Virgin Media Discussion Thread

Has anybody experienced problems with ping when downloading? Either torrents or downloading large files directly from websites make my connection feel quite unstable and this is reflected by the large ping spikes at times I know I was downloading. Even just watching YouTube is enough to make my BBQM graph rather colourful!

I've an engineer coming out soon as there are no problems in my area, but I just wondered if there was anything I could say to them to point them to the correct fix for my issue?

BBQM graphs from last weekend. A couple of times I had to reboot the Hub manually, as the connection just dropped out completely on all devices, wired and wireless.


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Do you throttle your upload to 90% of the max available? Even when downloading it makes a big difference to latency and jitter.
I can't in Firefox when downloading directly from websites. Although I could in qBittorrent, I don't. I simply never had to before, so I can't understand why I need to now. I feel that something is amiss and needs putting right.
 
Certainly saturated upload affects latency and jitter. As to why it is suddenly a problem, a bit random but something I've seen elsewhere is people with kids or people in the house who suddenly discover torrents or get malware and it is their computer saturating the upload unbeknownst to the bill payer. I always cap upload overall at the router to 90% of line speed but that's not possible on all routers.
 
Mine was terrible at the weekend, Sunday it was unusable almost all day with massive spikes and down speed of 10mbps, even though the app said my service was in order although it seemed there were lots of reports in all major cities on down detector. Everything been ok since sunday night though
 
So my instinct was right, there is a problem with my connection. The engineer who came was very thorough and did a test the previous engineer hadn't, revealing noise ingress on my line. The noise was also present on the connector coming into my home, leaving only the street cabinet as suspect.

After going to check the street cabinet, the engineer said it's definitely a fault with their equipment or potentially a dodgy connection in somebody's home introducing the noise. They made sure all the connectors were tight in the cabinet and escalated the issue higher up in the network team. Fingers crossed this might get resolved soon, but I was warned it might take a little time.
 
Moving to a property with only virgin media and FTTC.


Unsure which to go for. I’ve been with Virgin before and they were so horrifically oversubscribed.


With this, again, being a VM only area for >100Mb broadband, I’m expecting it to be pretty terrible.



Does anyone have any recent experience or thoughts? At least the Hub 5 is available
 
Does anyone have any recent experience or thoughts? At least the Hub 5 is available

I moved into an area 10 years ago with only 12/1 Mbps FTTC along with VM cable. Speaking to potential neighbours didn't reveal much as most had no clue about what speed they actually got and all said VM was fine.

It turned out the VM service had issues with contention and single vs multiple connection limts and these issues went on for about 5 years. However once VM finally replaced some ancient equipment its been fine since and as I often post on these forums slightly better in terms of service interruptions/packet loss than the OR based FTTP I have had for over 18 months in tandem.

I would say the only option is to try it as its area dependant and cancel if its sufficiently bad versus the FTTC speed that is available.
 
I moved into an area 10 years ago with only 12/1 Mbps FTTC along with VM cable. Speaking to potential neighbours didn't reveal much as most had no clue about what speed they actually got and all said VM was fine.

It turned out the VM service had issues with contention and single vs multiple connection limts and these issues went on for about 5 years. However once VM finally replaced some ancient equipment its been fine since and as I often post on these forums slightly better in terms of service interruptions/packet loss than the OR based FTTP I have had for over 18 months in tandem.

I would say the only option is to try it as its area dependant and cancel if its sufficiently bad versus the FTTC speed that is available.

Getting out of the VM contract would likely be tricky though.


Just not sure if I can deal with sub 20Mb upload again after being on symmetrical 1Gb for a long time.
 
I would recommend any using their "Service" cancels. I moved out months ago. Have been trying to contact them to cancel my services and got a demand from BPO, which I paid (even though not used their service for 6 months), this was paid 9 days ago. Tried contacting them 3 days ago to ensure they cancel my service but they say there's an outstanding balance on the account. Told them I paid but I lost the letter (Due to my illness, I put it somewhere safe and cant remember where). I called the collection agency today and they confirmed all paid and I got the reference number from them. Started a chat to Virgin today and they still say there's an outstanding balance on the account and can't cancel it. It feels like they are trying to be awkward so they can keep charging me for a service I have not used in 6 months. I asked to speak to a supervisor but apparently there are none in India. Such poor service and it's made me so angry today. They are completely useless. They used to be good when it was Cable and Wireless, the NTL. Since they moved much of the "support" operations to India, it's just dreadful. My advice is to cancel now and get a decent operator if you can.
 
This merger with o2 and virgin has caused all sorts of problems for me. I can't wait to get out of my virgin contract in June hopefully Openreach have turned fttp on by then, the groundwork has been done.

