Ditching virginmedia for tethering.....

3 had an issue with this a while back, IIRC, as people were using thier unlimited sim plans to teather to PCs, and smart TVs etc. and replace home broadband - I think they implimented some jiggery pokery to limit you if you are teathering excesivley - think they can tell somehow, so if you are streaming netflix from a mobile sim to another device they can throttle your speed.

you could look into something like a Mi-fi sim/router, which is esentially the same thing but designed for that.

But that's only really usefull if you have really bad home broadband options.

To be honest, if theres only 2 of you, you just don't need a 100mbps broadband, 30 or 40mbps will be plenty, so I would just do that if you want to save a bit of cash on the broadband subscription.

For what it's worth I don't rate virgin media, I've got 200mbps but it's unstable and there's frequent (small) outages, and thier new router I sware has worse wifi stregnth/stability than the old one.

I'll happily go down to half the speed if the wifi is better and the connection more stable.

We’re on virgin media and also notice small outages from time to time. Both my wife and I work from home (at the moment still) so it’s annoying when it happens mid zoom call etc.

Ours is really quite expensive for broadband / tv / phone (we don’t actually need a landline but it was cheaper in the bundle to have it original). We have some kind of middling package with no sport / movies etc. £72 or something like that - and we’ve had a letter to say it’s going up another £4 or something shortly.

I haven’t had much joy re-negotiating with them - but we can only get fttc from another provider so whoever we went with we’d take a hit in speed as copper from the exchange.

I’d say 30mbps was the best we could get is that going to be hugely noticeable? We use Zoom / Teams a lot on 2 computers at a time. Bit of phone web browsing. Bit of streaming Amazon prime through a smart tv.

If it wouldn’t be too bad I seriously think I’m going to try someone else as the constant price rises are getting boring now. Plus gas prices only going up so would be good to save somewhere else.

We switched from Virgin Media 100 to Vodaphone fibre. No issues with streaming Netflix. We notice it takes longer to download films but only a few seconds.

We were paying £75 a month and they refused to negotiate. Presumably as we had been with them so long their algorithm said we were unlikely to leave.

Saved £50 per month with a one off £100 for a new roof aerial for freeview. Should have done it years ago.

Switch was painless. Kept same phone number. Required a 1 hour engineer visit as we hadn't had a BT line for about 20 years.

op - hop over to broadband genie and sign up for shell broadband. With the vouchers on offer it works out around £13 a month for 18 months - for the 67Mb speed package.

Also - there’s no tethering limit in contracts now - ofcom blocked it. 3 uk doesn’t have a fair usage policy either so if you want to download 3 terrabytes of cat videos a month you’re free to do that.

You'd be supprised how little speed you actually need, assuming a rock solid stable connection.

Ok if you are a family of 5 and you're all gaming/streaming TV/video calling and downloading games and movies at the same time, that's when the higher bandwidth comes into it's own.

Granted going back to the days of ADSL 2+ might be limiting, you might get 15-20mbps on a good day, but a 30-40mbps FTTC connection is generaly ample if you are a two person household.

Also factor in that you can only get the maximum speed from the servers you are connected to, for example if I'm dowloading a 100gb game from steam or wherever, there's no way they can supply that data to you at 200mbps and max out your connection, so my game won't actually download any faster than if I had a 40mbps connection.

When all my girls are home from university there 5 of us in the house (with lots of streaming) and we get by just fine on 10mbps!

When all my girls are home from university there 5 of us in the house (with lots of streaming) and we get by just fine on 10mbps!

Well exactly, you don't buy a car on the basis of its top speed, as pretty much any car can easily do over 100mph, so top speed is not really an important metric. Other considerations come into play, how many seats does it have, how big is the boot space, how often does it break down, etc.

We've got a VM bundle and to me it has got a bit out of hand. Kind of got used to the telly channels though and the ease of access to Prime, Netflix and other apps (ITV hub, iPlayer etc) and the ability to record HD content. Hardly use the phone these days so could drop that. But that VM algorithm is probably quite smart as it feels like it would be awkward to move - hence we haven't for a good few years now. The move to VM was easy enough as, at the time, we only really had BT for the phone and EE broadband (provided by work). More complicated now but if I try going down the "we're leaving" route I need to have a (proper) plan B in case they call my bluff. 🙂

I'm in the same boat. Paying £70 a month for Medium TV, 200mb broadband and phone line.

