[roughbeast]

Crap is a relative thing and depends on what you want out of your broadband and ISP. This is my experience

Until 12 months ago I was with Virgin Media FTTC on their fastest band and with two V6 boxes for TV. I switched to Vodafone/CityFibre Gigafast - FTTP. I switched to VF because I wanted their 900Mb symmetrical service to run my free Plex server for 100 clients.

First up, in my experience, Virgin Media's customer service is crap, with poor training of many operatives and poor co-ordination between call centres and departments. There are bright spots if you get the right operative, but this is a bit of a lottery. Offshore operatives tend to be the least satisfactory. The web-based official help forum is pretty good, with experts and access to engineering appointments available if you are happy to wait long enough for a response. However, Vodafone customer services are even CRAPPER with none of the bright spots. They are shambolic, often lacking empathy and nothing gets done unless you call multiple times. Web-based forums are just a moaning shop with no company experts.

Secondly, with VM and VF I always got/get the paid-for up and down speed, with a bit extra. This includes peak periods. Perhaps I live in an non-centended area. However, with VM latency was always a bit high at 13ms and jitter around 2 or 3. VF latency is acceptable at 5-7ms with jitter <1. With both companies outages are a rarity. I have had no outages with VF since I joined them. Please note that VF are currently upgrading their BNGs to a disaggregated model. Customers might find that they aren't on their local BNG for a time, perhaps being routed throgh a BNG hundreds of miles away. This leads to latency of >20ms in some cases.

I can't tell you anything about routers or Wifi because I use my own routers supporting iMesh and Ethernet. Setting up your own router is easier with VM because their SuperHub has a modem-only mode. With VF you have to ask for your user name and password and tweak settings. VF do provide a 4G dongle as backup for if the main connection fails. If you are using your own router you will require a spare USB port.

Telephone with VF is VoIP, supported by their router. If you want to use your own router for phone calls you will need to subscribe to a different VoIP provider. VM provide you with a seperate telephone socket on the wall splitting off from their coax which carries phone, TV and broadband.

VF have no TV service. VM's TV is very good with as much choice as Sky with great capacity for recording and watching because of multiple tuners in their 2TB V6 boxes. V6 boxes in your house talk to each other, sharing settings and recordings.

That's pretty much it.