We have an ongoing problem with our Virgin broadband which drops in speed to unusably low levels about 8pm every evening and all day on the weekends. It's sometimes as low as 2Mbps. We are heavy users - four TV streamers, and an online gamer - and we can't do any of it at the moment. Speeds during weekdays are fine - over 160Mbps - so there is nothing wrong with our set up. This has been going on for about 2 months now.

Virgin don't seem able to fix this. Numerous engineers come, but only during the day when the speed is fine. So there is nothing they can see wrong. I've been told by one of the engineers that this is a widespread problem - Virgin have oversubscribed their network. They will only upgrade an area when 'overage' reaches 10%. Overage on my local cabinet is 2.5% so they won't so anything.

I've lodged a formal complaint with Virgin and have also written to Which about it. Looking online, this seems to be a widespread problem for Virgin users. I'd be interested to know if any other SE23 residents have experienced this, especially in my area (Mayow Road).

Hi there,

I'm on Dacres Road on the top of the hill so we more than likely come out of the same exchange. I've had the same Virgin service for about three years and it's been really quite patchy. I've just upgraded to the 100Mbps service (just did the test and it's running at 78Mbps right now). I've not experienced any problems just yet but I don't want to count my chickens just yet... Will be interested to hear if they come up with a solution!

Ben

Lucky you - I've got 6 Mbps right now. *straps forum reply to carrier pigeon*

We're in the same area and our service has been patchy for ages - it's really annoying and unpredictable.

Virgin customers in SE22 are experiencing similar problems. It's basically down to over capacity across our area. Virgin need to upgrade their servers/systems to enable equal capacity for their customers.

What speed test sites does everyone use? We had BT Fibre connected maybe 18 months ago - no complaints, touch wood - and the engineer used speedtest.net to show what we were getting. (87MB a minute ago, BTW.)

Speedtest.net is the one the engineers use when they are testing my system remotely so it's probably pretty accurate.

Looking at BT Infinity today, they guarantee a minimum speed for me of 68Mbps. I've never seen an ISP offer a minimum speed guarantee before.

This post was last modified: 04-02-2016 06:52 PM by rshdunlop.

On Sky, just used speedtest.net. I got 14 meg, 7 meg and 17 meg all within 2 minutes. Wierd.

Our bog standard broadband usually manages 12 - 15 and returned 13.8 just now. Would be good to have faster upload speeds as .8 is a little tiresome.

An update. Virgin confirm the current situation is within their accepted parameters so they won't do anything. If and when overage reaches the required critical level, they would try to divert capacity from elsewhere in the network as a first resort. This would take at least a month after critical status is reached. Any permanent fix would probably not be effected until the end of this year.

My official letter of complaint has been lost and in any case will apparently not even be read, just attached to my account records.

They have offered me penalty-free cancellation. I will be taking it. Apart from the broadband issues, I find their TV service pretty lacklustre compared with Sky.

our virgin has been so slow the last few weeks often grinding to a halt in the evenings. spoke to them today. an ongoing issue in the area since January, an engineer is on site and expected to resolve by 15 June latest. however there were weasel words about the potential need for an upgrade. they said getting a new hub or powerline adapter from them wouldn't help given the area issue. I got a 25% discount off last month's bill and the IT department said to contact customer service for a backdated discount from January. any other experiences to share? shall I maintain hope??

I wouldn't hold out too much hope. They give out dates for resolution but what that usually means is that's when they'll start looking at the problem. They finally admitted to me that an area upgrade was probably needed and that could take up to a year just to get started. This was in March this year.

I cancelled and went back to Sky. Solid broadband speeds of 36 or thereabouts and no drop off in this house of VERY heavy users. We didn't need super-fast it turned out, very few people actually do. Not that we had it very often. Will never, ever go back to Virgin.

Anyone with Windows 10 noticed their Internet is dire via the likes of Chrome?

Its OK on my Laptop.
The first Win 10 upgrade I downloaded seemed to be very slow for many things, but I recently downloaded a later version and its fine now.

This post was last modified: 12-05-2016 06:28 AM by BT.

Thanks BT, will have a go at that.

We are just over the border in SE20 and our Virgin service is very variable. We have a square two bed flat and one of the bedrooms you pretty much can't stream TV in. Trying to use Apple TV in the living room, where the hub is doesn't always work too. They claim we need a new hub, but they've been saying that since about a year after we first got our hub, which seems pretty poor to me. They are generally more interested in trying to get us to upgrade our package than fix the problem, Well, they claim it will fix it but it sounds like it won't from this.