Don't need the TV or land line, but every time I've tried to cancel the package, I get told that it's literally a few quid difference.

Just tried the chatbot to see if I can get a better broadband only deal. Answered about 100 questions only to be told the wait time is 4 hours!

The small disconnections seem to be a lot more frequent than I realised. I notice it when I'm off work during the day and wonder how many times it cuts out and I don't notice...

Thing is, on the BT fibre network I can only get 40-50mb and I know it's not the be all and end all, but I just don't want to end up with a crap connection and get stuck with it.

A few thoughts about some of the Virgin customers

I’ve heard from loads of people the Virgin router is terrible. Just buy your own Wi-Fi router for a huge improvement. A colleagues wife was front line brexit negotiations working from home. They were on virgin and the Wi-Fi cutting out was getting stressful!! New router sorted it

We ditched talk talk tv and broadband to go to fibre to the cabinet.

A chrome cast is about £60. You get a remote and a slick interface. You add the app’s and channels you need. It works so much better than talk talk tv.

https://store.google.com/gb/product/chromecast_google_tv?hl=en-GB

A fire stick would be less. You can buy a hard disc recorder if that’s a big deal. It would pay for its self in no time.

I’ve been doing this for years. They gave me unlimited data back when I had an old Ericsson phone which was clearly of no use. So I bought an iPhone, ditched the broadband and started tethering. Was great for a while until they welched on the deal, saying my contract was a ‘legacy deal’ and changed it to 50gig a month.

Tbf I don’t have Netflix so can’t advise there, I do watch YouTube a lot though but change the quality settings to 360 or whatever it is. The only time I’ve ever gone over my allowance was before I knew about this setting, watching back to back four hour Joe Rogan Experience’s in HD.

I switched my VM router for a better one a while ago, but the outages we get around here are VM's fault, not the hardware.

I'm waiting for an answer back from them now. I've got EE broadband waiting for a button press to buy it and book an install date.

If VM can basically half my price and just provide broadband only, I'll put up with the little outages as they rarely affect me and are usually sorted within half a day or less.

I just want to get rid of the TV and land line and not be paying £70+ for just broadband...

I have an old Chromecast on the upstairs TV that just lets my phone cast to the TV. I'd quite like one of the new ones with a remote for the living room TV instead of the VM box.

Plug your details into the checker at Zen and see what they offer. This has the advantage that you get what they say is there and your price is set for the foreseeable future. The supplied router is so-so but a Draytech or some such will see you right.

Virgin's router has a problem when working in modem mode as there is a fault in the chipsets upto V4 that causes drop-outs and no sign of a fix when I dumped them 4 years ago.

thanks for your experiences. to be fair to virgin, we could probably count the outages over the last few years on one finger, we've no complaints really, and our £23 seems to be quite
a lot less than some of you are paying. but as someone mentioned above, with energy prices creeping up itd be good to save a few quid elsewhere.

3 had an issue with this a while back, IIRC, as people were using thier unlimited sim plans to teather to PCs, and smart TVs etc. and replace home broadband – I think they implimented some jiggery pokery to limit you if you are teathering excesivley – think they can tell somehow, so if you are streaming netflix from a mobile sim to another device they can throttle your speed.

just had a look at their unlimited bumph on the site and it states that there are no hidden limits, truly unlimited, no speed caps, suitable for watching netflix etc. so......would a 5G phone maybe double my mbps? treble? or be unnoticeable do you think?
might see if i can have a live chat with them tomorrow about it.

you could look into something like a Mi-fi sim/router, which is esentially the same thing but designed for that.

just had a look at their mi-fi which still comes out at around the same price as our virgin at present so no gain there.

op – hop over to broadband genie and sign up for shell broadband. With the vouchers on offer it works out around £13 a month for 18 months – for the 67Mb speed package.

thanks, ill have a look. dont think it matters but we've just been put on shell for our energy now when green went under. are they a decent company thats likely to stay afloat?

but if I try going down the “we’re leaving” route I need to have a (proper) plan B in case they call my bluff. 🙂

yep, we've never had that before, just gambled and its paid off every year. this year i really do have options ^^^ so i dont much care if they get back to me or not and i think ill leave if they dont offer me something <£20 p/m.

