Virgin offered 1GB for £61/month, yes/no?

PattiTelongo

My contract is about to end I currently pay £83/month for 2 boxes, full tv pack including Sky and BT sports,M350 broadband & landline. 

I don’t want their TV or Phone anymore and they offered me £61/month for 1GB or £56/month for M500. If I agree 1GB they’ll cancel my TV & Phone immediately but if I take M500 it’s 30 days notice and my next bill will be £172 as I’m out of contract. I work largely from home and we’re a house of 5 and generally M350 is ok but some of the rooms in house have patchy service. Would 1GB make this better or am I being ripped off? I’m a bit clueless about broadband and hope it makes sense. 

littleboo

1Gb is far more than any typical household would usually needs. If you have rooms with patchy service,ie you mean poor wifi coverage, then more speed at the router wont fix that, you need to look at improving wifi coverage

oldernonethewiser

As littleboo says the speed of your connection will make no differnce to the wifi coverage in your home.

As an aside £61 seems expensive.

PattiTelongo

littleboo said:

1Gb is far more than any typical household would usually needs. If you have rooms with patchy service,ie you mean poor wifi coverage, then more speed at the router wont fix that, you need to look at improving wifi coverage

Ok thanks that’s the kind of answer I was hoping for. It’s mainly 3 of the 4 bedrooms that don’t have great Wi-Fi coverage. Is there a particular type of booster or extender you would recommend? I’ll go back to Virgin and tell them it’s too expensive and see where it goes. 

littleboo

You need a wifi mesh system, this would replace the wifi built into you Virgin router and provides better coverage through re-broadcasting the wifi from different nodes, but its transparent to the user - you don't know or care which node you have connected to, it all appears as a single wifi network.
I'm not overly familiar with them so would hesitate to suggest anything, but someone with more knowledge will no doubt be able to help.

oldernonethewiser

I use a TP-Link Deco mesh system and it works fine and I have put one in a friends very old house with thick walls and it has solved all her wifi connectivity issues.

Not suggesting this brand is the best but it hasn't let me down.

FreeBear

littleboo said:

1Gb is far more than any typical household would usually needs. If you have rooms with patchy service,ie you mean poor wifi coverage, then more speed at the router wont fix that, you need to look at improving wifi coverage

Unless you are connecting your computer to the router/hub with a cable and have a gigabit interface, you are not going to make full use of a 1Gb service. Using WiFi, you might get as high as 54Mb (more likely around 24Mb), and only if the server at the other end can supply data at that speed. Even when I am downloading & processing huge quantities of data, I'm hard pushed to use 20Mb/sec, throw in streaming a video or two, and I might get to 30Mb/sec.

Having a 1Gb service is just an expensive bragging right for many.

Kim_13

Would Virgin’s WiFi pods be useful in this scenario? Just trying to think of a deal OP could negotiate as even £56 for M500 only seems expensive.

Re: the 30 days notice, you’d need to measure the inflated price payable for that period against the extra package cost over 18 months (can’t be done exactly due to the unknown element of the RPI+ 3.9% increase (and you might not know the undiscounted price that they would use to calculate this for certain until you had agreed to 1GB BB.)

As an aside if anyone in your house has an O2 pay monthly phone (including sim only) you could buy M350 and have it upped to 500 for free via Volt benefits, or buy the 500 and have it upped to 1 gig.

phillw

FreeBear said:
Having a 1Gb service is just an expensive bragging right for many.

I think 350mb/s is pointless for most families as well.

Netflix Ultra HD/4k is 15mb/s. Unless you have very specific work requirements, then 100mb/s should be enough for most families.