Virgin Media UK Discounts Standalone Ultrafast Broadband
UK ISP Virgin Media has discounted the price of their 100Mbps to 350Mbps standalone ultrafast broadband packages for the first 12 months of service (minimum contract term), which now start from just £28 per month (£42 thereafter). On top of that they’ve also removed the £35 one-off setup fee (expected to last until 29th April 2020).
As usual this latest offer is for new customers only and they can expect to receive a Hub 3.0 wireless router (Hub 4.0 on 1Gig), a 12 month minimum contract term, unlimited usage, access to Virgin’s UK network of WiFi hotspots, internet security / parental controls and email.
We note that the provider doesn’t currently display their 50Mbps broadband-only tier in public (they do this sometimes); it does still exist behind the scenes but they’ve elected not to extend these discounts to it. Meanwhile their new 1Gbps service remains independent of this offer due to only be available to certain parts of the UK (hence it isn’t mentioned below) and 500Mbps can still only be taken with a special Oomph TV bundle.
M100 fibre broadband
Average download 108Mbps
Average upload 10MbpsPRICE: £28 a month for 12 months (£42 thereafter)
M200 fibre broadband
Average download 213Mbps
Average upload 20MbpsPRICE: £33 a month for 12 months (£47 thereafter)
M350 fibre broadband
Average download 362Mbps
Average upload 36MbpsPRICE: £38 a month for 12 months (£52 thereafter)
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook and Linkedin.
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Get stuff VM – don’t trust your company with data protection act! Don’t sign up!
I’m still awaiting an confirmation about what of mine might have been exposed after filling a GDPR request, but staffing issues due to covid-19 has delayed that, but at least VM gave me an update to this effect.
I was referred to VM and referrals was one of the things in the database so rather sure of that.
Hi Max. Any chance of a positive contribution to these at some point?
Lmao…. just like many other operators who have leaked information in the past.
Cheer up!
Not surprised it’s discounted .. soon they won’t be able to give away their service with the high latency 24/7. But don’t worry they have the capacity… the customer forums paint a very different picture.
I am one of those on the forum with latency/packet loss issues. Mine started back in December, way before the lockdown, and obviously gotten worse when we were all told to stay home. I suppose when things outside are back to normal my latency will still be crap in the evenings unless they will do something about it
So is it just latency thats the issues or do your speeds drop to near 0 in the evenings…
I’m just wondering as I’ve dealt with congestion issues with Virgin in more than one area before now, however have noticed area’s getting much better now, sure they’ll get to it but alots happening with Broadband right now.
Latency on any cable operator is always woeful, its the design of the network unfortunately though futurer innovations will be helping or ficing this.
I feel like its a have the cake or have a slice situation, for example, when I used to be into online gaming I had a 2/3mb ADSL line solely for online gaming and had Virgin to sort the bandwidth requirments in the house out, and when I did switch over the faster DSL services such as BT Infinity I started finding the issue with latency then occured further up the line, such as at gaming servers end and on the content delivery networks.
When I went over to canada for a couple of years, I found cable networks more equally balanced however there where a lot less users and more spread out geography, however they still suffered with one of thwe biggest problems with cable networks and that is the Intel Puma chips in the modems/routers.
I also wonder if these same issues will become reality with FTTP (Full Fibre) services in the future, wheres theres speed, theres a bottleneck.
Strange they don’t offer 500mbps tier as a standalone package still.
I’m sure it will come, however without a boost in upload I don’t see any point in having it over 350.
I’ve just setup my Gig1 service and suffice to say, the only thing its help with for me is the addition upload and the ‘improved’ puma 7 latency spike issues when gaming but Virgin still have a ways to go on both the Hub side of things and also the network.
Just taken the Gig1 service, absolutely no chance of keeping retnetions discount of £12 unless I stayed on 350 or below, however I wanted the new hub 4 and I wanted the extra upload.
First oppinions: Set it up on Saturday 18th April, seemed to start off well, Samknows Realspeed is reporting around 1060-1100mbps, managed to get Xbox One testing via Ethernet and iPad on 5GHz testing to fast.com simaltaniously acheiving 890mbps on xbox and 300mbps on iPad.
However, whilst the hub 4 does seem to be an improvement in relation to the Puma 6 latency bugs the Puma 7 has slight issues to but when gaming online I’ve noticed alot less or maybe no anomalies, the UI has a few little bugs but has been this was on all previous hubs from Virgin.
Wireless however is dissapointing, even without any neighbouring networks interfering and performing many tests under different locations (both hub and devices) I’m not able to push much above the 400mbps mark, and this is same for testing 2 devices simaltaniously, theres just not much bandwidth and this is dissapointing for a 4×4 5Ghz wireless chip.
I’m also still collecting evidence and an issue where the router or wireless card becomes unresponsive intermittently.
I’m certainly looking to invest in a dedicated 5Ghz access point in the near future.
My last comment on the Hub is ofcourse the lack of a faster than Gigabit ethernet port, although the hub is capable of making most of the 1200mbps that Virgin cofigures it for, its a dissadvantage for the advanced user who wants to use modem mode and will basically sacrifice over 20% of there capable bandwidth usage and nearly 10% of the advertised speed.
My hope is that Virgin (Liberty Global), specially Business side are considering the upcoming Motorola SB8611 2.5GB WAN Modem or something similar.
https://www.go2mhz.com/product/docsis-3-1-cable-modem-2/
As for the service side of things, hope to see the Upstream side of things upgraded sooner than later, 50mbps upload is what should be rolling out on the U-Oomph M500 service but thats seemingly not being classed as a broadband product but more as a bonus boost for VIP’s, need to be seeing that 100mb upload coming in soon or they’ll fail to keep people keen in area’s being hooked up with FTTP.
Some network routing around the UK, London specially could do with some TLC, peering with some places such as BBC, Xbox, Google and Microsft services is rather poor and has been for some time, its actually better for me to peer with outer countries instead of my own for some things right now.
‘Some network routing around the UK, London specially could do with some TLC, peering with some places such as BBC, Xbox, Google and Microsft services is rather poor and has been for some time, its actually better for me to peer with outer countries instead of my own for some things right now.’
You have your own ASN and BGP sessions up to those guys? Interesting.
I think they were saying paying with people abroad seems to perform better than playing with UK friends.
Not even that, I find better pings and bandwidth capability with servers far out than locally… specially with cloud providers.
I’ve recently switched my cloud storage elsewhere so I can acheive decent speeds when uploading and accessing content.
But this is just one example.