Plug your details into the checker at Zen and see what they offer. This has the advantage that you get what they say is there and your price is set for the foreseeable future. The supplied router is so-so but a Draytech or some such will see you right.

i'll also do this but from memory i think zen are supposed to be a good company but a bit on the pricey side arent they?

thanks for your advice.

We're waiting for BT to connect us in March. £30 a month for Broadband compared to what is nearly £60 for Virgin. We realised we stream most of our TV and never use the phone so are going to switch. Will stay with Virgin if they offer a substantial discount.

We went with virgin when the other options were poor. Now we have full fibre our neighbours have no issues with other providers. Being on the BT Openreach network means its a much simpler affair to switch between providers when they hike the prices too.

Wife works in IT from home so a fast reliable connection is a must.

Re virgin dropouts we turned off the intelligent channel switching doohicky (I don't work in IT 😉 and it was much more stable.

Regarding the blips mentioned above, I’m not on cable but it could possibly be the cable modem / router changing Wi-Fi channels if it’s set to auto (checks what channels other local signals are on). Maybe set use a scanning app to check the signals around you and then pick the least popular channel and set it to that?

Edit: didn’t read the last post! Already covered.

I've been with VM for well over 10 years and am currently paying £19.75 for 100MB (typically about 80MB on Speedchecker). I have found the broadband stable - with very few outages over the last 2 years I've been working from home.

But getting through to "customer service" is awful, and I hate the annual attempts at price rises. On the most recent they were going to put our £25 up to about £28, but when I phoned they agreed not to and then I got an email saying it was now £19.75 for the next 6 months! I am appalled when I read about people paying £50+.

What I have found in talking to them is that you need to be prepared to leave, have the prices and speed of the alternative provider available so you can say this is what you are going to do and you sound like you mean it. On two occasions I actually got to the point where they said goodbye and I had pushed the button on a new provider - which I then had to cancel 2 days later when VM phoned back to make a sensible offer.

A couple of other things:
- I agree 30-40MB is probably more than sufficient for 99% of people , so don't let them offer you an even high speed instead of a price reduction.
- Have you switched all your email away from a VM email address; you can't easily leave if you are still reliant on their email for all your important accounts. I switched to gmail a couple of months before negotiations, and specifically updated my VM contact details with the gmail address - I wonder if that contributed to them taking me seriously when I said I am leaving.

Ditched VM many years ago due to poor customer service.
We use BT instead. Customer service part is very important to me as when things go wrong on what is such an important household service I like to be able to get a fast response.
Call centres with endless waits are no fun!
As I have a household with heavy internet users I get lots of complaints if the WIfi goes down. We find BT both reliable and quick to fix any problem.

Just took me all night to get a response out of VM and got a reply this morning. They offered to upgrade my TV package to XL and reduce my bill to £68 (currently £74.50).

This is despite me telling them that I don't want TV or a land line anymore. Now I'm back in the queue to cancel the other services...

It's going to have to be literally half price for me to stay and I need to explain in black and white that as soon as I cancel, I'm ordering from a different provider so there's no point withholding deals to try a retention a few days later!

Ditched VM due to their endless above inflation price rises, sometimes twice a year! Yes I could ring up and negotiate, but it was just easier to move elsewhere. Now with Plusnet, speed dropped a bit, but as mentioned above a rock solid 10 Mb/s is all we actually need, so 50 vs 75 Mb/s is pretty academic.

i’ll also do this but from memory i think zen are supposed to be a good company but a bit on the pricey side arent they?

The price that you start on should be the one that rolls over when you renew. We managed to lock in at around £32.99 a month last renewal and that continues (until they find a way to lawfully vary the contract terms).

