Also, if you're looking for a sim only deal at the same time then they have
£10/month = 6GB + Unlimited calls + text Plus, £90 gift card
£144- £90 = £54/ year
Latest comments (37)
atc28uk
31 Aug 17#37
This seems like a good deal, with no £59+ connection fee... No do I go for this or hold out for a different one!! Do better deals come up often on BT...
pramfiller
30 Aug 17#36
I just signed up for it. OK, so the expected download speed will be more like 35mbps but it's still a great deal. Paying 12 months line rental up front will also save you £18.99 for the year :-)
brum
29 Aug 17#35
If you enjoy solid connections at the correct speeds get a 3rd party router. Mine lags like a 1 legged tortoise or drops out with home hub 6. Adding my r7000 as the router and keeping home hub as the modem = no dropouts and decent speeds (49mbps) on a 52mb connection. That's with 25 things connected to wifi as qos settings mean you can higher certain devices and lower priority others
zebrum
29 Aug 17#34
Yes there is no Virgin in my area at all. At the town meeting Virgin representatives explained how the blown fibre works and how long it will take to be up and running. They are held up by getting permission to put in the trunk because it requires a permit to dig up the road which was under embargo because of nearby motorway works. So until then they have just been doing the micro trenching around the pavements laying the ducting and putting in some cabinets. In the number fiddling shakeup the contractor was replaced and they seem slightly more professional now.
zebrum
29 Aug 17#32
That's their old system. Virgin now offer FFTP with their Project Lightning, it is blown fibre down plastic green ducting from the cabinet to the house. Then a box on the outside of the house converts to coax to go inside to the modem. It will provide speeds of 200Mbps to 300Mbps with a theoretical maximum of 1Gbps in the future. They've already laid the ducting on my street but the fibre won't be blown to the house until they have connected the cabinet to the trunk which will take a few months.
gary333 to zebrum
29 Aug 17#33
You must live in an area that has no Virgin Media footprint at all. Edit - (here I mean historically)
If VM have any HFC networks in your area (i.e. your street is a new street that wasn't there when they built the network, or for whatever reason they chose not to bother) then you will get coax.
Thus for most people project lightening will not bring FTTP. I know a lot of people automatically assume project lightening is installing FTTP however this is not the case. Originally (2016) VM said they were going to give FTTP to over 1 million new houses. This has been scaled back dramatically so if you are getting FTTP you are one of the lucky ones. Most project lightening connections are infill at this point in time.
zebrum
27 Aug 17#18
I get 30.8Mbps down and 3.12Mbps up with 20ms latency, from speedtest.btwholesale.com My line is 660m (not including the 10m or so to and back from the fibre cabinet to phone cabinet) but has many bad joins soaked in water and dirt and need a visit every few month to fix noisy line and dropped connections, followed by a speed reset. According to the distance chart I should be getting 50Mbps: increasebroadbandspeed.co.uk/201…nce THe main problem we had is when the fibre cabinet was installed, all the lines were incorrectly wired to the phone cabinet causing electrical interference, everyone on my estate were limited to 1Mbps for about 10 years. Only with a year of effort and finally getting the right engineer was it fixed. £50 compensation was offered.
Virgin are currently laying fibre ducting and should be ready for blown fibre by October so will definitely be getting that, it is however only fibre to the house outside wall and then coax inside to the modem, so as you say not real fibre again but significantly better than BT given it is a dedicated fibre optic from the house to the nearest cabinet where it is multiplexed into other fibre. But I feel better using Virgin given they advocate for changing the advertising rules that 80% of customers need to achieve the advertise speed rather than what BT lobbied Ofcom to make it only 20%.
melted to zebrum
28 Aug 17#29
The phone ducts flood around here, rotting the wires in the underwater junction boxes. We had an intermittent fault here years ago, dating back to when I had dial-up, when the best BT would do is boost the line voltage so at least the phone would ring, and through several years on ADSL.
It took over a decade to get it fixed. Used to have a very flaky connection on dial-up with speeds dropping to about 300bps on a bad day. ADSL was better, but tended to drop frequently on bad days.
