Afternoon all, I’m after a bit of advice please. We’re currently with virgin for broadband but it’s at £67/month for 2 or 300 mb, can’t remember but it’s fast and reliable. I WFH 90% if the time so it’s important for me but it’s just too much money.

Been with them a while so no new customer deals or anything like that unfortunately.. what happened to customer loyalty eh?! Last time I spoke with them they wouldn’t budge.

When I check my postcode it looks like virgin are the only true fibre so feel like I’m snookered. I suspect they’re well aware of this fact hence why I think they won’t budge on price. I don’t want to go back to normal broadband via the phone line. Does anyone have any experience of the 4/5g home hub setups? Will it be a step backwards and are there any other alternatives I should explore?

Thanks in advance

Do you actually need „true fibre“ and 200-300Mb? In most areas the BT local copper wire can still offer 50-100Mb. I’m getting 67MB from NOW for £21/month, which I found more than sufficient for WFH and TV.

As above. What is the actual speed you can get through telephone wire instead ? Many broadband providers now do a minimum speed guarantee which should give you a vague (but still exaggerated level of accuracy)

WFH doesnt need huge amounts, just reliable. Stream 4k TV requires a bit more !

I would say 30-50mb is fine.

In the same boat as joined gigaclear and know their prices will shoot up when the intro offer ends – is there no Offcom obligation to share infrastructure after a number of years monopoly as with BT openworld lines?

Are you our of contract?

I was paying £55 with a home phone I don’t use and now pay £44 without the home phone.

Worth asking.

Get work to stump up some of the cost?

I moved and couldn’t stomach Virgin prices at my new gaff, so I went with Sky on a bundle with the TV service and I honestly don’t miss all those extra Mbs of speed.

I WFH 100% of the time as well.

WFH and just on PlusNet Unlimited Fibre Extra Broadband. Stable, fine for all the stuff I do. Often streaming TV or Music at the same time as being on Teams and my wife also WFH 2 days a week and neither of use ever have connection problems.

You have Virgin fibre but not cable or TV?

According to their website, their 250Mbps fibre package is £32.50/month. £50/month nets you a gigabit connection. There’s something deeply wrong here.

I’ve no idea how you’re spending so much with Virgin. In the app there’s new deals cheaper than that on the “you’re able to upgrade” section. May be locality dependant.
I pay £30 a month for 100mb + tv (never use it). I bought a o2 sim only contract for £5 a month which doubles the internet speed and doubles the sim data with Volt benefits. In reality I get 250-300mb and so far no line issues.

When I check my postcode it looks like virgin are the only true fibre so feel like I’m snookered.

I think that’s the case in most places isn’t it? Fibre To the Premises with virgin only, Fibre To the Cabinet with most other providers in most places or to the exchange if you’re in a bit of a back water?

Being as I’m in a back water I’m very out of date on this mind so happy to be corrected.

You’ll be fine with non FTP if you’re in a decent coverage area, which, if you can get virgin FTP, you probably are as they don’t tend to offer it in areas with poor FTC

4G/5G hub from Three?

Or, buy the router and a data SIM from Smarty or similar for £15 p/m

One of my colleagues uses 4/5G and for 95% of the time it’s fine.

As others have said, unless your moving huge amounts of data between the work network and your laptop then 300mb is probably overkill. Until I moved we hat FTTC at it was fine with two of us WFH and the kids schooling from home in lockdown and was only 80mb.

When my deal with Virgin ran out they had nothing to offer me until I told them I was leaving for a different provider. They then matched the new deal; M350, boosted to M500 with volt, for £27 per month.

5g Mobile Broadband from 3 works a treat usually over 100 -300mb dependent on time of day I presume.

You probably need less than you think. I used to have a 55 Mbps FTTC connection that dropped to 24 Mbps  for a couple of weeks due to a fault. It was still fine for 2x people on video calls + 1x UHD stream to the TV simultaneously. Of course I totally ignored this finding and stumped up for a 1 Gbps FTTP connection the moment it was available.

If you are tempted by 4G/5G then make sure you consider the latency as well as the speed. Latency contributes more to a connection feeling quick as headline download speed does. Latency on 5G is usually pretty good, but can be poor on 4G.

Also don’t only look at download speed, upload can be very important as well, depending on what you are doing.

Thank you very much indeed to everyone who took the time to respond to my post. From memory the initial deal was maybe £35-37.50 then it jumped up considerably when that ended then one or two inflationary jumps “per the T&Cs” as they always say.. add in me being a lazy **** and here I am sat paying £67 for internet.

Sounds like the answer is I don’t actually need the broadband I’m currently paying through the nose for. I had a terrible experience with talk talk before virgin where I was getting about 10mb in the room where the router was and about 2mb in my office at the back of the house which meant I couldn’t get effectively WFH. I think this has probably painted a (inaccurate) picture of all non-fibre broadband for me. Sounds like I just a had a shit experience with that particular supplier.

