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For quite some time now, Virgin Media has dominated the UK’s broadband speeds, offering a fibre package of up to 300Mbps. Finally, we will be seeing this rivalled by BT who will be offering two new packages, increasing its top speed from 78Mbps to 314Mbps.
The first of BT’s new packages is titled Ultrafast Fibre 1, offering 152Mbps, whereas Ultrafast Fibre 2 is where the real speed is at with 314Mbps. For the first 18 months of the standard contract, BT will be offering its packages at an undisclosed deal, with prices rising to £54.99 and £59.99 per month respectively on month 19, a step up from Virgin Media’s current price-to-performance offerings.
It will, however, throw in 1000GB Cloud Storage, BT Virus Protect and its latest Thomson and Sagem-created Smart Hub which is less than two years old.
The Smart Hub is an upgrade over BT’s previous Home Hub 5, in that not only offer dual-band WiFi but more antennas to improve the signal strength and range around the home, a USB 3.0 port and four Ethernet ports.
Considering “up to” speed advertisements are being scrapped, BT has emphasised its guarantee of maintaining a minimum of 100Mbps. If this promise is broken, even during peak times, then it will award its customers compensation.
“Whether it is six in the evening or six in the morning, with Ultrafast Fibre everyone can be online at the same time, streaming, downloading and gaming,” claimed BT Consumer CEO Marc Allera. “Rather than spending hours downloading TV shows or films to their smartphone or tablet, they'll be able to do it in minutes. Customers will have complete peace of mind that they can always rely on Ultrafast Fibre, backed up by the promise that we'll give them £20 if their speed ever falls below 100Mbps.”
Once BT extends its Ultrafast Fibre lines across the country, other vendors are expected to jump on board with higher speeds themselves. Hopefully, this creates a better market for price-to-performance rather than the rising prices we’re seemingly seeing.
KitGuru Says: Considering Virgin Media offers its first year of 300Mbps for £44 and £55 thereafter, I am unsure why BT thinks it can charge the same amount for half the speed. That being said, those that utilise upload might just benefit as Virgin offers notably less than its competitors usually.
60 pounds for 314mbps?! is this a joke?
I pay ~11$ for 1gbps – one gigabit per second !
its a con . unless your in a major conurbation , its the horrible “last mile copper ” rule . if your really rural . even that is a pipe dream .
where do you live?
Virgin is rubbish .. it may “report” speeds of 100/200/300 Mb, but in real world tests (at least with our connection) it didn’t get anywhere near. We had both Virgin 200MB and BT 76MB at the same time, briefly, and tested by downloading a movie .. BT was almost three times faster to download at over half the reported speed. Just because a “speedtest” reports a certain speed, doesn’t mean you get to use that in normal day to day use ..
So you’re saying you had 200Mb virgin and it downloaded a movie at (76/2)/3 =12 Mbps? Either something was wrong with your setup or you’re lying.
Romania
Why would I bother to lie. I don’t know you or anyone here. I don’t work for either company. I see no possible reason to lie. I found a movie on Sky – I ensured I did not already have it, and started downloading it, and timed it, connected to one connection. I then deleted it, deleted it from the deleted items (so it didn’t just “resurrect it”), and then downloaded it again from the other connection, timing that. Those are the timings I got.
It may well have been something wrong with the setup – but that’s nothing to do with me .. I had engineers out several times to sort it and they said it was fine. I only did the test because I suspected something was wrong – because download speeds “felt” slower than they should be and didn’t feel as consistent as we used to have on a previous 35Mb download speed. I have a programme that automatically checks the current download speed at set times throughout the day and that also suggested the Virgin was a poor and inconsistent speed compared to what they said I should get.
I’ve seen other people report they also had similar problems with Virgin. Perhaps they were all also “lying” or their setup was wrong? To be fair, I’ve seen plenty who are also okay with their connections. I’ve got friends who use Virgin and have no problems with it at all – but they use their broadband for checking their emails and browsing facebook. Not exactly intensive stuff.
All I’m saying is that, in my opinion, Virgin is rubbish. And they’re disguising it by telling people to use a speedtest, which is not giving a true reading of the real speed you (or at least, I) get.
We had a man from Virgin knock on the door recently, touting for business, asking if we’d like it installed, and I told him our problems. He didn’t look surprised or concerned .. he just said “oh, ok” and moved on. If it had been an unusual problem, I suspect a different reaction would have occurred.
BT themselves have their own problems – not least they are expensive and if, like us, you’re on FTTP, you’re stuck with very few options for providers, but at least it is consistent and we get the speed we pay for.
Also .. 76/3=12Mb? hmm … not sure if it’s your maths, or my explanation .. but that’s certainly not what I meant :p BT, at 76, was three times faster (almost .. not quite, but I’ll round it, for arguements sake) — so I would say that to get the theoretical speed of Virgin in that instance, it would have been around a third of BT’s .. so 76/3. Not 76/2 and the /3 …?
Well mate I’ve been with virgin since they took over telewest all they years ago never had any bother , are you wired or wireless you may have to upgrade your Ethernet cable as I had too do always had more or less the speed I pay for
another thing it doesnt matter what speed you have it depends on what the site down Load speed is
Not going to rival Virgin Media https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/ecfab386df731566ac7f0bcf85c54bb1dfa5bc5967b4a981d41ffdbc58178adf.jpg
It was the same download from the same site, using the same internal infrastructure .. literally the only thing I changed between BT and Virgin when using their internet and doing this test, was which provider I used. It is possible that that specific download site had a massive glitch just as I was doing the test with Virgin, and then sorted itself when I did the same test with BT .. but it’s unlikely. And that doesn’t explain the rest of the time.