Didn't get fixed until the phone died completely, there was a submerged junction box that was full of water, and the Openreach engineer that fixed it showed me a length of wire he replaced, it was so badly corroded, it turned to dust in his hands. He had to get the manhole dug out and replaced as well. He reckoned that the junction boxes had never been touched since the estate was built. They've probably been replaced every 2 - 3 years since then though.
gary333 to zebrum
28 Aug 17#31
Virgin Media is only fibre to the cabinet. From the cabinet to the house is coaxial cable. Co-ax cable is far higher quality than BT's copper. Because Virgin cabinets serve a much smaller proportion of houses than BT they are usually very close to peoples houses thus the potential of Virgin is much higher.
In theory the co-ax cable is capable of 10Gb/sec download (1Gb/sec uplaod) using DOCSIS 3.1. The current DOCSIS 3 can run up to about 800Mb/sec with 16 channels however Virgin only run up to 350mb at this point in time as you don't want one customer taking all the speed for the whole estate.
The cable runs from the cabinet down the ducking in your street and to the outside of your house with the phone cable piggy backing on top.
Some areas of the country maybe have 100 houses all sharing the same 16 channels. This is why you hear of horror storys of areas where they are 'over utilised'. As you can imagine if all 100 houses (in the example) are all sharing the 800mb download then every house might only get 8mb/sec. This issue can be really bad in student areas where a house full might purchase the 200/300 and max it out all the time, this leaves the 99 other houses with only 500mb to share. Repeat a couple more student pads and the network is poor for everyone.
Virgin can be great if you live in an area like me which serves very few people. My estate has 40 houses that could be connected to one cabinet in reality not everyone has Virgin as some have BT others have no internet. My cabinet has around 20 people connected so even if all the old people who live around here decided to max out their connections we should (in theory) all be able to get 40mb/sec. Now in reality this is not fully how the network works, however gives you the gist.
Father.Christmas
27 Aug 17#20
£10 for 6gb is good. Any idea how I can access this deal as an existing bt mobile customer?
kramvic to Father.Christmas
28 Aug 17#30
Just been on to an advisor, the £10 deal has ended and is now £12, he said they change weekly. Would be interested if cashback works for additional sims like he said below.
Family SIM gives you a discount for every additional SIM that you have. You'll have 1 main SIM on a 12 month contract, to which you can add up to 4 more, and you can have these on a 30 day contract. All of the SIMs under family SIM need to have the same allowance. You can also manage all 4 SIMs separately on your account, plus you'll only get 1 bill.
Cristian
at 17:33, Aug 28:
You can add more SIMs later on, up to 5 per plan. This is perfect for initially starting with the plan and then bringing over other SIMs once they are able to switch.
Cristian
at 17:33, Aug 28:
You will be able to control the spending and allowances of each SIM in the plan individually.
mark
at 17:35, Aug 28:
ok, so the additional sims, would i get cashback for each of them/ e.g. £90 amazon gift card for each?
Cristian
at 17:35, Aug 28:
If you purchase each one of them individually, yes.
mark
at 17:36, Aug 28:
so, would i have an account, log in and then buy additional sims(the offer would show up)
Cristian
at 17:36, Aug 28:
Yes, that's correct
wildecat
28 Aug 17#28
They tweak the start up fee, monthly rental and MasterCard amount almost weekly. Raise one and drop the other to see who bites :skull_crossbones:
Only worth it if you get low start up fee plus decent MasterCard & Quidco/TCB plus switch yearly as they won't be competitive in year 2.
They usually raise the rental/call costs once (or twice) per year and then you can switch without charge within a 30 day window of this too :wink:
dave859
28 Aug 17#27
If your in a open reach full fibre area bt is the company to go with due to them allowing you to pay bt infinity 1 & 2 prices on a full fibre connection.
Sadikhussain899
28 Aug 17#26
Last week i got the same deal but with pre paid master of £150. Was a good deal. I think it will come back
zebrum
27 Aug 17#11
it isn't really fibre and is no where near 52mbps for most people, yet BT still get away with it, unbelievable
melted to zebrum
27 Aug 17#17
I agree that VDSL shouldn't be sold as fibre, but neither should coax based services.
I get around 6mbps on adsl services.
I'm not particularly close to the cabinet, but my line is still easily good enough to provide the advertised rate.
