Pro video blog…Produced by Philip Johnston DoP/Editor

Just passing on my findings after giving up BT Superfast Fibre 2 and was horrified to discover all is not so rosey at Virgin Media.

Virgin Fibre…Great download speed of 200 Mbps but a poor upload of 12 Mbps, its only when you get the 350Mbps fast fibre that you get 20Mbps upload speed, but not many places can get 350 Mbps at the moment.

When I was with BT Superfast fibre my download speeds were 67 Mbps and upload speeds of 18.7 Mbps.

I contacted Virgin to ask why my upload speed was capped at 12 Mbps and was told I should have 20 Mbps, not true.

Looking at their web site its 12 Mbps for the 200 Mbps package.

You get the advert on the telly that its fibre to your front door, bollocks, its fibre to the box at the end of your street called the cabinet, followed by a bog standard RG59 cable with a copper core the front of your house and round your property into the living room.

The sales team tell you that BT is only copper so it can’t reach fast speeds of 200 Mbps which is true but its a major kick in the balls when you discover that BT without boasting about it is in fact faster at uploading without paying a hefty premium for it.

The facts…

BT has faster upload speeds 18.7 Mbps on Superfast Fibre 2 but on an 18 months contract.

Virgin has a faster download speeds of 200 Mbps with a 12 months contract.

Strangely Virgins most popular package is the 100 Mbps with an upload speed of 6 Mbps and I think Virgin should at least keep up with the competition and boost upload speeds to equal BT.

author

Having been working in the video business since 1988 I have amassed a great amount of knowledge of both the kit and production values over the last 30 years.

4 thoughts on “BT or Virgin…Who do you choose for your fast fibre broadband ?

  1. Just out of curiosity, what sort of prices do you pay for broadband where you are ?

    HDW : With BT it was about £35 a month, Virgin have us on a bundle deal so I can’t tell you what we are paying for fibre.

  2. With SKY Broadband (FTC) download is 26.5Mbps and upload 11 Mbps. Was with BT/EE/Plusnet and they were all awful not only with down/up load speeds but reliability of connection as well. Cost (with standard SKY package and SKY Q Box and mini-box was £5.00 more than Plusnet’s Broadband/phone package; plus they threw in a 43″ LG HDR television for £250

  3. I’m on VM Vivid350. It’s usually over 380Mbps down and 20 up, about 2ms latency. Pretty amazing compared to Infinity 1 that I had prior – I used to be on Infinty 2 but the speeds dropped over the years, or maybe the contention went up… I bought V350 because it’s was the only unfiltered, untrottled, unlimited service they had. I’m not sure if that’s changed since I bought it. It’s been very good. With only one noticeable downtime for a few hours where the website said there was a known fault locally.

  4. This is why some have opted out of that, they had speeds of 1M down if they were lucky. Upload of a few 100k so you’re doing well with 12M

    I’ve been building real fibre – all the way to the home and upload speed that is usable for video (1Gb/s up and down). A bit of a trek for you but if you retire to the country head over to

    https://balquhidder.net/eu-documentary-some-digging-some-arm-waving/

    to see what we did.

    Apologies for the spam, I thought you might like to see what came after the 2014 CWG you visited.

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