The 1st birthday of my little man reminded me of something, it’s also my first ‘birthday’ with Virgin Media, I’ve been using their service for over a year now!
So – how has it been in that year?
Honestly, pretty perfect. I’ve had no real issues, there have been some loss of connection on the Tivo and SuperHub once or twice, but it seems to happen on or around midnight. The time leads me to believe they might have been upgrade periods rather than stuff being broken. I think I’ve had one occurence of a loss of service during the day, and that was for a few hours, if I’d have been ‘at work’ I’d have never noticed!
Generally the speed is pretty spot on 100Mb (I’ve upgraded from the 60Mb I had), and also my postcode is due to be boosted to 120Mb in a few weeks (for free). People bemoan Virgin’s ‘traffic management’ but to me, I can’t say I’ve experienced it – my line of work involves a lot of bandwidth, I’m constantly batting around massive files. Despite that, I don’t think I’ve ever been throttled.
I think my only negatives of the service seem to stem from the SuperHub, despite a lot of messing around the WiFi signal just isn’t strong enough. Also I’m finding it needs to be restarted around once a week or else seems to go a bit odd. The TiVo is still wonderful, I really do think it is a lot better than a Sky+HD Box, I know Sky have recently upgraded their EPG, but really TiVo is brilliant. Again, I have found I seem to need to power cycle it once a month as it seems to slow down to a crawl occasionally.
Ultimately I’m happy with the service and would recommend it, my only word of warning would be for you to google for problems in your area. Virgin have massively oversold in some areas, meaning the broadband service is atrocious and it appears it’s left until everyone is screaming before the capacity is increased. It’s a shame that Virgin can’t offer similar levels of service across its network. Thankfully Chelmsford (well my area!) seems to be working perfectly!
If you want Virgin, you can get it via Quidco and get £76 Cashback