And they do give an estimate of the speed your line should be capable of.
stats from my router:-
Data rate:
9.99 Mbps / 55.00 Mbps
Maximum data rate:
19954 / 70183
The speedtest is slightly impaired by the slow PC I'm using
Splashmo to zebrum
27 Aug 17#19
BT guarantee the speed, or at least they have with me when I signed up last week. If it doesn't hit the 52 then I can terminate the contract.
zebrum to Splashmo
28 Aug 17#22
How long is your line or what's distance along roads to your cabinet? Maybe its so close they guaranteed.
More likely they are just quoting standard cooling off period
Splashmo to zebrum
28 Aug 17#25
I have no idea. It just says this in my order email:
"How fast will it be?
We estimate your download speed will be between 54Mb and 55Mb, and your upload speed will be between 9Mb and 10Mb.
The minimum guaranteed speed you can expect from your broadband will be 50Mb.
For the next ten days or so, your broadband speed might go up and down while we try to find the best speed for your line. You can help by leaving your BT Home Hub on all the time. Find out more about the speed of your broadband."
stbk
27 Aug 17#14
BT have been very good for me, always at 52mb. Only one problem i had was last month where it dropped out over three days, but i contacted BT and they sorted it. My contract is up for renewal in October so will be hoping for a good deal,
kevinyork to stbk
28 Aug 17#24
My contract expired late May. Called to negotiate a good deal and they offered a paultry discount. So switched to Sky which worked out a lot less. Flawless switch over too, BT went off at 7.10, Sky was working at 7.20. No drop outs and get over 60mbps.
winchman
28 Aug 17#23
I had 3 weeks without internet moving from sky to bt, they of course blamed openreach but it was bt ordering system that was the problem. If you are moving from virgin I'd keep it going beyond the date bt give you if you can.
chigger1
27 Aug 17#1
The expired MSE deal worked out better?
crucial_extreme to chigger1
27 Aug 17#2
Hey thanks for the message, what is MSE?
vzkl to crucial_extreme
27 Aug 17#4
Money Saving Expert
I believe you are referring to the standard 17Mb speed though?
LOL_is_stupid to chigger1
27 Aug 17#7
Yeah but as you said, it's expired so a moot point to make really
kentc81 to LOL_is_stupid
27 Aug 17#21
Some people maybe willing to wait until a better offer comes along
seaniboy
27 Aug 17#16
Really shouldn't be in mobile section, the sim is a bonus not the main selling poing
nebo
27 Aug 17#15
£10/month = 6GB + Unlimited calls + text Plus, £90 gift card
sounds great if you could get that seperate? :smile:
aajax42
27 Aug 17#13
is this also new customers only?
keano666
27 Aug 17#12
Don't do it, you will regret it!
m1chaels
27 Aug 17#10
About 100 quid more over 12 months than last week. As offers change weekly probably worth waiting till they change again.
gl0ckage
27 Aug 17#3
Just want to say 2e tried swapping to BT from sky earlier this year and through BT messing up 4 times we had no Internet for 2 months. We are still in discussions with the ombudsman over it and I would not recommend them at all. Yes the price tempts us but your stuck with idiots for 2 years.
LOL_is_stupid to gl0ckage
27 Aug 17#6
Thanks for the update
Stubee to gl0ckage
27 Aug 17#9
Its a 12 month contract.
bilbob
27 Aug 17#8
Fibre
Niz
27 Aug 17#5
All provider will give bad service to a percentage of their customers. They will all use openreach as their scapegoat for everything too. Personally I would say if it aint broke don't fix it. IF you want to switch for a cheaper price its quite simply the risk you take unfortunately that things may not go smoothly.
Opening post
Installation fee: £9.99
£31.99*12months = £383.88 + £9.99 installation fee = £393.87
Top cashback:
Infinity BT Broadband + Calls = £90
£393.87 - 90 = £303.87
Prepaid Mastercard: £125
£303.87- £125 = £178.87
178.87/12 months = £14.90/month
Also, if you're looking for a sim only deal at the same time then they have
£10/month = 6GB + Unlimited calls + text
Plus, £90 gift card
£144- £90 = £54/ year
Latest comments (37)
Mine lags like a 1 legged tortoise or drops out with home hub 6. Adding my r7000 as the router and keeping home hub as the modem = no dropouts and decent speeds (49mbps) on a 52mb connection. That's with 25 things connected to wifi as qos settings mean you can higher certain devices and lower priority others
If VM have any HFC networks in your area (i.e. your street is a new street that wasn't there when they built the network, or for whatever reason they chose not to bother) then you will get coax.
