ISP Reviews by burnduck

I've had Community Fibre 3Gbps for around 5 months.

The installation process was not without hiccups. While the engineer turned up on time and got things going, they gave me the wrong ONT (2.5Gbps port) despite me having signed up to a 3Gbps plan.

While the last mile connection (XGS-PON) was rock solid, they've had some wobbles in their core network portions:
1. Weird routing issues which preventing some CloudFlare endpoints from being accessed (not confirmed but resolved)
2. IPv6 prefix delegation resizing - it gave me a good 2 weeks of on-and-off IPv6 connectivity (confirmed)

These issues were unlikely to be noticed by the average user (prob swept under the carpet of bad wifi issues), but as I am an experienced engineer working with internet technologies, I found it extremely difficult to escalate these technical issues through their support ever since they outsourced to a South African company.

Every time I tried to raise a fault with CF support I was told to download the Linksys app and do a bunch of IT Crowd esque troubleshooting steps. Needless to say it was frustrating at the very least.

Otherwise, their internet had been solid ever since those wobbles, for the price that I am paying (currently £49/month, 3Gbps, no wifi package) I am happy with the service. Just pray I won't have to contact their support any time again soon!

Mind you I am an IT Engineer with unusual internet requirements and this review probably isn't suited for the average consumer.

Where I live I can get Openreach FTTC at 80/20, or Virgin Media HFC.

I've been using Plusnet which gives me pretty much the full line speed, but it is starting to struggle when I'm trying to stream 4K content over the internet. That's why I thought I sign up for VM hoping to benefit from their faster internet speed.

I was issued a VM Hub 3.0, which I'm using in modem mode, along with my home router RB3011.

Blocked services:
I have a L2TP VPN server in the home network so I can remotely access resources at home. Turns out Virgin Media filters out several UDP ports (including those used by L2TP), this behaviour was discussed on VM forum but not acknowledged by VM. Also, this is not documented in the ISP KFI document issued by VM.

Speed:
Artificial test shows roughly 385 / 21.
HTTP download tests from third party sites appears to be traffice shaped - sustained speed at 200Mbps, with bursts to 400Mbps. The raising and falling edge is too sharp for me to consider it being traffic on internet. VM appears to be still traffic shaping although claiming not to.

Bottom line: VM is blocking ports (verified) / shaping traffic (?) but they claim to be not doing it. Questionable business practice. Will be cancelling within cool off period.