Virgin

[genya]

So after being screwed repeatedly by Origin, I am considering jumping ship. Virgin seems to be the only peeps offering the speed required for my business in the S2 area (as BT aren't fibering), yet I don't see any threads around regarding them... So thoughts on them if you please good forumites!

[SpencerUk]

I can't get Virgin in my area so I've never been able to consider them. Sorry!

[WillPS]

VM Business or VM consumer?

[bgnx]

Virgin Media Business are in general, excellent (in my experience)

Virgin Media residential are good until you have problems (again in my experience), their "support" team are some of the most unhelpful people I have ever spoken to in my life. When I had issues with my Virgin connection (before I got DR) I wasted many many many hours on the phone getting nowhere in resolved the fault I had so I left and joined DR.

That said when the service was working. it was great and I would use them again if I wasn't in a FTTC area.

[WillPS]

I've not had a great experience with VM Business. We had a week or so of downtime around the time of the floods (not in Sheffield) last year. Bizarrely the Sheffield is clumped together with London for their support - and whenever we range we were told of either regional or national outage. In the end the outage was nothing to do with us and the craphub we were given was just being crap - but we endured a week of downtime simply because support were unwilling to entertain the cause being anything other than "the outage".

My parents are with VM and while the connection isn't perfect it's generally pretty good. Their Tivo thingy for the telly is total arse though.

Overall, I'd avoid VM unless they were your only high speed option.

[KarlAustin]

Is your business in an office block/park? If so, have you considered approaching a local friendly provider of leased lines and asking them to split the cost between you all?

[Chalky]

I've had nothing but problems with Virgin Media Business.

I had a Managed Internet Leased Line with diverse PoP backup put into Birmingham for a client, it was delayed by over 6 months.

We have 2 Business Broadband lines delivered over coax (like the residential service) for another client in Sheffield. This was also delayed and you aren't allowed you use your own router (because the Business verison of the Super Hub is locked down so you can't use Modem Mode) without paying an additional fee each month for additional IP Addresses. Both services have been very unreliable and has often been down altogether because of a 'capacity issue'. It also appears that Business connections, which are only limited to 'upto 50Mbps' do not have priority over residential connections.

[KarlAustin]

Chalky - If that was recent on the leased line, it's probably down to our friends at Kelly Comms, as Virgin also use them and are having the same issues and worse than OR with them so I'm told.