Thus for most people project lightening will not bring FTTP. I know a lot of people automatically assume project lightening is installing FTTP however this is not the case. Originally (2016) VM said they were going to give FTTP to over 1 million new houses. This has been scaled back dramatically so if you are getting FTTP you are one of the lucky ones. Most project lightening connections are infill at this point in time.
THe main problem we had is when the fibre cabinet was installed, all the lines were incorrectly wired to the phone cabinet causing electrical interference, everyone on my estate were limited to 1Mbps for about 10 years. Only with a year of effort and finally getting the right engineer was it fixed. £50 compensation was offered.
Virgin are currently laying fibre ducting and should be ready for blown fibre by October so will definitely be getting that, it is however only fibre to the house outside wall and then coax inside to the modem, so as you say not real fibre again but significantly better than BT given it is a dedicated fibre optic from the house to the nearest cabinet where it is multiplexed into other fibre. But I feel better using Virgin given they advocate for changing the advertising rules that 80% of customers need to achieve the advertise speed rather than what BT lobbied Ofcom to make it only 20%.
It took over a decade to get it fixed. Used to have a very flaky connection on dial-up with speeds dropping to about 300bps on a bad day. ADSL was better, but tended to drop frequently on bad days.
Didn't get fixed until the phone died completely, there was a submerged junction box that was full of water, and the Openreach engineer that fixed it showed me a length of wire he replaced, it was so badly corroded, it turned to dust in his hands. He had to get the manhole dug out and replaced as well. He reckoned that the junction boxes had never been touched since the estate was built. They've probably been replaced every 2 - 3 years since then though.
In theory the co-ax cable is capable of 10Gb/sec download (1Gb/sec uplaod) using DOCSIS 3.1. The current DOCSIS 3 can run up to about 800Mb/sec with 16 channels however Virgin only run up to 350mb at this point in time as you don't want one customer taking all the speed for the whole estate.
The cable runs from the cabinet down the ducking in your street and to the outside of your house with the phone cable piggy backing on top.
Some areas of the country maybe have 100 houses all sharing the same 16 channels. This is why you hear of horror storys of areas where they are 'over utilised'. As you can imagine if all 100 houses (in the example) are all sharing the 800mb download then every house might only get 8mb/sec. This issue can be really bad in student areas where a house full might purchase the 200/300 and max it out all the time, this leaves the 99 other houses with only 500mb to share. Repeat a couple more student pads and the network is poor for everyone.
Virgin can be great if you live in an area like me which serves very few people. My estate has 40 houses that could be connected to one cabinet in reality not everyone has Virgin as some have BT others have no internet. My cabinet has around 20 people connected so even if all the old people who live around here decided to max out their connections we should (in theory) all be able to get 40mb/sec. Now in reality this is not fully how the network works, however gives you the gist.
Raise one and drop the other to see who bites :skull_crossbones:
Only worth it if you get low start up fee plus decent MasterCard & Quidco/TCB plus switch yearly as they won't be competitive in year 2.
They usually raise the rental/call costs once (or twice) per year and then you can switch without charge within a 30 day window of this too :wink:
I get around 6mbps on adsl services.
I'm not particularly close to the cabinet, but my line is still easily good enough to provide the advertised rate.
And they do give an estimate of the speed your line should be capable of.
stats from my router:-
Data rate:
More likely they are just quoting standard cooling off period
"How fast will it be?
We estimate your download speed will be between 54Mb and 55Mb, and your upload speed will be between 9Mb and 10Mb.
The minimum guaranteed speed you can expect from your broadband will be 50Mb.
For the next ten days or so, your broadband speed might go up and down while we try to find the best speed for your line. You can help by leaving your BT Home Hub on all the time. Find out more about the speed of your broadband."
I believe you are referring to the standard 17Mb speed though?
Plus, £90 gift card
sounds great if you could get that seperate? :smile: