Virgin or FTTP?

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21 May 2011
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131
I am moving to a new house soon and I like to order the internet. I can get FTTP (Openreach) and also the high speed from Virgin.

Offers I have found:
Virgin 213Mb: £30.99
Virgin 362Mb £36.99

Sky 150Mb: £35.00
BT 150Mb: £39.99

Would you go for Virgin or Openreach (BT/Sky)? My concern is internet connection is stability than speed.

My budget is up to £40 only and 150Mb+ speed or more.
 
Technically FTTP would be the lower latency option with (at present) a higher potential upload depending on the package, but depending on the area Virgin is faster/cheaper and I personally have no real issue with them, my m500 pulls 520-540 according to my speed tests to my own remote servers even at peak time and a quite reasonable 450Mbit via VPN (OpenVPN, wireguard is basically line speed), I can’t really argue with that.

Either way you won’t notice a massive real world difference most of the time between either unless you sit and watch large downloads.
 
Just moved to VM from BT FTTC (no choice as only other option was <0.75Mbps) - Virgin performance is all over the place and hardware is shocking. Can't wait until FTTP work is completed in the area I've moved to. So Another FTTP vote for me.
 
Its a shame peoples experience with things is so random. My VM is superb on the whole.

Wouldn't say it's that random. If you took a large sample size of BQM graphs between Virgin connections and FTTP connections I think you would find way fewer latency spikes and packet loss on the latter samples.

I've been on M500 with VM for around 6 months now and my graph looks pretty good compared to many I've seen on here and elsewhere. Still get minor and sometimes major packet loss at least once a week and near enough every day there's at least one significant latency spike.

The speed is nice but even on 150, you can download a full 4K remux (60gb) in just under an hour. I would much rather have consistently low latency and no packet loss.

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Happy to be proven wrong if someone on VM can provide a weeks worth of graphs with none of the above.
 
Interesting, your minimum latency(green bit) is over double mine

That will be mainly down to the location of the thinkbroadband servers. I believe they are down south somewhere.

Using speedtest examples, I get around 10ms pings to Manchester and Leeds servers.

Looks like we'll get YouFibre in my town soon enough so not really bothered tbf.
 
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Had virgin media (500 Meg) for 3 months. Supplied Equipment crap. Customer service crap. Speeds superb and no downtime. City Fibre are currently laying thier cables in my road and when I've a choice I'd likely avoid Virgin and go with Fttp just get away from the virgin customer service department which is quite frankly shocking.
 
Just got Zen FTTP enabled today. Been with virgin for 2 years and was one of first to uptake when it came to my area. Typical graph below, minus outages

Dropout is when I turned it off but speed drops and outages have been on the increase recently, including 3 hours last Monday when working from home is just not on. Guess it's got busier over time

Zen.....

Edited out the graphs as didn't realise I'd picked the live update ones
 
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