Virgin Media Discussion Thread

ahar said:
After 20 or so years, it's goodbye to virign. I've only stuck with them so long because they offered much faster broadband than anyone else, but finally I have th option of FTTH. Contract expires on 9th Jan and so far their best offer for 1 GB is £60 after the April price rise. Compare that to BT who are offering £41 after the April price rise and it's a no brainer.

I'm not going to bother with the cancel and get a better offer dance because a company that makes it that hard doesn't deserve to get my business. They've screwed me on prices for years because of no better alternative, currently paying £50 for 250Mb which is outrageous but the best I can get.

Parting is going to be sweet, with no sorrow.
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What about Vodafone? New customer via compare sites
City fibre areas
Vodafone 910Mb Full Fibre Broadband - £23pm/24m + £120 TCB - £21.79 PM Effective

Open reach areas
Tcb £68 cashback+ £130 voucher
£25.84 Avg. monthly cost
 
Kelt said:
That's an outrageous price, I'm currently on around £38 for 1GB, and I'm peed off paying that much!
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Im currently paying £34.50 for 1gig. Luckily I am away for the whole month of May next year, contract expires end of April. I'll leave and come back as a new customer, might as well book it on the last day in Vietnam so the router will be there when I get back home lol..
No way am i apying anymore than £35 a month for BB..
 
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Kelt said:
That's an outrageous price, I'm currently on around £38 for 1GB, and I'm peed off paying that much!
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Theyve been screwing me for years, but we're too far from a cabinet to get more than 30Mb and 4g and 5g speeds were about the same. Finally FTTH is available, virgin can go f themselves.

I will check out a few providers, but BT seemed a good choice for an initial comparison
 
Well been with VM a month and already a fault with the line :cry:

Constant packet loss and US profile changes every few minutes in the network log.

8bd493cdf86d8058eaa18f31a001ca796d9494d7-20-11-2025.png


Reported yesterday and technician booked for tomorrow.

Great start! :p
 
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chrcoluk said:
They exist, but he is calling for it to be mandatory, which logically he is right.

A typical broadband contract is lock in for the consumer and opt out to the provider, its really one sided. It should be they have a choice between lock in or regular price increases, but instead they get both slices of the pie.
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Agreed. The fact that they have been able to do this for years is complete ********. Initially, the whole benefit of a contract to the consumer was that the price remains the same until the contract expires.

Providers have been having their cake and eating it for far too long.
 
aaronyuri said:
I became fed up of seeing ads and decided to do something about my lack of configurable DNS on the 5x situation*. I purchased a XikeStor SKS8310-8X - which is a dirt cheap 10Gb 8-port managed switch. I already had some 10/5/2.5/1GbE SFPs lying around. That switch is now connected to the 10Gb port on the 5x, then that switch is connected to my original ethernet setup (10Gb capable but currently a mix of 2.5Gb and 1Gb). I have tested connecting at 2.5Gb from my PC and managed to top out Virgin's 1.1Gbps throughput which was good confirmation. The switch is capable but has no descriptors at all - it is on you to figure out config elements, dependencies, etc.. Not too bad once you're in the swing of it.

There was a moment when I started looking at 2.5Gb switches instead but, for the price difference, futureproofing with 10Gb ports for not much extra made sense to me. It also means that I don't need to upgrade a switch again if I want to go over 2.5Gb - I just need to upgrade my interfaces.

My attempt to create two separate network segments failed abysmally when I realised that I couldn't configure any static routes on the 5x. Did I mention how incredibly basic this router is? I had no choice but to remain with a single subnet and segment. This will change in the future. Alas, I have setup DHCP on the XikeStor switch and finally have my DNS requests hitting Pi-hole - hallelujah. No more ads. DHCP: one less thing the 5x is doing.

Having added this into my equipment list it means that, in the future, I can acquire a WAS-110 and eliminate the 5x entirely. I look forward to that moment.

