Best broadband - BT or Virgin

[middleager]

My 18 month contract with BT has come to a close. We were paying £31.49 a month for Fibre 1 unlimted which promised download speeds of 67 to 74mb. Since the contract ended last week this is now £40 a month including phone line rental for evenings/weekend calls.

New customers for Fibre 1 are being offered our Fibre 1 package at £26.99 for 18 months.

We are a family of four. Two working from home, streaming films and two gamer teens also studying at home.

For about the last six weeks internet has been slow/dropping off. A test on my phone showed download speed of just 9mbps and 4mb for upload.
My son's gaming PC showed 38.7/9.8

It took some time today, but when I got through to BT they said our router/hub was fairly old so the slow speed could be a hardware issue. We were offered the BT wifi complete deal for £36.99 Fibre1) with downloaf speeds between 62 and 73 mb This comes with discs, wifi extenders. This is the same price for non customers.

I am considering moving to Virgin which offers faster speeds. However, I've seen them go down a number of times in lockdown now and this makes me hesitant. While BT seem slow (and this might be fixed with a new modem) they have not gone down in the pandemic.

Looking for advice/experiences of noth providers, or other recommendations for fast fibre broadband and landline. In the West Midlands, if this is relevant.

Customer service is important too as it took 2 attempts today and have seen on social media that customers not happy with Virgin's customer service either.

Ime broadband performance is very location dependant, even down to which end of the street you are. I'd ask around your neighbours for recommendations, near me there are areas where some providers are pretty rubbish while others are good within a very small space, it's often discussed on local facebook pages, I have no idea why it happens.

I do notice that Virgin get a lot more complaints than BT

Well we switched from Virgin to Vodafone (who use BT infrastructure) because:

• Virgin left us with no internet connection for 6 weeks, endless phone calls produced nothing, no eta for fixing, no identification of the problem. It was never resolved, so we switched. (We're in London).
• much was made of Virgin's super dooper fibre optic cable but we noticed no change in broadband performance whatsoever when we switched.
• we literally halved our broadband bill (no exaggeration). Virgin was so much more expensive.

Thankyou.
That's helpful. Will check with neighbours.
Six weeks without broadband? That's what worries me in all of this - no service whatsoever.