Virgin Media Business Launch 4G Start-up and Back-up Services
UK broadband ISP Virgin Media Business has today launched a new 4G mobile powered “business-grade” Back-up (failover with unlimited data) and Start-up service, which aims to help businesses across the country “get online faster and stay connected“.
The 4G Back-up service is essentially a mobile broadband based failover service, which kicks in automatically if your main fixed broadband connection suffers an outage (something that has occurred on Virgin Media’s network a few times recently). Under this approach VMB supplies small businesses with an unlimited data 4G dongle that plugs into the USB port of their router and this costs an extra £7 +vat per month on top of their Voom Fibre plans.
Meanwhile the 4G Start-up service is intended to help eligible businesses get connected in as little as 4 days. Under this solution VMB will send customers a new router and 4G dongle, which they can use to get connected immediately “rather than having to wait for an engineer to finish installing their fibre business broadband.” This is available on all Voom business broadband packages and costs £40 for the first month.
Advertisement
Finally, VMB has also enhanced their HomeWorks service, which costs £9.99 per month (or £6 when taken with any speed upgrade) and includes next day priority engineer call-outs, security for up to 5 devices with F-Secure SAFE and 24/7 IT support for gadgets with Gadget Rescue. Wi-Fi Boosters can also be used throughout the home to “banish WiFi blackspots” (i.e. slowspots or notspots).
Gregg Pearce, Director of SOHO at Virgin Media, said:
“Our new 4G Start-up and Back-up services provides complete reassurance for businesses wanting to get online and stay connected no matter what. We know that providing a reliable and always-on connection is essential and are pleased to be supporting UK small business to rebound with disruption-free connectivity they can depend on.”
As usual the big caveat here is that this is only really going to be useful for smaller businesses with lower data demands. On top of that, its performance will be entirely dependent upon the quality of mobile connectivity in your area. At present Virgin’s MVNO platform is powered by EE, although their forthcoming merger with O2 will eventually change all that.
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, BlueSky, Threads.net and Linkedin.
« New 4G Emergency Services Network Faces Another 2 Year Delay
Presumably even with these 4G offerings you have to be in a VM enabled area – so it is no use to small businesses that are outside that footprint?
So basically they are charging more to cover shortcomings in their services – i.e. outages and installation delays?
Quite
Even BT offer this FREE when there is an outage!!
Quite a weird marketing call.
I believe that Virgin does sell some business services based on the Openreach network, so doesn’t operate exclusively in the cabled footprint. Whether that applies in this case is unclear.
According to their website “All 4G services must be purchased with Voom Fibre” so I guess it isn’t available with any OR based services.
I’ve also noticed that the £40pm 4G Start-Up offering has a 25GB cap – up to an additional 25GB is available at £1/GB! I’m not sure what happens if you use 50GB.
Does it apply to people who already have VM business, as in, can we order it as an extra?
Does it only work in the dongle supplied? would be a neat little data sim for the phone if it’s a regular SIM card.
As per the post, it’s a USB dongle which plugs into the Hub, so it won’t be a sim.
The dongle doesn’t contain a sim?
is it an esim?
Couldn’t tell you, I’d assume probably eSim.
Will back up dongle work if Hitron modem-router is used in bridge mode only (we connect this to an Asus router that provides more functionality?