Virgin Media - poor connection

jefaz07

prowla said:

jefaz07 said:

Munchkinsmum said:

Thank you. I’ll chat to hubby and see if wired works. Do you know anything about the VM Boost service?

Don’t do the boost. It’s woeful. As is the equipment they send. I had exactly the same issues with WiFi connectivity. 

I bought a mesh system £130 from memory. It’s a TP Link M4....although there are plenty others. 
Easy to set up. I now have 200mbps in the bedroom. Worth every penny and I’ve not had the internet drop out once. 

The "m" should be uppercase "M"; ie. Mega bits per second, not millibits.

jefaz07 said:

It does up to 5 bedroom (I think) but you can add extra units around the house. I must say I’m really impressed with it. 

In my pic you will see the app (excuse the network name, I named it to wind up my son) you can control who is on your networks and set individual restrictions. Set up guest networks see who’s using bandwidth  

The "K" should be lowercase "k"; ie. kilobits per second, not Kelvin bits per second.

As for Virgin; I've spent at least 2 months trying to get them to sort out their internet provisioning, which included 3 engineer visits (confirming a issue with the signal to the house), promises of WiFi Pods then withdrawn, then told they're not even in the country to be sent out. One engineer telling me everything is fine and it must be my house, an hour later (I called back) another one saying there was an issue with my router and they'd send another to me and an engineer. It got to the point where I'd had enough, so I gave them my notice; I then had two retention folks call me and I accepted the best deal to stay. The company is completely disjointed and apparently orders/whatever are logged into a system where there aren't enough people picking things up, so they get lost.

I do gas engineering mate haha 😆 

[Deleted User]

Munchkinsmum said:

Is this our only option? If we were

having occasional poor issues then I can see it being an issue but it’s consistent and doesn’t seem right that we need to pay extra just for internet to work? 

Many options and no reason why you can't get high speed whole house Wifi working for everyone, might need some investment though but it will be worth it. First be sure the problem is the Wi-fi, sounds like it is but do a speed test with something plugged into to hub via ethernet to confirm that is the case.

Note the biggest problem with Wi-Fi is not the signal transmitted from the Wi-Fi hub but is actually the router not being able to get a strong enough signal from the device (eg phone) to hear it properly and that can only be solved with really good aerials out in the open instead of being built into the box. 

1. First option is the free one to see if you can get more out of the Virgin Hub. I note it is upstairs in a bedroom, unfortunately the Virgin Hub is designed with it's puny internal aerials to transmit / receive Wi-Fi upwards as it assumes it will normally be located downstairs in the house so you won't be able to get good internet downstairs unless relocating is an option. Secondly is it in an open and central space away from furniture, appliances like TV's etc which all reduce Wi-Fi signal and at a height that it's signal won't need to pass through furniture etc?

2. Virgin "pods" are one solution but I don't recommend them for two reasons - one is that repeaters effectively half the bandwidth of your Wi-Fi and secondly the monthly charge can be better invested in upgrading your equipment that you can keep regardless of broadband supplier.

3a. Ideal solution but needs some ££. Buy a decent Wi-Fi router and put the Virgin Hub in modem mode. Good Wi-fi routers should have many big aerials sticking out of them if you want any hope of transmitting / receiving the Wi-Fi signal over a distance, and more importantly, receiving the relative weak signals back from the device. Locate this centrally in your house if possible. £150-250 budget.

Some guides to the best wifi routers around this year:
https://www.techradar.com/news/networking/routers-storage/best-router-9-top-wireless-routers-on-test-1090523
https://www.tomsguide.com/uk/us/best-wifi-routers,review-2498.html

3b. Similar to above but a proper mesh systems like the Asus AiMesh, Google Nest Wifi or Netgear Orbi for example - budget £150-£300

It might seem a lot to spend when you've haggled every last pound off your broadband contract but most broadband contracts are £300 per year or more anyway, investing £300 decent hardware will last 5 years and therefore only really cost you an extra £5 per month over that time and takes the stress of poor Wi-Fi away.

I always recommend anybody with Wi-Fi problems to ditch their ISP router and buy a proper third party one - I first did this 15 years back and never regretted it.