The price that you start on should be the one that rolls over when you renew. We managed to lock in at around £32.99 a month last renewal and that continues (until they find a way to lawfully vary the contract terms).

just had a look on zen. as a 'light user', £35 p/m and £30 set up fee so i wont be taking that any further.

the three 'mifi' option is a bit more than we're paying at present (£26) but a half-decent back up.

looked at shell. first it said as a current customer that our address wasnt available, but when i put my details in normally it said it was, so ill investigate further.

thanks

Plusnet are doing 40mb FTTC for £22, think that incuded land line but no free calls.

I was with virgin media a year ago and there constant price hikes and service reliability, somewhat annoyed me. So I went 3 and unlimited data, £20 for sim only. Perfectly fine for streaming - YouTube, now, Netflix and no need for TV licence if not watching live broadcasting. I only use around 120gb per month mostly 4g, LTE and sometimes 5g

So I went 3 and unlimited data, £20 for sim only. Perfectly fine for streaming – YouTube, now, Netflix

@simonalex99 out of interest, would you mind telling me what speed youre getting through your phone?

would you mind telling me what speed youre getting through your phone?

Will vary enormously based on where you are and how busy the local base station is. If you're near a quiet base station you could get fibre like service whereas if you've got a poor connection to a busy city centre cell site, you may struggle to get a good service.

Years ago an ex-GF when to her local mobile phone shop, signed up to a contract etc giving all details, went home and found she had zero coverage on that network in her house - couldn't even send a text message!

+1. Depends on signal strength,nearest cell tower/infrastructure and time of day. I only use phone or tablet for streaming at hd or less. Just ran speed test app on my phone, I was getting between 5-9mbit over LTE. I don't own a TV, so wouldn't know it be like on a TV with teethering

sharkbait
Free Member
When all my girls are home from university there 5 of us in the house (with lots of streaming) and we get by just fine on 10mbps!

Aye picture quality is great here! 😆

well, 3 days to go before cut-off and the phone call never came, so looking at the options now.

op – hop over to broadband genie and sign up for shell broadband. With the vouchers on offer it works out around £13 a month for 18 months – for the 67Mb speed package.

doesnt look like this offer is on now. having a look at broadband genie now and theres no mention of any vouchers to knock the price down

vodafone looks an interesting option at the moment i think, £18 for 38Mb, or £19 for 67Mb, but..... theyre a 24 month contracts so if we find its rubbish after a month or two then we'd be stuffed.

just contacted three about their mifi, and a rolling 1 month contract would be £24, so it may be worth trying that in the knowledge that i can bin it at any time.

think i need to make a decision fairly sharpish tho.

We don't have a phone line so I've never dared the threaten to leave option.

update:

i tried vodafone via broadbandgenie first, but on clicking through it to the vodafone site and putting my postcode in, the '£18 for 38Mb, or £19 for 67Mb,' suggested on broadbandgenie didnt appear, i only had 29 Mbps available for either the £18 or £19. plus it was 24 months which i didnt really want.

so i opted for three mifi in the end. we're all on three in our house, never have any issues with customer service and i sorted it through the live chat window.

12 month contract, £12.50 for 6 months, then £25 for the reminder of the year. 14 day cooling off period if we set it up and find its a bit crap.

being delivered monday so we'll mebbes be the best part of sunday without broadband, but i reckon tethering will see us ok.

thanks for your help.

Going back to Vodafone £18 £19 and £22 deals held for 24 months
I have had a mobile contract with them for 4 years so due to that loyalty they have pestered me all week to sign up with all my discounts I'd pay exactly the same as anyone new signing with them. Their only comeback is you won't get a better deal and normally I should pay them £27

Plug your details into the checker at Zen and see what they offer. This has the advantage that you get what they say is there and your price is set for the foreseeable future. The supplied router is so-so but a Draytech or some such will see you right.

You think the Fritz.Box routers Zen provide are only so-so?! Honestly, I think for most purposes Zen give by far the best standard router going. They are very decent spec commercial SME grade ones with an RRP of around £150 if you want a new one. Further they are completely unlocked so you can change any settings you want, you have complete control over it. Try configuring a lot of ISP supplied routers for a Pi-Hole for eg. And they do not have annoying ISP specific firmware which you can't update properly.

