Business Broadband Checker/Recommendations

[jonnymc4]

We have an office in central Manchester (M4 1xx) and we're currently with Virgin on one of their business products. It's diabolical. See BQM below from this morning. We sometimes struggle with dropped packets / call dropouts during Teams calls, of which we have quite a few.

Is there a business broadband checker anywhere, or does anyone have recommendations as to a provider? There are only 9 of us in our office and all our information is based off Dropbox. We don't need anything particularly fast, just reliable. We're paying around £84/month (includes VAT) for 500/50 product.



Cheers,
Jonny

 

[Orcvader]

Have you tried contacting VM about the dropped packet issue?

You can use this to check if FTTP is available and from which network, it will be more reliable than VM's cable broadband: https://bidb.uk

 

[Caged]

You might be able to get Hyperoptic

Business

Discover hyperfast, super affordable broadband for business with speeds of up to 1Gb. Connect to the UK’s best business provider

www.hyperoptic.com

 

[jonnymc4]

Have you tried contacting VM about the dropped packet issue?

You can use this to check if FTTP is available and from which network, it will be more reliable than VM's cable broadband: https://bidb.uk

We haven't. It can vary quite significantly - some days it's absolutely fine, other days it can be awful. Here's a "good" day and a "bad" day within the space of 3 days last week.




bidb.uk unfortunately shows very little around us, though Hyperoptic is an option as @Caged mentions. Their advertised cost jumps quite high when I put in our postcode- £75 advertised vs £150 actual for the 250 mbps package, plus activation. Wondering whether they'd have to pull fibre to our actual address for that cost?

 

[Orcvader]

I would try contact VM first if they can get it sorted. Usually their business support very good at helping and trying to get it sorted out.

As for Hyperoptic, you could always try call them for more details on what needs to be done, and maybe try negotiate on price.

 

[Rainmaker]

Can you get Openreach based FTTP or fibre other than Hyperoptic (Cityfibre, Netomnia etc)? Andrews & Arnold are one of the gold standard Openreach based fibre providers, and are around your current pricing for similar speeds. Aquiss will do 900/100 on a business account for cheaper again. YouFibre (Netomnia) do a business package up to 10G symmetric as well.

 

[ChrisD.]

+1 on speaking to VM business, their tech support are pretty decent.

With that said, that graph looks more like a local issue rather than at VMs end, ie a bunch of clients downloading or uploading at the same time without any traffic policies set.

 

[jonnymc4]

3 VM Business vans were parked at the large cabinet today carrying out some work. Didn't stop to ask but hopefully gets sorted. If not I'll ask someone to give them a call.