The switch was £118 and sadly didn't come with any rack mount ears despite having fixing points for them. It does have a fan which will also actively cool any inserted SFPs - this will be beneifical for the WAS-110 that runs notoriously hot. I'll do another update once I have the WAS-110 in my possession and have connected some more devices at 2.5Gb. My existing NICs top out at 2.5Gb and there aren't many 10Gb options on the market that aren't overkill for my needs; I'll wait for progress to be made in that area. There are those 10GbE Realtek NICs popping up from China but there were too many reports of general power saving features not working correctly - which defeats the point of having the power efficient NIC in the first place. I'm sure some of the more known networking brands will start producing NICs based on the Realtek chipset in the future.

*Yes, I could've configured DNS settings manually on each device, but then I have no excuse to invest in new equipment!!
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Following up on this post. I purchased an SFP PON from Better Internet (https://store.betterinternet.ltd/product/x-onu-sfpp/) and a Flint 2 (for 2.5Gb WAN) as my new router. I also acquired a hybrid fibre adapter to reuse the existing Virgin fibre run versus what was included with the SFP PON. Had my ancient TP Link router kicking around but it topped out at 1Gb for WAN and has been EoL for years. Good excuse to get something modern.

Tested the SFP PON a week or so ago using my Deco and it worked a treat. I forced the Internet ethernet interface to VLAN 100 in the PON config and then tagged this on the Deco BE25. That confirmed the PON was a success and that I just needed a proper router to eliminate the 5x. The SFP PON is installed in port 8 of the XikeStor router right next to its fan and the PON/its CPUs haven't broken 57C under full load. The SFP PON and the ethernet uplink SFPs are isolated from the rest of the switch - this ensures no crossover of traffic (especially broadcast) between the WAN and LAN sides without going through the router. It does mean I can't hit the mgmt interface of the PON, but it's easy enough to remove the port isolation when access to the PON is necessary.

Enter the recent black Friday Flint 2 purchase which arrived today. Flashed vanilla OpenWRT on it and we're in business; I'm not using it for WiFi so no qualms against the lack of proprietary WiFi drivers. As a side thought: currently running Pihole on my RPi4 but may move this to the Flint since it's got plenty of compute free due to HW offloading. We'll see.

For now, I've gone with 2.5Gb WAN ports as Virgin aren't currently going over 2Gb and the cost of a 10Gb capable router (which would need two 10Gb ports, might I add) was a bit nuts. There's futureproofing for a touch extra and then there's futureproofing at 3x the cost. The latter isn't for me.

Next on the list is finishing the RJ45 wall connectors in the rooms, then I can fully migrate to 10Gb switching (albeit at a mix of 2.5Gb and 1Gb link speed - futureproofed for 10Gb!) and retire my 1Gb switch. All of the walls are masonry and it requires chasing and burying the cat6 cable. I have avoided this for about as long as I can, but it's the only thing left now. I'll try and find something else to distract me from that...
 
ahar said:
After 20 or so years, it's goodbye to virign. I've only stuck with them so long because they offered much faster broadband than anyone else, but finally I have th option of FTTH. Contract expires on 9th Jan and so far their best offer for 1 GB is £60 after the April price rise. Compare that to BT who are offering £41 after the April price rise and it's a no brainer.

I'm not going to bother with the cancel and get a better offer dance because a company that makes it that hard doesn't deserve to get my business. They've screwed me on prices for years because of no better alternative, currently paying £50 for 250Mb which is outrageous but the best I can get.

Parting is going to be sweet, with no sorrow.
Click to expand...
Same here, with VM for long time due to no other alternatives, but openreach fttp is now available, I am thinking to leave early (contract end in March) after I saw some ISPs cover the early termination cost.

But not everyone like to shop around, a friend of mine is out of contract for years, currently paying £70+ a month for m250 bb + basic TV package/phone, the last two not even plugged for long a time.

Told him many times to switch to community fiber or any other ISPs for similar speed but lower price but he is just lazy and worry about switching.
 
Cancelled our virgin media services & due to end this friday. Unfortunately no fibre services in our area yet but planned to be built next year. I'm considering getting a 5G modem (zyxel FWA510 looks good) and an unlimited 5G sim card for the transition period.
You used to get a call from UK retentions a few weeks before disconnect to offer you the best price but it doesn't seem that way any longer.