Best bit is, the Fritz.Box 3490's often come up for sale for £20-25 on ebay and the latest firmware allows them to act as MESH end points so for not a lot of money you can quickly have a robust MESH network covering even stubborn houses that usually only have good wifi in one room.

Other than that yes, 100% agree Zen is the way to go 🙂

Other than that yes, 100% agree Zen is the way to go 🙂

maybe for some, but i dont understand or need that. just had another look, for me as a 'light user' its £35 p/m. three mifi is a tenner less than that per month even when my half price discount has run out.

maybe for some, but i dont understand or need that. just had another look, for me as a ‘light user’ its £35 p/m. three mifi is a tenner less than that per month even when my half price discount has run out.

For me it is not just about bottom line price. I want my internet to just work, all the time. But, if there is a slight snag I want to know I can speak to someone who will actually fix it promptly.

Zen tech support is the best going IMO and UK based. You get to speak to someone who knows what they're on about and actually works with you to fix any issues. I have had to used them 3 times in 5 years. They have been utterly brilliant on each occasion. Twice the faults were down to me however they still fixed them FOC and quickly.

The line is rock steady as well, never had an issue with that side of things. Will never leave them unless their service fundamentally changes. Yes I could save £20 a month but I have been with Sky, BT, Virgin etc and every single one of them was completely useless when it came to fixing issues and none gave me the reliability I have now (Virgin being by far the worst of the three) 🙂

well the three mifi has arrived and we're up and running. the usual faff with passwords and things not connecting and needing a reset, but we've now got all our phones, laptops and the tv connected to it.

no problems with speed so far. just done a test and its 13 Mbps download and 9 Mbps upload which is above the 5 needed for netflix HD. looks like the only problem we would have is if we wanted to watch netflix Ultra HD which would appear to need 25 Mbps, but i cant see us needing that particularly.

hopefully itll be plain sailing now, and i must admit it feels better to have dumped virgin. cheeky b4st4rds didnt even ring back with a better offer to keep me 😀

ive been using plusnet through john lewis for a while now. managed to renegotiate periodically, prob not the cheapest but rock solid and amazing customer service where you can speak to someone easily and effectively if needed (although very rarely needed). I think plusnet, ee etc all use BT thesedays as theyre the same company? BT customer service I found very poor - people in call centres with scripts and not able to deviate off them...

I bought a VOXI (Vodafone) sim on a rolling contract; 75 gb of 5G data for £15 per month. They do unlimited for £35 per month too. Worth a look if you don’t want to be tied to a long contract.

okaaaaay, after a bit of playing around today and doing regular speed tests, im not so impressed with the speed of the three mifi, its probably been around the same speed as my phone most of the day (3.50 Mbps-ish) so we may not keep it.
looked at using my phone as a hotspot instead, but it guzzled the battery and my 8Gb plan wouldnt last long. id have maybe looked into an unlimited data contract if it made sense, but not sure the constant faff plus battery frazzlement is worth persevering with.

ive been using plusnet through john lewis for a while now. managed to renegotiate periodically, prob not the cheapest but rock solid and amazing customer service where you can speak to someone easily and effectively if needed (although very rarely needed). I think plusnet, ee etc all use BT thesedays as theyre the same company?

just been on the livechat with plusnet. £22 isnt toooo bad but i dont want to pay the £50 connection fee, plus its an 18 month contract. i wouldnt want any longer than a year.

I bought a VOXI (Vodafone) sim on a rolling contract; 75 gb of 5G data for £15 per month. They do unlimited for £35 per month too. Worth a look if you don’t want to be tied to a long contract.

is this just another sim for my phone, not a separate unit? if so i think id have the same battery draining problem if we were constantly streaming from it.

thanks

is this just another sim for my phone, not a separate unit? if so i think id have the same battery draining problem if we were constantly streaming from it.

Yes, just a sim. 4g mifi routers can be bought for around £35. 5G quite a bit more though.

We got three home 4g broadband. It was rubbish. Speed initally seemed OK, but it would suddenly drop to near zero for a few minutes a couple of times an hour. Which obviously meant it was unusable.

Cancelled on first day of use, cancellation accepted and we were promised the returns envelope.

