BroadbandTrackWorld – EE or Virgin or Other?

Current BB contact is now up – I’m with John Lewis atm, which has been OK, but its not all that fast so looking to move. Happy to move the phone line. Don’t want an TV packages.

Looking to pay £30 – £35 per month max including the phone line ideally. Needs to be unlimited.

We use for the usual web surfing, to stream iPlayer to the TV (a Samsung with an iPlayer app built in), and I need it to work from home sometimes which will involve transferring reasonably large files, uploading websites and a fair bit of file syncing. The current provider is OK for this, I’d just like it faster and ideally with a better router so I can get the signal to the other side of the flat without boosters. Reliability/stability is more important than cost.

I can get decent speed and a discounted price from EE as I have a mobile with them, but I’ve seen mention that they had issues streaming iPlayer – no idea if that is still an issue though.

We’re always getting offers for Virgin through the letterbox and they seem to have decent speeds. Have heard mixed reviews on customer service and speed – but some people love them.

Any opinions or experience with either of those? Anyone I’m missing that i should be looking at?

Cheers!

I’ve had virgin bb at home for years. I’m on std package at 30mb download. I test it occasionally on speedtest and it’s always just above 30 so all is good, except. If up load speed is important then vigin is only 2mb. It’s not a problem for me but worth knowing. Secondly, it’s bloody expensive. I have all inclusive call, mobile package and bb and the bill is always around 50 per month. Special numbers like 0845 etc are excluded in all inc, like most it’s only std land lines that are included.
Service wise. Possibly better than many but not the best I’ve heard talk talk are by far the cheapest but the customer service is non existenant)

Virgin has the fastest service and I’ve never had an issue with customer service – came out to replace our STB on bank holiday Monday with 24h notice.
I pay about £60-65 a month but I get a 1tb TiVo box, about a billion HD channels (XL pack), phone and broadband at 50mb (their basic BB now! They have asked me if I want to go to 150mb!!). I think that’s a great deal. Never get less that 45mb speed, it’s fantastic.

Definitely not EE!!!! They throttle during peak hours in the evening which sees speed drop from 30mb to about 3mb. I’ll be leaving as soon as my contract with them is up.

BT for me been an excellent ISP, no throttling good call packages included and if you can get fibre then speed should be good too.

If your flat has cable then you’d be daft not to have Virgin Media, as the speeds are very good. Ours is 120mb & it slows to perhaps 90mb at peak, but it’s usually 100mb+.
Can’t fault their customer service either.

Another Virgin customer here – hard to work out the exact cost as we have phone, BB and TV through the cable. BB is fast and does not seem to suffer from throttling. In the evening multiple people can stream videos with no issues. We have the 100mb service – started at 30 but VM keep upgrading.

As per takisawa2 says if you have cable then VM is probably the best approach.

Cheers for all the feedback 🙂 I guess I’ll take another look at Virgin!

Thanks for that loddrik – thats what I was worried about. I’ll avoid EE then!

I’ll take a look at BT & Zen as well I think.

If anyone is interested – upload speeds for Virgin are 3Mb on the 50Mb package and 6Mb on the 100Gb package. Looks pretty promising.

Virgin used to shape the shit out my connection when I was with them. much happier with BT, speeds are constant throughout the day and up time is as near 100% s can be reasonably expected. We’re on the infinity 2 package, its 40+ quid a month inc line rental but we definitely get our money’s worth

BT. Mainly as you get your unlimited Openzone/BT Wifi minutes. (at least unlimited on the better packages. Reasonable chance of FTTC/Infinity as well.