Which Fibre Broadband (Openreach) for modest streaming.

TheMarlin

I have BT ‘Whole Home’ with the expansion discs for whole house coverage. 

It’s excellent. Average of 70mbps, super solid connection, has only dropped out once (for 90 seconds) in the year I’ve had it. Speed never dipped below 65mbps. I test it regularly. 

Previous BT hubs seriously sucked, we’re quite unstable. Get ‘Whole-Home’, or don’t bother with BT. 

Grumpyrocker

TheMarlin said:

I have BT ‘Whole Home’ with the expansion discs for whole house coverage. 

It’s excellent. Average of 70mbps, super solid connection, has only dropped out once (for 90 seconds) in the year I’ve had it. Speed never dipped below 65mbps. I test it regularly. 

Previous BT hubs seriously sucked, we’re quite unstable. Get ‘Whole-Home’, or don’t bother with BT. 

We've recently upgraded to BT Complete Wifi - which comes with the new black Smart Hub and a single extension disk. However BT offer you up to three further discs for free if you need them to completely cover your home.

I'm very impressed with the new hub. Previously I had a HH5 which I used in modem mode only and left the WIFI to a more fully featured ASUS wifi router. However the new hub is much better and its AC wifi really does a great job covering most of our house. We live in a four bedroom stone vicarage but just the hub and the single disc is enough to give a strong 5GHz signal everywhere in the house.

As for the internet itself. We live in a small rural village. But we got fibre to the cabinet a couple of years ago. I was the first to sign up and we're just 100 metres or so from the cabinet. I got about 78Mbit down, 19Mbit up. It rarely goes much lower and is very reliable.

I know there are cheaper offers out there. But given my wife needs a land line for her job, and we get some of the bill paid by her job, we're happy with what we have.

Skipped

I am very happy with all the responses. Thank you.

My strong impression is that "something" has changed at Virgin and that they are now more likely to be playing hardball on the phone with customers who are out of contract and are looking for another great deal (on a new contract).

I saw a post a few months ago suggesting that the only way round this is to actually leave Virgin, and then switch again  every few  years.

I think I will ditch my Virgin email address and switch to gmail or a similar browser based email service. This is annoying,  but only needs doing once.....and then switching is surely an easier decision to make each time.