Looking for new ISP for a House

[im4gine3]

Currently with Virgin Media 1G Fibre, but the upload speed and their customer service is pants to be honest.. Especially when they are updating software with no communication so i could be left without internet for the day during working from home.

I am aware of many other great ISP (HyperOptic being one of them as i used them when i was living in a flat), but it seems most of these ISP will only provide services to purpose built flats... i can understand why

Unfortunately it seems there is only Virgin which can provide high speeds in my area, with the next closest being BT at 76mb, then EE etc etc.. but what i want to know is whether there are are LLU which will provide FTTP/FTTC to a house?

Sure there may be some if you opt for business and/or ridonkulous prices, but want to see if there are alternative options about

 

[im4gine3]

Have you checked https://bidb.uk/ ?

I've not had a VM outage in the year I've been using them. There was an issue between them and Google but I used a VPN to get around that. Apart from that (and the horrendous CS) it's been solid.

I'll give that a go and have a look around

LLU isn't a thing any more, that was when companies like Be and Sky provided ADSL2+ from their own equipment instead of BT Wholesale.

If VM is all that is available then that's all that is available, not much you can do other than try not to commit for too long and keep an eye on any fibre built progress.

Ahh ok.. yeah been out the loop with whats on offer lately

Pick 1 of these. If your internet is "that" important for working from home then you bite the bullet and take the reliability over cost. If the reliability isn't "that" important then you take the cost over reliability and get the normal Virgin connection.

A safe middle ground would be to pipe in the VM connection into your own router and run a 4/5G backup as a secondary so when VM do push an update you have some form of backup. That gets you multiple services with "not perfect" service levels at a cost that is marginally more than just a VM line.

So i mainly use internet for downloading, browsing, streaming and the like.. typically being a heavy user.. prefer uncapped with fast download speeds. Work is secondary but obviously when working, would liek the connection to be reliable.. my main concern is when Virgin decides to push updates randomly to the hub so i lose internet access.. sometimes at critical times. I currently use the hub as a modem then feed that to my router as i feel the hub is unstable and doesn't provide the speeds i have asked for... even with a 1G connection, i can probably get away with streaming 2 devices max before connection drops/slows if i'm streaming more than that.. which is unusual.

 

[im4gine3]

How often has this happened? At what sort of times?

It's very random.. usually once a month but i've had it happen more frequently 3-5 times a month... its as if an update has been pushed but hasn't applied properly and a manual reboot of the hub is required... which fixes it half the time.. others i just have to wait till the breathing green light turns back to white.. and that can take anywhere from an hour to the whole day.

In terms of timings, also random.. sometimes at night when in bed, others it can go off and do its own thing during the day.. and internet cuts off