Goodbye for now Virgin Media.
 

Finally, after a long wait, and 12 years with Virgin Media, I have left for Vodafone CityFibre.

Why? I was tempted by the promise of a nice symmetrical 900Mb and a lower ping. Also, we didn't need all that TV, so have made a monthly £60 saving.

How has it turned out? Firstly, Vodafone's CS is diabolical with waits of up to an hour, mostly offshore call centres and operative training that makes VM CS look like University Challenge.

Service initiation was delayed by two weeks because one windy day meant only half the job could be done. (The fibre comes off BT poles in our district.) Apparently half completed customers were pushed to the back of the queue so as not to delay the service initiation for newer customers. No thoughts of getting extra engineers in then?

The Vodafone website is opaque, with no links to the email logon and poor navigation generally. There is an online chat bot, but with a shortage of humans when the bot gets stuck.

The good news is that we get what it says on the tin in terms of speed + a bit more. The line is very clean, although I was expecting a consistently better ping than 11ms. I have recorded a ping of 6ms, but it is mostly higher than that.

I'll give this deal 18 months and decide then whether to stay with Vodafone or not. This may depend on what VM offers by then.

https://www.cableforum.uk/images/local/2022/03/1.png


https://www.cableforum.uk/images/local/2022/03/2.png

Re: Goodbye for now Virgin Media.
 

Jealous that you're in a Cityfibre area. But I've also done the same and 'unbundled'. FTTP Broadband from EE (900/110), Sky TV (Q is lacking compared to Tivo, but PQ is better) and phone via sipgate basic (free 'landline' and incredibly cheap calls, which I dont use)

https://www.cableforum.uk/images/local/2022/03/3.png

Re: Goodbye for now Virgin Media.
 

We got a letter yesterday from YouFibre saying they were coming soon. Registered my interest and can't wait for a boost in upload speed.

Re: Goodbye for now Virgin Media.
 

My main use of the higher upstream is to beef up my Synology Plex server. I can support more simultaneous clients and at a higher quality. My only limit is probably the NAS processor capacity, but today I had 12 clients streaming film without running out of processing power.

Re: Goodbye for now Virgin Media.
 

Never have more than 4 users using Plex but uploading multi gig files back to work will be where it'll make a difference.