable the smart setup.

Netflix ultra HD hovers around 15Mbps in my home and was fine running two at once on BT before it was 55Mbps. I synced at 40,000Kbps.

Oh I didn't mention gaming on virginmedia was a joke.

One good thing to say about VM is the customer service was brilliant and I have nothing but positive things to say about call waiting times and staff working there.

Edited by ukhardy07 (Sat 24-Dec-16 17:55:48)

Thank you Maniac,

@PS123 - I am sure that's a decision you will not come to regret.

@UKHardy, Aye, I have to admit the few times I spoke to them they were good. I saw the other side in retentions but even then everyone was cool.

The service is a joke, the staff who do their best to work with said joke, not so at all.

I have mixed views of VM, I dont think they are a outright disaster but it is a risky move.

When you are not suffering noticeable congestion then the service is decent.

Benefits I would say are.

Guaranteed connection speed - it either connects at the package speed or does not connect at all. No distance and line quality bullcrap.
Exit points of their network nationwide so e.g. connecting to steam manchester servers should not need to go to london first.
No DLM type profiles, so not having to deal with things like excessive interleaving delay.
They hand out discounts really easily if there is problems, if you the sort of person who is fine with a cheap service even if problematic then this can be a good thing.
The CPE supports modem mode, VM is probably the only UK provider who recognises that there is a benefit for a modem mode on their equipment. Funny enough I pride myself on getting modem mode added, as it all started when I mentioned it to a senior VM CS bod on his blog several years ago.
If they need to send out an engineer, it comes quickly and is no threat of fee's.
Phone line's are in my experience much better quality than openreach, but my experience is based on having a long copper length to exchange.
Services are typically completely unaffected by the weather unlike satellite and DSL.
They have try before you commit policy.

Downsides

VM have problematic areas, the amount of areas 'seems' to have increased following their vivid product launches, history tends to show once the area has capacity problems in tends to be long term with possible short bursts of time with good service. Fix dates are frequently months away and when they do arrive get pushed back more often than not, if a fix is applied it is often not good enough.
They continue to sell to areas that are even confirmed as saturated by their own network team, which is one of the reasons people dont have respect for VM over this issue. I dont mean just accepting orders, but I mean carrying out aggressive sales tactics like leaflets through doors.
They allow people to upgrade early to new products before any infrastructure changes have occurred and even in saturated areas.
India tech support.

A lot of good comments from people already.

So my simple conclusion for you is this: If you live in a magical under-saturated area, you'll have a great time of it. If you live in an over-saturated area, prepare to pull your hair out trying to get it resolved.

Regarding the former scenario, the issues you might experience are the nonchalant attitude to Superhub etc problems - they just don't seem to communicate to customers (often things the customers have already worked out amongst themselves).

Regarding the latter, Virgin are quite frankly despicable. I do wonder why Ofcom have not acted more firmly against them. They have the cheek to continue to sell services to new customers on the very same street where you may experience speeds as low as 250Kbps (and pings in excess of 1000ms) at peak times. The people on the phone and in the shop tell you a 'fix date', when that comes and goes the people on the forum push it back and call it a 'review date'. So basically, they're fine about lying to you.

I had a completely different view of Virgin before I moved temporarily from a wonderland of always-200Mbps-speeds to the horribly congested, disgusting speed city of Norwich.

In reply to a post by Sheza:

So my simple conclusion for you is this: If you live in a magical under-saturated area, you'll have a great time of it. If you live in an over-saturated area, prepare to pull your hair out trying to get it resolved.

Regarding the former scenario, the issues you might experience are the nonchalant attitude to Superhub etc problems - they just don't seem to communicate to customers (often things the customers have already worked out amongst themselves).

It's not magical, I think most people are likely OK, after all, they topped the speed tests on this site from any major provider, and even the bottom 10% got 8.9mbit (which, is slow, but not the "250kbps" people talk about).

If 90% of people are over 8.9mbit, I think it's worth a shot myself.

It's not likely to be the whole of norwich that has issues even - probably just your cable segment, which might only be 10 houses.

I'm in Ipswich, I have no issues on 300mbit. I believe my routing goes via Norwich.

The Intel chipset in the SH3 has some issues with Jitter, that are acknowledged and Intel are working on. Personally, despite being a heavy user of everything from Newsgroups, Torrents, Online gaming, Video streaming, and VoIP, I have never noticed any impact whatsoever from this.

im on vms 300/20 package, was amazing until the 19th of december where from 12pm-2am, my download speed was all over, sometimes 30% or less of the usual 300.

i knew straight away it was because the kids were off, now theyre back at school the issue arises between 5pm-12am, so now i will not recommend vm.

the latency on vm is appaling too because of the modem 3.0 they supply, it has a dodgy chipset which virgin have failed to accept in almost a year.

so no, i will not recommend vm, and my contract is out on the 11th, bye bye.

bt provided me 75/20 with an average ping of 12ms, slower speed but latency better by far.

Edited by arronlowley (Wed 04-Jan-17 18:33:55)

@arronlowley:

I'm sure you won't regret it.

It was a hard decision in the fact that 100/6, 200/12 or even 300/20 (Homeworks+ package) were so tempting considering the speeds far outpace VDSL at 76Mbps.

@everyone

Thanks everyone for the additional comments after my last post. I've switched to BT, connection date 9 February. Hope it goes smoothly as I had a bad experience the last time round with them!

I left VM about 3 years ago because at that time I ran an online racing server for global drivers and at most races I had to restart the server and race due to the bad stability of the server.
The upload speed of my server was fine , but it was not smooth enough for online use , there was too much lag and jitter.
Moved to BT and my problems were solved , so if you want to use the connection for online gaming my advice is don`t move to VM.
BTW I live in Hertfordshire where VM laid cable in about 2002.

Edited by deleted (Fri 06-Jan-17 18:38:11)

we had bt before mate, the speed and latency was really good, just that bt are cons, they put added extras onto our package without asking and they werent free.

personally for me, its sky whos the best provider.

Edited by arronlowley (Fri 06-Jan-17 19:39:51)