I now have a mesh network setup so any degradation with distance from router is a non-issue. I’ll give them a buzz and just go for cancellation, if they offer me an amazing deal great if not I’m offskies.

Thanks again

@nickewen

We have the same issue. About as far from the BT/Openreach exchange as it is possible to be.

A speed guarantee is no use if I’ve got to endure hours of service calls and arguments to get a contract release.  Had exactly that with BT when we moved in.  18 months of paying for an unusable phone and broadband and several months of that also paying Virgin.

The problem is whether Openreach’s underlying infrastructure is now an order of magnitude better than it was over a decade ago.  Only way to really know and not risk work issues is to overlap with the current provider and try it and risk being trapped paying twice if it’s garbage.  The price has risen to a point now and enough time has passed where I think it’s probably worth the risk of being stuck arguing for months if it isn’t any good to find out if we now have an option again.

I wonder what their policy is for cancelling it and then immediately reprovisioning it at normal rates? 😁

It’s definitely worth a phone call.

Virgin, been with them for 20+ years (originally diamond cable). Just had an email saying they are increasing the price and I have the option to cancel contract early. ‘Press button 4 if you are thinking of leaving’ after 20 minutes of loud awful rap noise it just hangs up.

may consider moving but it will be with a provider using the very old phone lines in our Road. Currently on 125gb and wife works from home, some interesting comments in this thread though about speed.

I had a terrible experience with talk talk before virgin where I was getting about 10mb in the room where the router was and about 2mb in my office at the back of the house which meant I couldn’t get effectively WFH.

Do an online check with the supplier you are looking at – this will show you what speed you can likely expect. (usually input your post code and landline phone number).

Not all old-school phone lines support higher speeds. Some can still be as low as 10mb or even lower. And if upload speed is vital this is usual quarter of the download speed.

You’ll also need a phone line of course – so hopefully this is still connected.

Just check before you jump ship!

My work broadband is below – I get half this speed at home 6 miles away…

@the-muffin-man
Can you get that speed estimate or similar if you haven’t got the phone line into the house?

I think our BT connection was cut years ago with some building work and the socket replaced with a VM one in the same location.

Do you actually need „true fibre“ and 200-300Mb? In most areas the BT local copper wire can still offer 50-100Mb.

If you can, I worked from home in the back of beyond, and the speed down the wire was enough for me to do all the usual “worky” stuff, giant spreadsheets, teams, outlook etc etc, and It would stream movies in the evening (mostly). Was only me in the house and the connection was split between my house and one other – home to an elderly retired couple, so I doubt they were mega-online gamers, so that may have had a impact on the usability

Ditched virgin a few years ago as they were charging nearly 60 quid for a shit deal. Went to Plusnet for under 20 quid and connection speed doubled to 88Mb. Virgin was cable, Plusnet copper.

Can you get that speed estimate or similar if you haven’t got the phone line into the house?

I’ve always had land lines so I don’t know.

If you don’t have a land line then the cost of having one installed would, I guess, easily cost more than sticking with fibre.

You’ll also need a phone line of course – so hopefully this is still connected

not necessarily.

Our BT line had been cut years ago after we went to NTL cable. When we signed up for NOW last year they arranged for Openreach to install a new cable to the house, which we didn’t have to pay for.

Is there not something that BT is no longer installing new copper lines? So that might not be an option if there’s not one there already.

BT do FTTP, we have it – but perhaps not in your area. I pay £60 for 900Mbps with bells and whistles, and it’s great. I’m mainly paying for the upload speed, it really helps sometimes for work but it’s a niche use-case. I could drop to 450Mbps but I’d get half the upload speed and it only saves a fiver.

We’ve no cable in the street, but I can’t complain at the 58down/20up Mbps we get.

I stick to a ‘good’ provider, having had awful service, speed throttling and dropping connections with folk like TalkTalk and Sky. I’m with Plusnet and it just works well and reliably.

I had a terrible experience with talk talk before virgin where I was getting about 10mb in the room where the router was and about 2mb in my office at the back of the house which meant I couldn’t get effectively WFH.

Assuming all other providers are going to use the same Open Reach cabling I’d say tread carefully as it might just be that the copper to your house is a long way from the cabinet, the contention ratio is high, or it’s just a bit shonky. Those postcode checkers are OK, but rarely account for issues with wires to individual properties.

4g mifi might be an option though.

Those postcode checkers are OK, but rarely account for issues with wires to individual properties.

Yeah when we had copper I went from 1.5Mbps to 2.5 just by re-seating the wires in the master socket.

Just ring virgin up and cancel your contract, then sign up as a new customer on a new deal. I do this every time my contract comes to an end.

Those postcode checkers are OK, but rarely account for issues with wires to individual properties.

They give you an idea though – no point signing up if the max you can get is ‘up to 17mb’. No amount of tweaking is going to make it run any faster than that.