I have a broadband/TV deal with Virgin.

I switched from BT about 8 years ago for the faster connection speeds as I often have to work at home and rely on the connection.

In the last six months the internet connection has become decidedly flakey. It is often showing as ‘Wireless Connected – No Internet’ or I will be in the middle of a web conference and the line will drop for long enough to lose the conference and then reconnect.

The couple of time where it has been bad enough to endure the over friendly automatic fault logging system I have had a very nice person explain that it is a known fault and is being addressed ‘just as quick as they can’.

Is the reliability likely to improve if I switch back to BT or do they all share the same network infrastructure?

If it’s cable I’ve had occasional problems like that and if you persist they will come and sort it out.

With mine it was a faulty amplifier about 100 yards up the road and they fixed it once they buckled down to investigate properly.

It might just be your router though.

Had similar issues with a dying wireless router – have you got a spare? Check out the wireless network to remove that from the equation.

If it’s cable I’ve had occasional problems like that and if you persist they will come and sort it out.

With mine it was a faulty amplifier about 100 yards up the road and they fixed it once they buckled down to investigate properly.

My dad had this with Virgin too, causes a SNR issue on the line so when the contention goes up it starts dropping connections.

Keep on to them.

Switching back to BT will probably resolve the issue (assuming its proper Virgin cable), but if I was you I’d persist with getting Virgin to sort it.

Have you checked to see if you are getting a lot of interference from other poeple’s routers? I had a similar problem with my Virgin and it turned out to be interference. If you download a program like insidder and see how crowded the channels are you can then change the channel your router is broadcasting on to a less popular one.

I had line speed problems and spoke to a nice man at Virgin and he changed something. It’s been far more reliable.

I have always found that rebooting the Superhub thing weekly does seem to help though. this may just be psychological though.

IF you’re running from a laptop try it with an ethernet cable for a while and see how you get on?

We had exactly this for years with Virgin. Every call to them (usually best part of an hour to get through) was met with the same response “Your password is too weak”. Noticeably, our connection pretty much failed whenever our neighbours came in – the people the other side said the same too.

It was so bad that we went to BT Affinity (which I had said I would never do) last month and the difference is incredible. For the first time we can actually watch videos on the net without it bufferring / disconnecting.

I used to need an attenuator on my connection but recently when I was having issues the guy fitted a different strength attenuator which seemed to help. Signal strengths/noise levels must have changed since my original fitting.

I’ve just given up on Virgin cable after a catalogue of disasters over the previous 9 months. A few periods of unusable internet connection lasting several weeks. It would seem that network technicians turn up to do maintenance work on the street cabinet and end up dicking around with people’s connections.

Switched to BT Infinity now.

If you’re still on the original router then it’s probably on it’s way out. I had similar problems to Bimbler. A new router resolved the issue.

I’m laughing through gritted teeth here – I’m on my 7th Openreach engineer visit right now. He’s busy down the street swapping the connection between the exchange and the cabinet. Mainly because they’re running out of things to try 😉

Is the reliability likely to improve if I switch back to BT or do they all share the same network infrastructure?

Different network infrastructure for Virgin – it’s effectively outside the BT local loop and sub loop.

I had the same trouble after they boosted the broadband speed a couple of years ago. Spent ages trying to sort it out but in the end my old router was the cause. I bought a newer one & everything was fine.

I’ve been an NTL then Virgin customer for years and been mostly happy.

We changed to TiVo and got a new superhub thing about 18 months ago at the same time. Connection became very flaky, especially when the boy was using xbox live. Turned out it was as meikle mentioned above, too much interference from neighbours networks on the same channel. Had a fiddle with that and all sorted. No problems since.

Is it the same on wireless as wired?

i.e., is this a router problem or a Virgin problem?

get them to check it, my tv picture got progressively worse and intercom became flakey – turned out to be a dodgy optical coupler (according to the engineer) in the local hub. 100% better since fixed and now downloading at 15MB/s and TV actually looks watchable