Anyway I have been with o2 for 20 years now and up until this year never had an issue with them. Although I think some of the issues stem from before the merger this has brought them forward. I am the organiser of the phone contracts for my family, I have four contracts with them each one for my wife and two children as well as me. I done the o2 switch up on my wifes phone in December and apparently since March the device hasn't been paid yet all the direct debits were taking and phone was working fine till last month. I check my account from time to time to see how much data people are using and see if any charges made to the phones just so I can inform anyone that might not realise it was charging to the phone number. Never saw anything about something not being paid on my wifes phone but there was a overdue charge of some sort that when I would click on it to see what it was and how much would show £0.00 owed but this wasn't on my wifes phone section it was a separate thing. So last month my wifes phone stops working and wouldn't call or text and I contacted o2 to see why. I was then informed that I had to pay £812 for the device. After saying everything about phone working and no record of it showing unpaid I was basically told I either pay it or they send it to debt collectors.

I have spoken to a friend in the know and he says there has been lots of similar to this with o2. Well as well as moving from virgin after 20 year I am moving from o2 and I am unsure what to do as because I know many networks piggyback on the main networks these days such as sky/tesco using o2, do I go for a clean break and not use o2 at all or go with sky as they seem to have good prices. I have bought a payg vodafone sim for a month for my wife in the mean time mainly because it was an esim and I could get it within 10 mins. I think o2 and virgin are going to lose a lot of customers over this.
 
Can i ask what peoples opinions are on the standard issue Virgin fiber standard issue equipment please?

Finally to my joy i had a knock at the door that finally fibre is in my street :D

ive been a BT/plusnet user since i moved in 14 years ago and always bought my own routers as there supplied ones were not good enough signal wise in my house, i bought a ASUS RT-AX82U back in 2020 and got improvements.

They have also offered me 3 signal boosters in the house.

I went for the 550m package which is a huge boost from my 67meg currently.

Hope to hear peoples views and any tips welcomed.
As I understand it, you will get a Hub5X, which currently does not have a working modem mode.

If you want to use own router without double NAT, there is however a workaround, customers have a found a device they can use in place of the Hub5X.


However if you on their coax product (which they still call fibre), then the standard Hub5 does have a working modem mode so can be bridged.
 
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Moving to a property with only virgin media and FTTC.


Unsure which to go for. I’ve been with Virgin before and they were so horrifically oversubscribed.


With this, again, being a VM only area for >100Mb broadband, I’m expecting it to be pretty terrible.



Does anyone have any recent experience or thoughts? At least the Hub 5 is available

I suggest try it.

I live in an area that has a history of extremely bad VM congestion, I hadnt used VM for several years until I signed up to gig1 back in 2022, and the performance I wont claim was completely uncongested, but I never witnessed anything but full line rate when downloading from credible sources (such as steam). There was some peak time upstream congestion (it still out performed the max upload rate on FTTC), but that got fixed when they rolled out DOCSIS 3.1 on the upstream, every area should have that rolled out by now.

Finally, you have a two week cool down from the install date, so if it isnt performing,you can cancel with no commitment.
 
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I suggest try it.

I live in an area that has a history of extremely bad VM congestion, I hadnt used VM for several years until I signed up to gig1 back in 2022, and the performance I wont claim was completely uncongested, but I never witnessed anything but full line rate when downloading from credible sources (such as steam). There was some peak time upstream congestion (it still out performed the max upload rate on FTTC), but that got fixed when they rolled out DOCSIS 3.1 on the upstream, every area should have that rolled out by now.

Finally, you have a two week cool down from the install date, so if it isnt performing,you can cancel with no commitment.

Thanks for the info, that’s really helpful.


I’ve been with Virgin Media a few times and to be honest the main gripe was always the router for me. The Hub 3 was diabolical.



I always forget that it’s 2 weeks from the install date so will definitely try it out :-)
 
Thanks for the info, that’s really helpful.


I’ve been with Virgin Media a few times and to be honest the main gripe was always the router for me. The Hub 3 was diabolical.



I always forget that it’s 2 weeks from the install date so will definitely try it out :-)
Hopefully you get the Hub 5, it has a different chip to the Hub 3, I had no issues with and its overall feedback seems good. If you order Gig1, I think its a very high chance you get Hub 5, small chance Hub 4.
 
Hub is terrible but the Hub 4 was pretty good to be fair. But yes it does seem to be Hub 5 as standard now which is a good thing because for an ISP-supplied device, I'm quite impressed with it.

I had Gig1 with a Hub 4 previously. Cancelled the service then took it out again in my wife's name as 350Mb and got a Hub 3. Upgrading to Gig1 only cost £4 extra a month so I did that and they supplied a Hub 5.
 
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