Question Upgrading SKY broadband to Virgin?

Ratfink

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Hi folks,

Bit of a tech novice here, so bear with me. Been with SKY for many years and had endless troubles (although their customer service and response is impecible!)

Finally got an engineer (about 10th time!) out who discovered that my apartment runs on Virgin cables - the other is broken and they can't get to it as it's in the walls. They did change some things on the connection side and the service has been okay. I generally get 40-50 mb/s on their max 70 mb/s package.

My question is: worth upgrading to Virgin seeing it's available to me? I can get Virgin's superfast broadband cheaper than what I'm paying now!

Is their router reliable or worth upgrading?

And are they VPN friendly?

I do stream a lot and d/l big games. Also, I'm becoming interested in cloud gaming so would like a solid, quick connection.

Advice appreciated.
 
I am on Virgin. I have 350meg cable. The product is fabulous IMO. But, ironically I am on the phone in a queue waiting to talk to them as yet again they have increased my monthly charges for no additional services. This is twice in 6 months and not a small amount either - 10% increase this time.
 
Thank you for the response. Yup, SKY do the same to me with the increases...
 
Are you just moving the BB?

I have Sky Q and Virgin BB and that seems to give the best of both worlds as VM's TV service is still not as good.
 
I have a friend using Virgin and it has gone down at least twice in the past year. It is down now and waiting for an engineer to call. Phone access can be frustrating - it took an hour to get through. Personally, I'm on TalkTalk, broadband, TV and phone. Can't remember when I last had a problem. And cheaper too!
Good luck with your choice.
 
Are you just moving the BB?

I have Sky Q and Virgin BB and that seems to give the best of both worlds as VM's TV service is still not as good.

Hello. Yes, just the BB. I should have stated that, but TV isn't important and not something I need.
 
Had virgin broadband for nearly 5 years, its hardly ever went down, 3 to 4 times in that time period
 
Get Virgin, if the price is good and your speed is better. I have the 350mb service and its great, no complaints about the router.
 
I have had virgin for a couple of years. When the first deal was up, I just phoned them, & was given the same deal, for about £1 more.

There are wifi problems with the hub 3, google is your friend.

We have had lose of internet about 3 times in this time.

Not overly happy with the installation, men just turned up, laid the cable from the road up to my door. This goes over a flower bed, so I can dig it in.

The man who came to fit the cable inside, wouldn't run cable over garage roof to my rear living room, "health & safety" so cable has been run along skirting board in hall, going over a door. This means the router is in the hall where the only socket is.

He did offer to run the cable from the front door, under carpet to my living room. But I declined.
 
I have a friend using Virgin and it has gone down at least twice in the past year. It is down now and waiting for an engineer to call. Phone access can be frustrating - it took an hour to get through. Personally, I'm on TalkTalk, broadband, TV and phone. Can't remember when I last had a problem. And cheaper too!
Good luck with your choice.

At the end of the day, people are always going to have issues with their providers, no one offers a perfect service or ever could. There are lots of issues with all the major ones including TalkTalk so no one is immune.

Good customer service is essential but that again can be flawed as you only need one bad call centre agent for a customers' experience to be rubbish.

On here we are more likely to complain than praise but that's a different story.

I personally have had VM BB for around 20 years (am guessing) as we had it when moved into current house 17 years ago. The first speeds I got was 512Kbps from memory and their digital TV service was rubbish and used to crash with various VB errors (yes really). I am now on 1Gbps service, so around 2,000 times faster or so.

Have I had outages, yes but probably no more than any other utility, probably had the same number of power-cuts or water-cuts. I have had workmen dig through the cable when relaying my drive, I have suffered from national outages, like the wobble last Thursday. Normally CS is pretty good at getting a technician out if you need one, last one was when did the Gig upgrade due to an issue on some wiring. I would argue they have got better over time.

I have also had BT and Sky BB at the same time because it was either paid for by work or was free. Unfortunately, I can only get 40Mbps with VDSL and I regularly exceed that in "normal use" for my family so its not really an option. Unlike these there is no drop off in speed with VM with distance from the greenbox. These services also suffered outage from time to time.

Unless you can get FTTP then you are not going to get the same speeds as VM, having said most people will not benefit from more than 200Mbps especially if just using WiFi devices.
 

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