About to move into new property and need an internet provider. Which is better bt infinity or virgin... bt est speed is 22.1 mb but virgin dont know yet as my address isnt listed so need to contact them.
Virgin's customer service is appalling. If you ever need to call them expect to spend all evening listing to RnB caller hold music and repeating your security details 10 times as you get passed from department to department. BT infinity all the way,
Yeah, there's no way I'll be going back to Virgin if I can help it after the last couple of years. Have no experience of Infinity but have heard far fewer complaints about it.
I'm on Infinity. Was a bit wary of them as an ISP beforehand, but right now I cannot fault them. Service is solid as a rock, fast, and exactly as sold. I've never needed to call tech support though (which is a good sign). My parents are on Virgin, and have been since 2000. I hate Virgin. Their tech support is utterly dreadful (I spent 3 years before I left home dealing with it), and hasn't improved one iota in 13 years. As they were originally NTL customers their online account is totally fubar - we don't know the username or password for the master account, and Virgin won't tell us. This means we can't access half of the offered services...
BT have no restrictions, Virgin now have quite a few, even on their top tier package. I've never had to deal with support for them, but as a few people have said, the support isn't very good. I've been on Virgin 120 meg for 6 weeks and it's been hassle free, There's always at least 120 meg available to me. This might not be the same in your area though, as they do seem to suffer a lot of over utilisation and it takes them ages to sort it out.
It took me 4 months from ordering BT Infinity to get ADSL upto 6MB, not even ADSL 2 (the line was capable of it). The communication between BT and openreach was appalling. It didn't get installed and no amount of complaining made anything move more quickly. Eventually I cancelled the contract as they'd breached the terms, they even invoiced me for the connection before it was installed. I've been a customer with BT on 3 separate occasions and never, ever got what I asked for. Had shoddy customer service and always ended up with compensation for the time they wasted. Stick with Virgin, I've had nothing but fantastic service with them. That and their tech support know what they're on about. I can't be arsed to rant in detail about how crap BT are but if you want me to PM you with the details I'd be more than happy to.
Most likely you won't be in a cabled area then, if so they will only be able to supply 'Virgin national' services - telephone and ADSL.
I thought openreach was owned by BT so communication between openreach and all the other providers is worse, surely? At least with BT you don't have to pay extra for openreach's services. I thought BT customers were served preferentially by openreach, meaning shorter waiting times for installation.
I wish we had Infinity in our area. On Virgin and get 500kbps if I'm lucky in the evening. From around 1800-2200. Then full speed. I'm out all day, not downloading...so not traffic shaping, just over subscribed in my area. Been like this for 7 months now. Ranges from 100kbps to 500kbps. Call centre staff are hopeless...I don't actually know how someone can do a job like that, know and care so little and go home satisfied after a shift. I'd be distraught!
Drop me a PM with your address of where your moving to and I will check tomorrow when I get in work, as to whether it is in a cabled area or not. As for what ISP to choose, each has benefit's and faults and people will say good or bad things about each dependent on how the experience was that they had. I had VM broadband and I cancelled it, due to having gaming issues and the issue was eventually found mainly down to me and someone else looking at it. Whilst I won't usually look at BT for broadband, the Infinity is appealing but I will need to look at what I can get when it eventually comes to my area. Yes Virgin has restrictions on how much you can download within a certain period before your connection has it's speed reduced and dependent on what package, you are on depends on what your speed is reduced down to. The new STM does mean though, that if you are reduced on your download speed then your upload speed is not reduced aslong as you have not used the amount of data, within the time period to trigger the reduction, but I cannot remember as it's not something I deal with normally since I work on business and not residential. The last time I was reduced though I went from 120Mb to 70Mb and stayed at that level, until a specific time after the reduction hit. 70Mb is still fast enough to download, game, stream and anything else I could think off and not only that it's still faster than all the "Unlimited, Unrestricted packages" I can get from all the other ISP's in my area, by about 10x. With BT Infinity or Sky Fibre and all the other's there are not really restrictions in speed but you do get, natural reduction in speed so if there are lots of users in the area all using the connection at the same time, and they are hammering it then you will sometimes get a reduction in speed but it depends on what bandwidth is available in the area. A friend of mine has had, VM ADSL Broadband and he hated it and was only receiving around 4.5Mb down and 0.2Mb up, but as soon as he switched to BT that went up to 12Mb down and 6Mb up which was quite nice for him. Another friend of mine had BT Infinity and was getting a decent connection apart from when his phone rang, and then it would drop in speed and sometimes would drop the connection all together. When I rang through to VM CS I sat on hold for 45 minutes one day, but then the next day I didn't have to hold for longer than 2 minutes. I don't know about BT's CS because I have never had to phone them, but I have heard that they are not that bad to be honest. Either way if I remember correctly but I am not sure you have 14 days in which you can cancel once the service has been installed so, you could get either installed and see how they go and if it's poor then cancel and try the other.
I used to have complaints with Virgin but of late they've been excellent. We have 60Mb and almost always get 7.5MB/s download speed (if the site/server supports it). E.g., I downloaded a game on steam the other day and 6.5GB took less than 15 mins.
Nah they work in partnership, openreach are contractors. They do install work for other ISPs too. This was about 2 years ago now, but after the two previous problems I has with them I decided that enough was enough.
Currently on FTTH Infinity with BT. Had Virgin cable before. Virgin were straight up about their traffic management policy, and I always got 100% speed and good ping. No complaints there! Infinity now, no forced traffic management policy, but I get about 35% max line speed midday - midnight, and then a full speed overnight which is a bit annoying. Cost is the same, and in my experience customer service has been equal
One thing I really dislike about VM is I don't think you can see what contract you're on unless you phone them. As a result I only recently discovered I'm actually on a 12 month contract (despite being sure we'd signed up on a student 9/10 month one) and so have to pay an annoying disconnection fee.
Checked for you mate and send a reply to your PM, but you should be fine and be able to get VM if you choose to.
BT have improved and theirs always the ceo's office that can get things sorted when their is a big issue, always hear alot of good things about plus net and their UK support is very good. As for Openreach they own and manage the UK's phone network between the exchange and the home, they are regulated by Ofcom and give equal and fair access to all Isp's. Alot of people assume that since their part of the BT group they would communicate well with the other parts, in reality the communication is quite poor.
Openreach appear to be hopelessly incompetent no matter who they're working for. I hasten to add that I cast no doubt on the engineers themselves, who're perfectly competent; rather, the organisation itself is laughably inept. For this reason I avoid BT. Frankly I'd avoid all of the bigger ISPs on the basis that they're likely to be more directly in the firing line for restriction and surveillance. I have been using Eclipse for many years and while they've become a bit bigger and a bit more corporate of late, I've never had a reason to complain. Their tech support, in particular, uses native English speakers (I think they're in Exeter) and seems to be able to grasp the idea that at least some of their customers are experienced in the field and don't need to be taken through a ridiculous "switch it off and back on again" script. As I believe we're required to say on the internet, Eclipse ++. P
