I used to be with virgin.. monthly bill went up and up. Friend of mine only left virgin this year for BT. His ping was awful on virgin even with 80mb download. He loves BT. I'm on BT coming from O2 a month ago. Let's put it this way... I dung hear much good about virgin but everyone I know who is on BT loves it.
Virgin for me, BT can't yet provide even a 1/4 of the speed I get with Virgin, so why would I change? Yes there are the occasional odd speed reduction when I've been a bump and downloaded too much one evening, but speed is still good. It will affect mostly p2p stuff anyway which doesn't affect me and the speed reduction is still faster than the highest speed on BT. As for ADSL, its a joke! Fastest speed in the area is up to 6Mbps.....vs my 120Mbps? Nah no thanks I'm ok, and I'm happy to live with the awfully slow CS as long as I get decent speeds and pings. Always have great pings. When you have 3 people gaming online at once and a 4th person streaming youtube, as well as background steam downloads, without any hiccups, why would I change?
I'm personally going from Virgin 60mb fibre to Plusnet ADSL happily. I'd far rather have 8mb solid than 60mb with 1000+ pings all over the place.
I have had Virgin for a while now; the speed of the broadband is great (albeit I would like a faster upload speed [3MB on 60MB package]) but their customer service and accounts team are terrible. That being said, I left BT for a reason and I'm sure most companies are just as bad. Also on a router front, the super hub is plain dire, even after so called 'improvements'; you'd be better off getting another wireless AP or router to handle Wifi. I agree with George, I would rather lower speeds, maybe not 8MB if I would have better ping & upload speeds.
I was happy with o2 for the years I've been with them. After they announced a few months ago that I had been sold off to sky... I started to get major ping problems. Ping would shoot up to between 160 and 1000 every evening between 6pm and 11:30. Then it got worse... would happen in the day as well. Was told by an o2 engineer there was nothing wrong and it must be someone in my house causing it. He said my town had been due for exchange upgrade but that might not happen now we'd been sold off to sky. However... I'd been posting about this issue on the o2 forums and other people were having the same problem.. It had been picked up by someone at o2 who got engineers on it. They brought around improvements but still it wasn't as good as it had been before. Then came the exchange upgrade for my town. After that the download rate was consistent and as good as you will get for ADSL 8mb. However... ping was now locked at 50. Never dropping below 50. Prior to the problems it had been 28 to 36. With BT my ping is far below what it ever was with o2.
My ping on Infinity is usually sub 10ms for a UK sever, which is flipping fantastic. Just did this right now. The 70Mbit down is due to my wireless bridge, if I hook up to the HomeHub3 directly I get 78Mbit, which is 2Mbit shy of the absolute max. 7ms ping!
I'm with virgin and rate them and have never had a problem. Only gripe I have is the upload speed. 100 download and 10 up
I'm with Virgin and have always been delighted with speed, reliablity and even cs never been a problem. I heavily download tv shows every monday and never been capped either - though capping does occur. I wouldn't touch bt with a bargepole after what they did to me years ago.
My experiences with Virgin have been mostly good. Over the past 5 years, it's been rock solid for 90% of the time. Download rates are almost always bang-on, as are upload rates, although they are very disappointing. Just did a test now and my results were 61.5Mb down, 3.01Mb up, which is just over what I should be getting. Ping is also very low most of the times, about the 7ms mark. But we do experience some issues now and again, usually relating to high pings and dropped packets. We had a prolonged issue for a number of months 18months ago which meant frequent calls to their customer service departments. The wait to talk to someone is usually long, but the same is true of most companies, including BT in my experience. As for their helpfulness, completely depends on who you talk to. One person insisted on remote connecting to my computer and running tests, which was a complete disaster as I was running the developer preview of Windows 8! She concluded that the 100Mb ethernet connecting my computer to the router was bottlenecking the 60Mb internet connection! no amount of arguing would change her mind. Hung up and phoned straight back and spoke to a really helpful woman who sent out an engineer the next day who found that the superhub was faulty. This brings me to the superhub. It's pure garbage as a router. Mine is used in modem mode and connected to a seperate router for wireless. Despite being a rather poor quality Netgear WN2000 router, it's still 10x better than the superhub. Finally, when it comes to the download caps, I only download during the hours of 21:00-10:00, where there is no limit to the amount allowed.
I'm running on BT Infinity 1 - option 2. They were great when they installed my line when I was on slow ADSL in my new place, and they were just as good installing the Fibre. I was toying with the idea of going for their option 2 for the 60 meg service but to be honest I'm delighted with the speeds of what I'm getting. Really can't grumble about BT. I know lots of people have issues etc, but for every 7 bad stories, there are a few good ones.
