BT v Virgin

Sliver

Sliver

Sliver

Soldato
Joined
27 Dec 2011
Posts
10,908
Location
Darlington
So I've been a BT customer for many years. TV, mobile and internet. Initially I was pleased as everything worked and my internet speed was around 70M. In the last couple of years though I've had numerous problems and a slow down in my internet. Add to this Bt's relentless price increases for a poorer service, I decided enough was enough. This morning I called Virgin and made what I think was a great deal. 200M broadband, better on demand TV with more channels than BT and a better deal on my mobile, for the same price I was paying BT.

I can't wait for the guy to come and install it in 30 days time.

I'm interested to hear from anyone who has had both services and how they compare, or indeed anyone who is on Virgin and how you rate them.
 
Ive always found virgin Internet to be flawless. The TV box takes some getting used to...its slow as balls aswel.

I do think your internet massively depends on your location - im in quite a prime location and can get the maximum. I think Ive had 2 ISP issues in the 4 years ive had it.

I had BT internet at my house 5 years ago and it was terrible...but this was 5 years ago.
 
ChrisD. said:
Have you researched Virgin Media congestion in your area? Pray you are unaffected.
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Yes. Everything looks fine. I've been promised speeds of up to 200M with a 14 day money back guarantee if I feel the service is not as promised. The guy on the phone did a line test and told me everything was great.
 
Of course they're going promise speeds up to 200Mbit. :) Also look into that 14 day period, I recall someone saying it's not as easy as they make out.

I hope the connection is fine for you, VM in a decent area is hard to beat.
 
dalehitchy1 said:
If you want decent upload speeds stick with BT. I'm on 150mb download with virgin and my upload is around 1-2mb/s
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Like I said in my opening post, BT are not providing the service they promised when I signed up. I expected they would improve over time but after several years they have got worse. So after researching Virgin on the net and speaking to them on the phone and also persuading them to knock the price down by £12 per month (which was cool of them to do) I decided to switch. I'm aware that when they say 200M download speeds, that is a maximum and in reality the speed will be less. BT do the same trick. Still, Virgin will be much quicker than what I have now.

In the highly unlikely event everything goes pear shaped, I can always switch back.
 
Unfortunately if you're on FTTC at the moment then although VM's download speed is higher, browsing, gaming etc will 'feel' faster and better on a decent FTTC connection.
 
Been on Virgin (formerly NTL) for 16 years now. Its been pretty much rock solid over that time - I can't remember the last time I had any sort of outage. Just ran a speedtest now (6pm) and getting 214.67meg download / 12.18 meg upload - which is better than promised on my package.

Agree with comments above: the Tivo menu is frustratingly slow, but we are watch less TV these days and more streaming via Amazon fire.
 
peterwalkley said:
Been on Virgin (formerly NTL) for 16 years now. Its been pretty much rock solid over that time - I can't remember the last time I had any sort of outage. Just ran a speedtest now (6pm) and getting 214.67meg download / 12.18 meg upload - which is better than promised on my package.

Agree with comments above: the Tivo menu is frustratingly slow, but we are watch less TV these days and more streaming via Amazon fire.
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Good to hear. Makes me feel confident in my decision to change providers.
 
I shouldn't worry unduly OP. You should be fine (hopefully). I can't remember whether you specified but make sure you take the VIVID200 GAMER not the regular 200. It gives more upload and has no traffic management/throttling at all.

Personally speaking, we did suffer bad congestion for a time. However, since the VM network upgrade program we've been totally solid, even though we're in a historically terrible VM area (Liverpool). We now have the full 24 downstream channels on the broadband, and I get 200Mbps down and 20Mbps up 24/7 without issues. Downloading stuff at 27MB/sec and uploading iCloud backups at 2.2MB/sec even at over 1TB a month... no problems. It's great, so great I'm phoning tomorrow to pay the extra for 300/20 instead. :D The speeds are now very consistent (even at peak time) as you can see from this speed graph:

Screen_Shot_2017_07_14_at_00_16_18.png


Regarding some of the comments above: The TV boxes aren't slow, not the new V6 ones anyway. They're snappy and easy to use, and I've experienced no lag issues at all. If you have a slow box I'll wager it's one of the older Samsung boxes or the gen1 TiVO.
 
Sliver said:
This morning I called Virgin and made what I think was a great deal. 200M broadband, better on demand TV with more channels than BT and a better deal on my mobile, for the same price I was paying BT.
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Your first mistake - Quidco and/or TCB would have provided you with a *much* better deal. Depending on the area, VM can be great, they too will hike the price on an annual basis, they too will have issues, more so in August/September etc. when student installs hit and upgrades are required.
 
Be wary of the installation being done by multiple teams. The first guy to turn up could apparently only do a temp install and another visit was scheduled to do a proper install about 2 weeks later. The day before that, I came home to find an 'advance' team digging a trench through the middle of my lawn, completely at odds with the way the first guy had agreed it would be installed.

Since that cluster **** of an installation, the service has been generally ok bar a week long period of 2 whole postcode areas being down but not being told this was the case just mysteriously having every engineer visit I booked cancelled 3 hours after I finished the lengthy support call where they apparently didn't know it was widespread. I only found out eventually via twitter.
 
Had virgin 300 mb with tv and phone and cancelled within the cooling off period as the line dropped to half speed during peak times, ping times and packet loss was hideous.
Currently have BT infinity and its a million times better than Virgin Media ever was! Plusnet who i moved to after virgin were also very good.

Ping times are low:

Pinging google.co.uk [216.58.198.227] with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 216.58.198.227: bytes=32 time=7ms TTL=54
Reply from 216.58.198.227: bytes=32 time=7ms TTL=54
Reply from 216.58.198.227: bytes=32 time=7ms TTL=54
Reply from 216.58.198.227: bytes=32 time=7ms TTL=54

Ping statistics for 216.58.198.227:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 7ms, Maximum = 7ms, Average = 7ms

Speed tests are consistent - always best to check with neighbors before signing up with virgin media
 
Virgin Media and BT both have absolutely toilet-quality support, but BT gives you IPv6 and you will get whatever speed you sync at. My experience with Virgin Media has been one of congested networks, nobody wanting to get as far as admitting that was the case, and fix times that they are happy to measure in months.

I'll take my rock-solid 70/20 sub-10ms IPv6 connection over a 200Mbps Virgin Media line connected to a network so poorly maintained that I can get those speeds at 4am and can barely use Netflix in the evening.
 
FTTP is way better than FTTC, if not why is sky going over to it.

Both Virgin and Sky have both over subscribed hence the congestion.
 
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