I’m looking at changing from Virgin to BT. Does anyone know how good the new “strongest signal” really is? We have to use wifi extenders at the moment and it would be good not to have to rely on them. Also, the BT max speeds aren’t as good as Virgin claim. BT offer minimum 35mb, probable 44mb – 58mb. IIRC, Virgin speeds are around 75mb. Given that there could be 4 people all streaming content, how much difference, if any, would we notice.
I’m not too bothered about customer service horror stories as everyone has bad experiences, I’m more concerned about service performance and reliability.
As always, many thanks
davebigpicture says
Nudge…..
Vulpes Vulpes says
Not sure what your ISP has to do with your wi-fi extenders. The service delivered to your router is the responsibility of your ISP, what you do with it after that is down to you.
If you rely on a router supplied by an ISP, that’s your look-out – I’ve always bought my own. Maybe you should just be looking at getting better on-premises kit, rather than changing your ISP?
davebigpicture says
Maybe. Can you recommend a router? Virgin round our way is pretty unreliable though and BT are advertising that they have the strongest wifi signal. In this case, I just want to be a consumer and use stuff out of the box. I spend enough time fiddling around with settings on kit at work.
Vulpes Vulpes says
In the past I’ve used a Vigor router, but to be honest, the facilities on offer far exceed my home office requirements, and when the last Vigor gave up the ghost I bought a decent Asus instead – significantly cheaper – and it’s been excellent. No idea about model number off the top of my head with no access to the system from where I currently am, I’m afraid, but ten minutes Googling will point you in the right direction. Start with the PcPro A List perhaps.
davebigpicture says
Thanks
johnw says
I would guess that someone has already complained about that advertising. There will be some very small print saying that they’ve compared other UK ISP “free” routers but I’m extremely sceptical about them bundling in with their service, the most powerful available.
Vulpes Vulpes says
Oh, and the customer service with BT is SO bad, you can’t afford to ignore the horror stories. Believe me.
If you change, move to a small ISP, not to another behemoth that can’t possibly give a flying one about your level of service.
ip33 says
As usual with these things I’ve never had an trouble with BT including couple of weeks ago switching my mum’s phone from the Post Office back to BT. Never even spoke to anyone, just did it all online. It took from Sunday afternoon to Tuesday morning to switch with no problem at all.
Mike_H says
I’ve had no great problems with BT Infinity in the years I’ve been with them. When there have been problems, they’ve been very short-lived and the customer service has been better with BT than I ever had previously with Virgin. No horror stories here. Maybe Virgin Broadband have improved now. I wouldn’t know.
A lot of it is down to how good or bad their infastructure is in your area, how much they’re spending on it and how heavy the demand on it. They have both tended in the past to be keener to get people to sign up than to provide a reliable service. Now that nearly everyone is signed up to somebody or other, at least in urban areas, they are competing more on service levels. That’s definitely to our benefit as customers.
Keef says
i switched to BT last year – mainly because I was after cheap access to the Rugby on BT sport. They’ve just upgraded the speed and I have to say it is noticably faster than what we had before More reliable too. I don’t use extenders so I can’t comment on that.
The actual switch itself was a nightmare due to the combined behaviour of my previous ISP and BT and we ended up without the internet for over a week. A series of increasingly frustrating contacts with BT’s service centre resulted in a lot of false promises. Hopefully, you’ll have a better experience if you do decide to switch.
ip33 says
I’m a BT infinity user and last week received one of their new Smarthubs and I’ve been very impressed so far.
Easy to set up, quite a bit faster (up from 35mps to about 60 over Wi-Fi) and it has got rid of a dead spot in our back bedroom.
Would recommend.
welshbenny says
‘dead spot in our back bedroom’
I’ve got one of those too, it’s called the bed.
Boom and indeed tish.
fortuneight says
It’s not been a good day for BT. Work broadband is up and down like BoJo’s trousers.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-36844712
I know some happy BT customers and a few who maintain something akin to a fatwa against them. I chose not to use them having had prior problems with my phone service and experiencing their miserable customer service. As with VV above, I chose a small provider (Zen) as they don’t stick you with a router and to date have been quite good at the customer service bit (albeit only available in office hours).
Beezer says
We’ve been using BT Infinity for about 2 years or so with no local or performance issue at all. (I type this as word goes round that BT have had a major national outage earlier today. I think?)
All three of us cane it. Three devices, at least, logged on whenever possible accessing you tube, iplayer and general browsing most nights and virtually all weekends. Only the rare instance of spinning wheel buffering and then only for a few seconds.
All kit used straight out of the box supplied. No replacements or personal upgrades have been remotely necessary.
But, we are in the Home Counties and very close to the local exchange. I’d be very surprised if the service wasn’t ace.
Kid Dynamite says
If you are looking at broadband delivered via phone lines rather than a cable solution then it’s worth googling your local exchange and seeing which providers are using it LLU (local loop unbundled). My experience (from a few years back so possibly out of date) was that an LLU service was noticeably faster than one that wasn’t, especially as we were living some distance from the exchange.
fentonsteve says
I have BT fibre to the cabinet, copper to the home (the final ~300m). The free router/hub is excellent, much better and faster wireless coverage than the Netgear router it replaced.
I signed up to the 100MB/s package when the cabinet was upgraded but the 100 or so neighbours have since joined and it has slowed down noticeably – no HD iPlayer streaming on a wet Sunday afternoon, for instance.
Only once had an issue with customer service, when the line went down in winter. The engineer installed a free master socket upgrade while he was fixing it, which the billing dept tried to charge me £100 for. “You can get stuffed or I’m off” cured that.
johnw says
I’ve only got two accounts to compare. The BT infinity one is far far slower than the standard (50M) Virgin one. I personally wouldn’t swap.
