come talk to me about broadband

[ItsYourMoneyRalf]

Contract ending. Do I move from crappy BT. How do I know if providers claims of fast speeds are legit. Any virgin customers? Are they any good? 2 adults WFH and 2 teens gaming / netflix, so speed is a priority. we're not in a full fibre area for BT

If you only have openreach in your road, and it is still the old copper cables, the only options for faster internet are mobile broadband and starlink I think. It's pretty crap. We get 10-15mbps (down to 6 at peak times like evenings), despite being "promised" 60. Whichever openreach provider you use there is not much difference. The minimum speed is far, far lower than the speed they advertise

If Virgin have put their cables in your road, I think that is separate to openreach. I haven't used them, as they haven't cabled our area.

no idea they were different. I thought open reach owned all the cables? bt are offering 49mbps, virgin offering 1130mbps. I was thinking that was impossible but it sounds not?

Have a look on money saving expert, you can see current best deals. We have virgin, fast and reliable and cheap.

I'm on there now. you seem to have to click through to the providers website. They all seem to show full fibre on money supermarket but not when I click through, so wasn't sure what's actually correct

Virgin are OK when it works, but if you have any problems their customer service is awful. Bottom of the list on Which, Ofcom and Trustpilot.

Don't be tempted to pay for faster speeds than you will ever need, it's a waste of money. 250Mb is quite enough for most families.

I'm on a measly 49mbps at the moment

Openreach only do the telephone cables. So providers who bundle with a telephone (bt, talktalk, plusnet, sky etc). Some providers put their own cables in - virgin, gigaclear etc. Some providers don’t use cables at all (Starlink, mobile broadband). Chances are you wouldn’t get those mad high speeds with virgin anyway. But hopefully better than 40mbps! If I had a virgin option, I would try it. It’s hard work not having functional internet.

it sure is!

That's a speed I can only dream of!

Currently paying £65 a month for a top speed of 2mbps (usually more around 0.8-1) and a crackly copper phoneline. No mobile phone coverage from any provider so no option to boost with a data connection.

We held out on the promise that hard to reach properties in our area were going to be connected under project gigabit but ours for some reason has been excluded. Now considering Starlink

If you WFH

Are you paying for Residential or Business broadband ?
The reason I am asking is because there are differences

We get great speeds from virgin internet but we do have power line adapters as the WiFi itself is crap. The internet however is fast so I have power line set up and an Ethernet cable for my home office. Dd has one that's got WiFi attached to the power line.

Considering changing supplier though to someone cheaper as virgin is £60 pm for just the internet and phone line. M350 I think the package is called.

I'm on BT and fibre to the property. Never had any issues in 5yrs. Negotiated a lower rate when I renewed last time by threatening to leave. Why is BT crappy for you?

Virgin were so bad that I went to arbitration and was allowed to leave my contract without penalty. I even got a refund.

I would highly, highly recommend you don't start a contract with them.

We're with Community Fibre. They're currently £26 for symetrical 1Gbps fibre.

I really rate them.

The only thing to be aware of, is that they're a newer company and missed out on the IPv4 addressing landgrab in the 1990's and don't have enough addresses. New customers are put onto Carrier Grade NAT which means you can't connect into your home network via an IPv4 address. It also impacts port forwarding. They do fully support IPv6, though, so things like Xbox Live work correctly.

There are two network providers, Openreach and Virgin Media. VM are essentially using the cable network, and in areas they didn't build, they use Openreach.

There are many differences with how / where / when the two networks share capacity amongst customers, however you are much more likely to notice this sharing if you are on VM's own cable network. I'm sure many here will attest to service levels / speeds dropping during school holidays and when children arrive home from school.

If you can get fibre to your premise, happy days, second would be fibre to the cabinet, then VM cable network, and last copper telephone lines (IMHO).

I worked for many years at BT and at VM.

"There are two network providers"

That's not true. The two largest network providers are BT and Virgin, but there are multiple OLOs in the UK.

Vodafone bought Cable & Wireless Worldwide and have their own fibre network, but they do generally use BT for the bit from the cabinet to the home.

Hyperoptic, Community Fibre, etc, have their own local fibre networks, but don't cover large areas.

Virgin are horrific for customer service as are Talktalk. Bad CS is a deal breaker as far as I'm concerned.

Been with Plusnet for nearly 10 years as they're world's apart in terms of customer service. We have 3 teens in the house and WiFi being used all day, when all at home and never had a problem with it dropping. Tv/music/bit of gaming.

I was with PlusNet for 11 years and recently left for Virgin fibre. Can honestly say that PlusNet were great in terms of reliability of service and speeds for my area (FTTC). I've been with Virgin now for around 2 months and had 2 short drop outs of around 30 mins each (I work from home so really notice when this happens), I tether to my phone when this happens so no great shakes if it happens every once in a while - speed wise it's flying although I've got much more than I need but for the introductory offer it's well worth it. I will change back to PlusNet when contract is up.

You are better off asking locally to where you live

Is there a local facebook group?