[Closed] Fibre Broadband - BT, Virgin or...?

The legacy of pisspoor customer service from BT is that I'll pop up onto every thread like this to mention it. 🙂

Never really had any complaints about Virgin, and we've been with them about 8 years, in two houses.

Prices are creeping up, but I'm not sure they're anymore expensive then anywhere else. For us the broadband speed is fast and consistent. According to Ookla, we get the promised speed.

Have to reboot the router every now and then, and in 8 years probable had service disruption that lasted more than a couple of hours about 3 times.

Thinking about dropping the TV, as we just tend to watch on-demand now, but I we'd stick with the broadband.

Check the cashback sites, in 2015 we moved to BT and the £115 Topcashback covered almost all the first year promo price for Infinity1. It's how my TCB crusade began. 😉

Another +1 for Virgin and -1 for BT

Zen always get good reviews. I've had ADSL with them for decades and they have been extremely reliable (important for me as I often work from home).

They also give things like a fixed IP and no content filtering/throttling as standard.

Little bit more expensive than some other providers mind.

Currently on the phone trying to get BT to refund £130 for an engineer visit they promised would be free. So - 1 for BT from me.

-1 for Virgin. Think they're OK as long as you don't have to speak to a call centre but the call centres are useless. They were meant to install at the start of November (my neighbours have Virgin cable) they've managed to promise me it'll be done in the "next week" or so since. Finally cancelled it a week ago as I was getting fed up being told the same thing and nothing happenning.

According to one of the install teams I met in the street there's a blockage and they won't pay to dig a ten metre trench to fix it. Indian call centres and everyone I spoke to just wanted to placate me (promising free stuff, different every call) and promise things that never happened. I even got disconnected by one guy who wrote up in my notes everything that happened and didn't bother phoning me back!

Grrrrrrrrr.

Currently on the phone trying to get BT to refund £130 for an engineer visit they promised would be free. So - 1 for BT from me.

Just got off the phone. Got my £130 back. So feel free to go with BT now 🙂

BT product is pretty good, I've been with them for a few years. As has been mentioned though, their customer service is bloody terrible should anything go wrong...

I've been with Virgin since 1996. I've had the odd niggle over the years but never bad enough to warrant changing. Must be three years or more since I last had to speak to a call centre. Occasionally drops out but usually not for long.

PlusNet are BT with good service, been working for me for years

I had all sorts of problems with the service from Virgin when we were with them in Leeds. Inconsistent speeds, wifi dropping all the time, heavy traffic throttling during evenings and weekends that made streaming services impossible to use.

With BT now, which works well enough, but their customer services are appalling.

Swings and roundabouts really.

We've been with Virgin for a while, prices were creeping up and it was getting ridiculous (nearly £150 a month for 200Mb + XL TV + Movies + Sports & an extra box).

We've dropped all but the basic TV, cheapo phone but kept the superfast broadband for approx £53 a month.

Working so far. We have a Now TV subscription for the stuff I actually want to watch on the Sky channels (not much).

Not BT for the love of god.

Almost at the end of a 3 month month fibre broadband saga with them.

1) they couldn't get the BB to work (no good reason, it's a bog standard residential street)
2) they set up 2 accounts
3) I cancelled and switched to virgin after a few weeks of fannying about . They agreed to cancel at no cost
4) they went ahead and started a phone service randomly 2 months later and billed me for cancelling the broadband
5) I'm still getting random bills and credit notes on a weekly basis. Got a 40p credit yesterday, yay.

Never again. Useless useless useless. Every call to CS is a journey into the abyss.

Virgin have been fine.

Virgin fibre broadband for the last 10 years or so has been pretty rock solid for me.

I've never experienced any of the issues with Virgin that people describe on here, neither has anyone I know. Virgin quite well installed in Huddersfield so most people I know are on it and very happy.

I've just signed up for a basic TV and TiVo package, with home phone line and 50mb internet for £31 a month.

We've got BT fibre at our London place and Virgin cable at our Edinburgh one. Given the choice I'd go with Virgin cable (we've had it for years and it's been excellent) but can't say we've had too many problems with either. Only had BT fibre for a couple of months so far though.