Nick Nock says
Don’t BT own all the pipes anyway? So, basically everyone’s beholden to BT’s capability. Or have I go this – as I get most things – completely wrong? 🙂
moseleymoles says
Virgin have their own network of fibre-optic cables, but don’t have anything like the geographical coverage of BT. So in many cases it is just the BT pipe on offer.
fentonsteve says
Strictly speaking, Openreach, not BT, own all the pipes, fibres & cables and can lease them to whomever they like, including (mostly) BT.
Openreach is a subsidiary of BT, which might, or might not, have some influence on that.
Virgin own their own fibres and boxes and can run fibre to your door, but don’t have the coverage.
In my part of Cambridgeshire, they run in parallel but Virgin’s box is on the West side of the main road and Openreach’s is on the east. I live on the east side. Virgin will only tunnel under the road if 100 residents sign up in advance. I live in a side-road with 99 houses.
Vulpes Vulpes says
Openreach. Not part of BT? Ha hah ha ha ha ha ha haaaa! When it suits them to say so. Which is when things are tits up.
I’ve escaped the clutches of BT (virtually) entirely by having my broadband service AND my phone delivered by the small, excellent, technically clued up ISP that I use: Vispa.
Like Zen, the support line is only manned during work hours on weekdays, but when you get through during those hours you speak to someone who’s a) been with the business since they started and b) has forgotten more about broadband and POTS tech than you’ll have ever learned.
Vispa – can’t recommend them highly enough.
I’m looking forward to our village getting FTTC – when Openreach have finished counting the EU money they’ve squandered fitting out the suburbs on a rural budget.
Meanwhile I’m getting 5-7Mb at best, when it isn’t raining, and when there’s a J in the month, and I can’t stream iPlayer in HD any time at all.
All that being said, I’d not swap my technologically modest rural idyll for a multi-Gig connection in some diesel-fume-filled city in a million years!
fentonsteve says
I didn’t say Openereach wasn’t part of BT, foxy, they are a wholly-owned subsidiary. BTinternet pay Openreach for access just like TescoNet et al do. The difference is, BT Group keep Openreach’s profits.
I work for a company which is wholly-owned by Brother (the sewing machine people). When my Brother printer runs out of ink, I still have to pay for a new cartridge.
I started out with a local ISP – I could walk to their office in 10 mins – but their infrastructure was unreliable. I went 6 weeks without any service when some of their hardware failed but they still charged me. In the end I took them to small claims court (I won) and the ISP were bought and sold twice by bigger firms. Each time the customer service got worse.
So, in summary, they’re all shite.
Lodestone of Wrongness says
Here in my sleepy Languedoc village our internet has just been upgraded as part of the national push to move rural areas into the 21st century. The speed varies from around 2mb on a wet Sunday afternoon to 5mb on a quiet Monday morning. I read the above posts with some envy but like Mr Foxy I ain’t moving nowhere.
davebigpicture says
I’m sure it’ll change Lodey. The tiny port in Kephalonia we’re going to in August has excellent broadband, much to our surprise.
Baron Harkonnen says
I haven’t read the above posts, I will but I would just like to add this info. A mate is a B.T. engineer and he describes their broadband service as ‘shite’.
I am with Virgin which is expensive and at times the broadband is also ‘shite’ as is the customer service most times. However 95%+ of the time my broadband speed is between 80-107mb so I’d think twice about going over to B.T. Most broadband services are not up to standard mainly because the infrastructure ain’t yet complete, but their money grabbing is up to scratch.
Baron Harkonnen says
I forgot to say that I kept complaining about the Virgin router’s wi-fi and in the end they upgraded the router. They sent a new one in the post which I had to fit myself, not a hard job, the wi-fi is now much better. You have to complain until they are sick of you and give in.
davebigpicture says
Was this recently? Our Virgin router is a couple of years old now.
Baron Harkonnen says
Last week @davebigpicture, I fitted it on Tuesday this week.
fentonsteve says
With my engineer hat on, I feel it is worth pointing out that there is a limit to how much power a WiFi router can transmit and still get a CE mark (which is required for sale in UK & Europe). I can’t remember how many milliWatts it is, I could ask a colleague if you’re really interested. The difference in performance is down to how well it tracks your devices.
A router with one antenna will transmit equal power in all directions.
A router with two or more antennae can track the location of the device it is communicating with and focus more of its power there (sort of in a beam). This results in a higher field strength (perceived signal strength) at that point and a lower field strength everywhere else.
This (it’s called ‘phased array location tracking’) is an example of trickle-down technology – it’s how aeronautical radar works.
I am a spod.
davebigpicture says
Is this similar to diversity radio mics and do BT/Virgin domestic routers have two antenna? You can’t tell by looking.
fentonsteve says
Yes, and I think they must have.
fentonsteve says
I’ve had a look and I’d like to amend my previous answer.
No, diversity radio mics use two different frequencies and two different antennae and, on the fly, selects whichever received signal is the best.
That’s not an example of a phased array.
Leedsboy says
I used to have Virgin broadband. It was fast but it would often slow down – probably due to Virgin restricting it during busy times. Also, when it went down, which it occasionally did, it would take a long time to get going again. We lost broadband for 2 1/2 days once. Moved to Sky and whilst it is not as fast as Virgin, it feels faster (or at least as fast) as it doesn’t seem to be as restricted). It’s also never been down (or at least not long enough for me to notice).
I also have a wifi repeater (TP Link from Amazon) and it works fine. The router is at one end of the house and the repeater extends the signal to my home office in the garden and also our bedroom upstairs.