Virgin or BT for Internet?

[welshio]

I'm moving into my new house on Dunstans Road (near the middle close to Goodrich School) next week and I'm trying to figure out who to go with for my internet access. I'm currently living up near ED Station where my only option was BT FTTC (using Zen as the ISP) which has been fine (getting approx 70Mb/s).

The previous owners of my house had Virgin and I know that I can get up to 200MB/s with them but I have read a fair few horror stories about how much it can slow down at peak times. BT are quoting that I am only likely to get approx 35MB/s at the new address. Also when I say BT I just mean their wires, I'd sign up with a proper ISP, not the actual BT jokers :)

Does anyone on here live near my part of Dunstans Road and are you able to give me some first-hand experiences of what the internet services are like?

Thanks

[sleepy-li]

I live on Underhill, near Dunstans and can sadly report my two years with Virgin were awful, as much as it pained me to I had to go back to BT and its much much more reliable. Virgin would drop out for days at a time it was a nightmare as I work from home.

[Bic Basher]

Your question should be Virgin or other ISP's who use the BT Openzone network. Most Openzone ISP's buy their bandwidth from BT Wholesale, so whoever you use from BT Retail, Plusnet etc will have similar speeds. TalkTalk and Sky have their own back end at the BT exchange, so you may have different speeds in comparison.

Virgin is like playing Russian roulette round here.

[Jah Lush]

BT all the way. You only have to look at the regular complaints on here about Virgin's service to convince you not to go with them.

[welshio]

sleepy-li: Thanks for the info, it's good to get the opinion of someone so close to where we are moving to.

Bic Basher & Jah Lush: I agree with you, Virgin is not worth taking the chance with. I was hoping that I might get lucky but as it has a 12 month contract it's too much of a risk to take.

I guess I'll have to suck it up and give my business to an ISP that uses the BT infrastructure.

Cheers

[Huggers]

We changed to Virgin and we have lost internet on a regular basis for two days at a time.

[bobbsy]

Im on Underhill - recently vhanged from sky briadband to EE fibre. The change was a bit long winded but no compaints with the service now its up and running.

[SebsC]

Is anyone around the top end of Upland Road using Virgin? If so, what is it like and would you recommend using Virgin tv and broadband? I know there were lots of problems for a long time with Virgin in the area - speaking to them today they said the problems had now been resolved - is this true?

[SebsC]

Word of warning, we phoned Virgin just to enquire about prices and a few days later we got something through the post telling us a date that the engineer would be coming to install it and with a direct debit already set up (they used our details from when we were with them years ago). When we phoned to complain, we were told we had verbally agreed to this. It was only through insisting that they listen to the recorded conversation that we were able to get them to admit to fraudulently using our bank details. Outrageous. That definitely made our minds up for us.

[Lowlander]

Near Upland Road and Dunstans Road junction, PlusNet ADSL is 18MB/s (i.e. BT Openreach infrastructure)

We had 78MB/s Infinity 2 for 18 months, but went back to ADSL as it's a fraction of the price (and no difference to us).

[Alan Medic]

Anyone lose Virgin broadband and TV in CP Road area? First time it's happened to us in a long time.