I endured Virgin for years. Dreadful. Constant contradictory advice from their customer support. I moved over to BT and never looked back. Wouldn’t go back to Virgin in a million years.
My problem with the BT Openreach based system is the unreliable connections. The time it takes to diagnose and repair faults and the amount of pre diagnosis the user has to do to prove that the fault is not occuring in the property.
At least with the Virgin system is that the number of connections between my house and the cabinet in the street is limited to a continuous length of copper or fibre.
The BT Openreach based system is dependant on the availability of repair people with ladders, poles etc. Often problems would require several vehicles of gear to repair a fault in the twisted pair cable. Often taking days for the stars to align so that the various people could converge to do a repair.
I also have no respect for a company that blames the state of its infrastructure for the unreliable service for which it has done nothing about for 20 or more years.
I’m in the sticks and can’t get anything apart from copper to my house. On a good day I get about 20Mbps. That’s enough for my household’s use- maybe two televisions streaming different content and possibly my streaming music at the same time.
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It depends where you live. Many places in the UK (here for example) don’t have BT poles and overhead wires. The Virgin Media connections are also all underground coax back to the cabinet for broadband and a copper pair for telephone. Of course most BT connections are copper pair for telephone and ADSL/VDSL to carry broadband over that copper pair.
No ladders needed!
As you say it depends where you live. In our neighbourhood
The copper pair leaves the green cabinet in a duct, then it ascends a pole to serve 6 or so houses. each house having an overhead cable to each house.
At every change of state there is a twisted copper wire join, eg at the bottom of the pole, at the top of the pole, at the connector on the barge board of the house, at the junction box in the house.
Each of the joints can get disturbed if work is being done on a cable adjacent to it. Pairs of cables can get mispaired.
There is no testing of the quality of the join by adjacent pairs until the user either has a reduced connection speed (sometimes no speed), the user has to report the fault to the ISP, assumIng the user can get a phone service, has to wait for Openreach people to come out and check all the connections - can be days later. If they cannot fix the problem they have liaise with their colleagues in the exchange to check that there has not been a failure.
This sorry state has been around for 20 years or more.
Hi. I have Virgin 100Mb broadband and they wanted to put it up from £30 pm to £36 pm. So I rang retentions and they gave me an 18mth deal of £26pm.
Had the same experience with Sky, was paying £36 pm and they wanted to put it up to £38. One phone call and now paying £24 pm for next 18mths.
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We have a Virgin mobile account in the house, and customer service although not quite as good as the past has been good. BT have massively improved their customer service in recent years and have had good experiences with them too… and they appear to offer discretionary discounting. The company we use whose customer service has in my opinion nose dived is Sky.
I used to work for Sky… so intrigued when I did finally talk to a rep I enquired… and surprisingly, perhaps because it said I used to be an employee on my customer record, but the individual opened up and I heard not all is well behind the scenes in customer service land… apparently, although they were helpful and reduced my TV package cost down as I simply said it was too much…
Needless to say I booked a Sky customer call back for another Sky service… and nothing happened.
Indeed, although at long last that is slowly shifting at a mass deployment level to fibre with BT and Openreach as the UK PSTN service closes in 2025… twisted pair if you require it will for most terminate at your green cabinet… so it will only be part of your neighbourhood network… kind of like a local Ethernet lead.
With regard to poles and drop lines, where they do exist in rural and older urban/suburban locations, fibre is distributed using it now, really speeding up deployment, other than a little fibre warning symbol on the pole, it’s hard to notice the difference.
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