Broadband only deals

Computers & Tech
#1

I am moving soon and thinking about broadband for the new house.
I can’t remember the last time I used my land line to make a call and now my parents are no longer with us I really only have one friend who is a dinosaur and doesn’t own a mobile and calls evenings and weekends only for 58 minutes before reconnecting.

According to comparison sites for the post code of the new house fibre is available with a max speed of 60 - 70 Mb from most providers imcluding a phone line

Virgin are offering Broadband only in 100Mb. 200Mb, 350Mb and 500Mb deals.
I am thinking of adding in TV.

I hear horror stories about Virgin customer service but what is their actual service like?
Is there much outage?
Do you get the speeds they promise?

At the moment I have 12Mb and for most usage it is fine although I do get some buffering on streaming Now TV at busy times so maybe 60Mb would be more than adequate but 100Mb is the same price without a phone line. :shushing_face:

#2

VM are brilliant, I’ve been using them for over 6 years now and have probably had no more than 6 hours outage during that whole time.

Try and get FTTP if available.

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#3

Can’t say Virgin broadband is bad but they tried charging me after the contract ended when I didn’t get their upgraded box. I explained I had the letter confirming that’s what they’d do if I didn’t take the new box. They wanted me to send them the letter they sent me as proof, the dicks.

#4

I’ve had Virgin for ten years here, and it’s been great. Really fast broadband, and any problems (which have mainly been on the TV side) and they send out an engineer who fixes it.

The main issue is the people calling to upgrade your package, but you can just stop this.

#5

Been with Virgin or it’s predecessor for over 20 year’s fibre to the house for a long time, 15 years I think. Very few problems. The service centre can be hard work, but when you persevere they send an engineer who sorts it. The speeds hold up very well. The wireless side of it can cope with 2 or 3 internal brick walls, but the external wall defeats it. They are pretty good of advising of any planned maintenance work as well. I usually get an e-mail two weeks in advance. We frequently have a feed to two tv’s, music streaming and up to 4 using the net.

#6

I have a broadband only deal then I pay £3/month for a voip connection - this means when people phone my old landline it now comes through to an app on my mobile. Porting my old number was £26 ish. That’s with voipfone

If it’s just you, a 20mb connection would be ample. There’s 4 of us in our house and we managed on a 15mb line. I went to FTTP when it became available for zoom/teams videocall (upload) reasons and better reliability but speed wise, 15 was enough and that included gaming and hd streaming to 3-4 devices concurrently

#7

been with VM forever. I have rarely had to call on them for customer service or an engineer, and when I have, I have had no problem.

As for the service it is excellent, had one outage (and that was the modem), very reliable. TV is fantastic, rock solid.

They tend to be more expensive, but worth every penny.

#8

Thanks all :+1:

#9

PS - if you do go with VM stick the hub into ‘modem only’ mode and get a good router and wifi product as the VM hub is bobbins.

#10

I actually had to google that as I had no idea if it meant good or bad
Turns out to be some Northern gibberish for ‘bad’ you learn something every day!

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#11

picked up in the army, think it’s a fantastic term.

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#12

I use an edgerouter x and and tplink deco m5 WiFi mesh. In my case they connect to the fibre terminating box, in your case they’d connect to the virgin box. The ERX was £50 from Amazon (and it’s tiny) and the m5 3 pack was £125 from pc world

#13

Go with VM, service speeds are excellent, the router is theirs and the cable to their infrastructure is theirs. Means if their is a issue all responsibility sits with them. FTTC your dealing with a Openreach owned line and you can find yourself in a blame game between your provider and Openreach.

VM is more money but for availability and speeds I am content.

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#14

Anyone with Plusnet?

I’ve tried to get VM to match their offer (24.99 pm) and they’re not interested, so…

#15

Have had Plusnet for broadband and phone since they took over Madasafish years ago. No complaints, and their call centre is just down in town, so I can understand the accents.

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#16

We have John Lewis Broadband which is Plusnet.
Excellent, consistent performance and great customer service.

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#17

I assume you have Virgin Cable, if so unless Plusnet are offering Fibre to the premises you speeds will be much less than Virgin. However if you don’t need the bandwidth and they are a lot cheaper they appear to be one of the better providers.

#18

I would expect them to at least match the £26.99 new customer deal for the 100MB package, have you tried asking them to do that?

#19

Not yet, will give it try tomorrow when I ring them to get my pac code.

#20

either that and play the covid sympathy card, tell them you’re off sick with covid and not earning anything and see what they will do.