Since then: no returns envelope. we call, it's "in the post". we chat, they can't see on their system but they are sure it's in the post and if we call the phone team they'll be able give us tracking info. we call, no tracking info but it's "definitely in the post". repeat. weeks now. don't know whether they have dispatched 3 of them, or just 1 but it'll definitely arrive soon (we've been told both, including in the same call by the same person).

now we've received the "you owe us money and we've tried to contact you but not managed" threatening letter. the "we've been trying to contact you" lie in the opening sentence of that letter is the icing on the cake.

We got three home 4g broadband. It was rubbish.

yep, we've come to that conclusion now. sending it back.

Cancelled on first day of use, cancellation accepted and we were promised the returns envelope.

Since then: no returns envelope. we call, it’s “in the post”. we chat, they can’t see on their system but they are sure it’s in the post and if we call the phone team they’ll be able give us tracking info. we call, no tracking info but it’s “definitely in the post”. repeat. weeks now. don’t know whether they have dispatched 3 of them, or just 1 but it’ll definitely arrive soon (we’ve been told both, including in the same call by the same person).

now we’ve received the “you owe us money and we’ve tried to contact you but not managed” threatening letter. the “we’ve been trying to contact you” lie in the opening sentence of that letter is the icing on the cake.

hope we get better service than that, they told me on the phone last night theyre sending the envelope today.

i shamefully rang virgin back in the hope i could salvage something 😀
fibbed and told them id been trying to get in touch about lowering my speed before cancellation date but had always been on hold for half an hour so could never get through. loyal customer, been with them years etc etc.
"yes i can see youre a valued loyal customer so we can offer you a deal and reconnect you at no extra cost. we're pleased to be able to offer you the same speed as before at £52 per month"
"yes but thats over double what i was paying previously."
she said all my discounts were coming to an end anyway and thats what i would have been put on in a month or two, so maybe just as well we cancelled.

done enough faffing and live chats now, just decided to go with the £19 vodafone fibre broadband 2 year deal. 2 weeks before they can instal and a 14 day cooling off period so we'll see how it goes.

cheers

How did you get on with the voda broadband? We're just going through similar process to you. Just moved so no bb currently and were considering trying a mifi unit but after seeing 2 people above not happy with it not so sure. Though it would be Vodafone not 3 providing the 4g.

getting on great with it, pleased we made the leap now.
the three mifi was garbage.

ive got a speedtest webpage open all the time and every now and then i just click it and it constantly gives around 50 Mbps which is waaay more than we need. connectivity is good. every now and then (maybe once every 2 days or so) a page is slow to load and it looks like the connection has stalled but 10 seconds later all is well again.

£19 for the next 2 years, i'll settle for that. recommended.
we went through broadbandgenie and had a £60 voucher or somethings too, so i ought to have a look at that, thanks for reminding me.

In a similar vein, don't think it's been covered.

Virgin got switched off for good last night. GF was paying nearly £100 a month after many years! Crazy.

Got a Zen contract coming in a couple of weeks, but in the mean time, anyone know if/how I can cast stuff from my Pixel 3a to my Chromecast connected to the tv, WITHOUT Wi-Fi?

I've googled it a bit but am at a loss. It mentions using 'guest mode' in Google Home app but I don't seem to have that.

Another way I think is using my phone as a hotspot and casting from another phone?

Anyone got a workaround? 👊

if/how I can cast stuff from my Pixel 3a to my Chromecast connected to the tv, WITHOUT Wi-Fi?

Not possible I'm afraid.

We have VM and ditched the phone & TV part of the package for broadband only some years ago. Even that price has gone up to I believe £48 a month for 100 Mbps, Mrs asbrooks pays for it. So it's not much cheaper than the base TV, phone & braodband package.
The VM connection is OK at best. Working from home on occasion, using Teams is no good, audio drops out all the time. I have to connect using my phone over 4G.
My daughters when use their phones to tether laptops and watch Netflix no bother at all with 4G connections.

Three mobile say that they will have 5G in our area this year, in fact they already do but it's not stable which is around £20 month. I'm waiting for the confirmation as I'll be going this route once the 5G become more stable.