Has anyone used a 5G sim for home broadband (I know i'm probably better off making a new thread)?
 
southy1978 said:
Cancelled our virgin media services & due to end this friday. Unfortunately no fibre services in our area yet but planned to be built next year. I'm considering getting a 5G modem (zyxel FWA510 looks good) and an unlimited 5G sim card for the transition period.
You used to get a call from UK retentions a few weeks before disconnect to offer you the best price but it doesn't seem that way any longer.

Has anyone used a 5G sim for home broadband (I know i'm probably better off making a new thread)?
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You should ask here.
 
Contract with VM till March, called to check early termination fees if I switch now but was told I don't need to pay anything. Not sure if this is true, also the agent didn't care about me switching at all and he just want to end the call early.
 
southy1978 said:
Cancelled our virgin media services & due to end this friday. Unfortunately no fibre services in our area yet but planned to be built next year. I'm considering getting a 5G modem (zyxel FWA510 looks good) and an unlimited 5G sim card for the transition period.
You used to get a call from UK retentions a few weeks before disconnect to offer you the best price but it doesn't seem that way any longer.

Has anyone used a 5G sim for home broadband (I know i'm probably better off making a new thread)?
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You could always re-sign up as a new customer on a rolling monthly contract, or sit out of contract until the end provider is ready.
 
koeiwong said:
Contract with VM till March, called to check early termination fees if I switch now but was told I don't need to pay anything. Not sure if this is true, also the agent didn't care about me switching at all and he just want to end the call early.
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Start the process of switching to another provider, the one touch switch procedure will trigger Virgin to send you an email regarding leaving, it will also include any early termination charges..
 
MarkeR said:
Start the process of switching to another provider, the one touch switch procedure will trigger Virgin to send you an email regarding leaving, it will also include any early termination charges..
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I did that and the email show £0.

Also, I saw workers from FiberOne and OGU working in my area, installing new cabinets and putting new cables in VM ducting.
 
Anybody with Grain?

Their speeds looks alright but I am concerned about having no static ip. (Without paying extra.)

I have a load of Blink cameras and a yale house alarm all connected to wifi...is it likely to cause me a huge headache?
 
F4FF3R said:
Anybody with Grain?

Their speeds looks alright but I am concerned about having no static ip. (Without paying extra.)

I have a load of Blink cameras and a yale house alarm all connected to wifi...is it likely to cause me a huge headache?
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Nope, all those cloud based services work by the device phoning home to the cloud server and you access the cloud server from the app. There's no direct communication from your phone etc, to the device in your home (at least while establishing the connection).

Very little to no consumer products and services require a static IP IME.
 
My VM connection went from being my primary connection, to secondary, early 2024 when CF cabled the area. I've kept it as my backup line since.

Currently paying just over £36 for M500 upgraded to Gig1 on Volt (though expecting that to drop at any moment because my O2 lines are now all closed), and was looking to switch the secondary line to an OpenReach based line (maybe with Aquiss) now OR have also cabled the area for fibre.

However, I took a look at the VM packages for new customers (knowing I won't get what they're offering them, but just for potential negotiating leverage, or so I thought). New customers can get Gig1 for 3 months free + £29.99 for a month, then £33.99 for 8 months, then £37.99 for 12 months (factoring in mid contract price rises). That's a total of £757.79 for the two years.

They offered me £48 a month as the best they could do for M500 upgraded to Gig1 on Volt. They couldn't understand that I just wanted Gig1, no Volt, because Volt will be dropping off because I no longer have O2 SIMs/lines. That's a total of £1,152 (and not doubt mid contract price rises) for M500.

I'm not going to pay almost £400 more for half the speed of new customers. Aquiss isn't the cheapest, but I can get a 900/100 OR line from them for an extra 12p a month and no mid contract price rises, with only a 12 month contract. Plusnet are £31.99 for 4 months, £35.99 for the next 12, and £39.99 for the final 8 of a 24 month contract with a USwitch special. That's £879.76, and there's a £180 Mastercard reward card - so the real cost is less than £700. So even double-paying for just over a months service with the existing VM line saves money...
 
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