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.

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.

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.

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.

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: The speedtest is slightly impaired by the slow PC I'm using

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.

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.

Hey thanks for the message, what is MSE?

Yeah but as you said, it's expired so a moot point to make really

Thanks for the update

Its a 12 month contract.