Again .. exactly same internal infrastructure was used when doing the BT and Virgin download test. Obviously different HUB/router, but other than that, everything the same. You can’t claim it’s a problem with my cables/wifi if it works with one, but not the other :p As I said previously .. some are happy with their connection. I can’t speak for everyone, only myself. You are happy with the speed you’re getting and I’m assuming have tested that with something other than a speedtest site, and that’s great. But I’m not in your house using your internet because, lets face it .. that would just be weird :p
Let me stress again .. MY opinion from MY personal experience, is that Virgin is rubbish.
Probably your terrible explanation just like everyone else is picking holes in it. You said “BT was almost three times faster to download at over half the reported speed”. Taking that at face value you’re saying on BT you got about half the actual speed (so 76/2) and that was 3 times faster than virgin (so /3 again). Hence the pretty clear workings out of 12mbps.
If you meant BT was 3 times faster at 76 then you’re even dumber than I originally thought as that makes no sense when that’s not the speed you were getting.
Also using a Sky box for a download test is probably one of the worst ways to test a connection. There are too many unreliable and unpredictable factors. If you want results people are actually going to take seriously then have a computer wired directly to the router and download from the closest amazon s3 server or somewhere similar that isn’t going to bottleneck your connection.
Hehe .. okay I accept that my explanation was terrible.
I downloaded a movie. It was the same movie both times. I timed the length of time it took to download it. It took around three times longer to download it via Virgin as it did via BT.
My Virgin connection was “supposed” to be 200Mb and that’s what speedtest reported. My BT connection was “supposed” to be 76Mb and that’s what speedtest reported.
Feel free to make that sound like Virgin is faster if you like .. but I know what I experienced. And all I can go on is my personal experience. I don’t care if people take me seriously. Calling me a liar and trying to troll me makes none of my experience any less true.
Quite frankly if we had had a decent connection with Virgin, we would have been very tempted to stick with them .. we would have saved ourselves a lot of hassle and a lot of money. Paying Sky and BT for TV, phone and broadband is not the cheapest of options.
If I was going to do a proper experiment with BT v Virgin, doing it in a house, timing it with a watch, and doing it only once, would not be the way to go. But I’m not an engineer or some big shot or anything else. I’m just a basic consumer. And I’m saying that, from my personal view, as a basic consumer of these products, I found Virgin to be sadly lacking. And that’s not just based on that one experiment .. it’s based on my experience from ordering the Virgin package (which took many attempts as the first time the order got “lost”, the second time it got cancelled because they accidentally sent it to the wrong engineers), to installation (where they installed incorrectly and then failed to install the full package), to use of the system (TV box regularly resetting; broadband hub regularly resetting and then taking 5-10 minutes to set back up again; poor quality phone line and large number of phishing calls; sporadic and inconsistent internet connection – wired and wireless) to cancelling the package (took several phone calls and talking to 4 different departments to get it sorted) that they fared poorly. The only thing they actually did well, was deal with the actual disconnection and returning of the equipment.
For information (which I believe I mentioned elsewhere), I also had a bit of software running that did regular tests with various external servers to check ping, download and upload speeds. These were done with a computer wired directly to the router. Obviously anything like this is going to be affected by other things going on in the house, and any external problems – and perhaps the software itself just couldn’t cope with the “huge” speeds from Virgin. But again the information that gave supported my actual experience USING the connection.
You can tell yourself what you like .. you can believe or disbelieve what I say. But the most likely truth here is that, at the very least, my personal experience and connection speeds with Virgin were not what I should have expected. Perhaps every other customer of Virgin get what is advertised, and that’s wonderful (although not likely, judging by their forums). Unfortunate they couldn’t sort out my problems, but that’s not a problem for everyone else.
Or alternatively, I’m just a random troll who has nothing to do with my time but make up far fetched stories about how bad everything and everyone is, because apparently it can’t possibly be true that anyone has a bad experience with Virgin. Well done .. you’ve found me out. /sarcasm off.
And you pay in $s? You’re definitely making America great again.
I have virgin 200Mbps and it usually, ie 99 times out of 100, maxes out while downloading, streaming and gaming. Virgin’s biggest problem is, when there is an issue they don’t let their affected customers know about it. And when people ring up to find out what’s going on, they play dumb and pretend (lie) they’re not aware of any issues, and they totally ignore what customers are saying on their community forums.
If they were more upfront with customers, then it would be be on a par with the best of them.
Ah that’s cool. They did say that potentially there may be a problem with ours when they fit it, because we’re so close to the grey box outside – they had to “choke” the speed to avoid it overloading our hub – so potentially there could have been some problem with that. So it’s nice to know that some people ARE getting what they paid for. You do expect some glitches and problems .. and I seem to remember there is a bit on their website that shows problem areas, however, as with most companies, I would imagine often their front line people are the last to know of any problems :p
I did find, during my interactions with them, that everyone was very friendly and *tried* to help .. but as it’s such a big company and they sub-contract some of their work out .. not everyone knows what they should.
Unfortunately in our case, we’d had so many problems with them over such a small space of time (we moved into a new house that came with a three month free trial with Virgin) that when it came time to make a decision to either stick with them for a full term contract or move .. it was a no-brainer.
And as you’ve said .. their forums are full of customers complaining about stuff that often gets ignored.
I’m on virgin business. 350mb for £36 a month. Wired tests scores mine at minimum 320 whenever tested. And no, I’m not a business – it’s available to anyone who can get regular virgin. 24hr SLA to fix problems, dedicated customer service reps.
Are the Smart Hubs made by Thomson?
Peak times always ruin speeds, tools can never get accurate readings, and the government is doing everything they can to make people like you less angry.
Right,
How familiar are you with how the Romanian leu compared to the dollar?
Also, even if they used USD to pay, that wouldn’t make the US richer.
Well that’s me told. And I thought Romanian currency is the euro too.