Just as a disclaimer, the issues we had with Virgin were apparently down to oversubscription problems in the area we were living in (student area in central Leeds) i.e. they signed up loads of people on cheap deals but the fibre didn't have the capacity to handle the amount of people on the network.

[url= https://www.vodafone.co.uk/broadband ]vodafone[/url]

we had issues with the line recently (was water in the cabinet down the road). They got openreach out a lot quicker than BT have in the past.

Call centre in Glasgow as well.

BT are such a farce that our account password at Virgin is BTSUCKS

The new virgin box looks much better on paper than the tivo junk they used to do....

I'm due out my current contract in June, Virgin have just dug up our town for superfast, so hoping to go with them then.

Zen +1

Also been with them for 10+ years, all UK based.

-100 for Virgin.

Tried them twice, both times the 100Mbps service ground to a crawl every evening. Abysmal latency so couldn't work at home because voice quality was so bad on skype and livemeeting.

Regular instances of no service that in same cases would last a week or more - but the thing that really grated was the endless endless lies they would tell about fix dates - which would come and go with nothing happening. Our neighbours tell us it's much the same now but still seem happy to throw upwards of £70 a month at them.

By comparison, BT and Plusnet* have both been extremely reliable. No outages over the 4 years that we've used them and the speeds have been pretty consistent irrespective of time of day.

* yes, I know Plusnet are owned by BT, but weirdly their ping times and speeds are actually a bit better.

+1 for Virgin, it must depend where you live. We initially signed up with 80mbit, they've gradually given us upgrades over the years, it's something like 150mbit now and actually reaches that speed and maintains it. I personally get zero degradation during peak times, it's ridiculously fast always.

ADSL is like 10% the speed of cable these days, and even then generally 50% of the claimed figures. Everyone around here gets exactly what they're sold with cable.

When totting up costs, bare in mind most Virgin packages include line rental now, BT will charge this extra at £17 a month.

[url= http://www.speedtest.net/reports/united-kingdom/ ]http://www.speedtest.net/reports/united-kingdom/[/url]

Plusnet. Never had any problems on their 60Mbit fibre. Never had to deal with customer service other than initial purchase/install and that was fine.

+1 for Virgin.

2 years of insane mailshot bombardment at our old house until they were finally offering a monthly cost in line with what we'd been paying for BT and separate broadband. Speed excellent, no issues with service. Can only remember one outage, I was working at home and they were doing network engineering locally. I walked round the corner, saw the engineer at the junction box thing and asked him to come give me a shout once he was done, and he did.

Good discount on the contract, promotional period ended just before we moved house. I just asked for the same promo price in the new house on a 12 month contract, they agreed to it. Download speed tests usually show approx 205Mb download speed, not too shabby.

I've never spoken to a call centre, I just use the live chat thing if I need to contact them. Works well.

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I was curious, tested just now, we're on the 150mbit package.

Not BT, bunch of robbing barstewards. Just got rid of them after ombudsman intervention. Now with sky who appear to be best of a bad bunch.
Funnily enough had a letter and a bag in the post today asking for the BT equipment to be sent back for recycling.
Took the claw hammer to the hub and posted it back with a note which said "this is as broken as your customer service department and my will to live after 2hrs on the phone to them"
I hope they read the note. 😕

ive just had my price jacked right up by virgin so have handed in my cancellation, apparently i have to give 30 days notice tho so ill still have to make another payment :-/
looking for alternatives, but fibre doesnt appear to be available at my house. i get fibre 50 mbs with virgin tho, can other companies not use the same line like they would a phone line?

I'll say Andrews & Arnold again.

You'll say "too expensive" again and get something cheaper again

It'll be rubbish again.

Rachel

+1 for Vodafone.

We took out a contract with them at the start of Nov last year and on the couple of occasions that Openreach have caused a connectivity issue a quick call to Vodafone customer services resulted in HUGE mobile data allowance loaded onto my mobile so I could use it as a wifi hotspot.

We live in an area with a strong 4G signal so the above approach worked like a charm.

Top marks from me.

We were with BT for years with no problems however their prices have crept up and crept up over the last couple of years so we've just moved to PlusNet saving £20 per month on broadband and landline. So far they have been good. Had a problem with initial connection but their customer service sorted it out very quickly and there have been no further problems. So far its looking good.