BT broadband can I get a second line with virgin media?

pinklady3333

Hello, I have just moved and taken BT with me. No super fast fibre here so average about 12mbps. 

The house does have virgins media installed as a separate line. 

I’m thinking about getting a second line and broadband with both bt and virgin. 

Bt for the reliability
virgin for the speeds 
as I need reliable broadband and virgin seems to go down a lot Round here looking at Facebook!! 

My question is, can anyone foresee any problems with having both networks in the house? Will they interfere with each other? 

Lastly do virgin provide the booster discs like BT do? Can’t see any info about them. 

Thanks in advance. 

Appreciate any advice. 

vacheron

It is perfectly possible to have two ISP's on the same network. The difficulty will be getting the two routers to work together seamlessly (so that if one service goes down, the network will automatically switch to the other one). This is because in most normal network there is only one "gateway" which is a unique location where your PC or tablet or phone or whatever, is told to go to in order to get information from the internet (this is normally the IP address of your router).

If one of your connections goes down and your devices are set to use that ISP's gateway, the devices will not be able to "find" the internet from the other ISP unless you effectively tell them where that other gateway is! 

If you don't want to be resetting or switching devices on and off each time you want to change the ISP you use, you may need to switch both your ISP routers into "modem only mode" and then look at getting a "Dual WAN Router" which are designed precisely for this kind of purpose, but unless you are a very keen IT hobbyist or professional, you may need some specialist help to set things up.

Also, if you take this route, and merge the networks, the benefit is that you can use anybody's Wi-Fi booster disks as they will work fine for relaying data from both ISP connections.

JJ_Egan

They will be two separate systems .

BT  via  BT Open Reach cabling to  BT master socket  and BT Router .

Virgin via virgin cabling to Virgin router .

So you will pay BT landline and Broadband plus Virgin Media charges .

Networks will show independent to each other and you will need to change whatever you use phone or two connections on PC .connection etc BT to VM

BUT  VM for speed  will not give you speed through BT equipment .

To me you will be paying twice for no real gain in anything .

I would trial BT before buying another connection .

Brewer21

pinklady3333 said:

Hello, I have just moved and taken BT with me. No super fast fibre here so average about 12mbps. 

The house does have virgins media installed as a separate line. 

I’m thinking about getting a second line and broadband with both bt and virgin. 

Bt for the reliability
virgin for the speeds 
as I need reliable broadband and virgin seems to go down a lot Round here looking at Facebook!! 

My question is, can anyone foresee any problems with having both networks in the house? Will they interfere with each other? 

Lastly do virgin provide the booster discs like BT do? Can’t see any info about them. 

Thanks in advance. 

Appreciate any advice. 

For a basic answer, they shouldn't interfere with one another.
I currently have Virgin BB and Sky BB, I take my pick which one I use. Been like this for the last two weeks but the Virgin services will cease in 10 days time as I've switched to Sky. 
All I do is connect the device to whichever I want and it stays on that after the initial first couple of times of trying to go back to the other, they learn which to connect to in my experience.
You can have two phone lines too with those two providers, they'll say it costs no more, of course the new one will require a new number if you didn't swap the current one over, your choice.