ISP Reviews by cg0

I switched to EE after leaving Three and have been mostly happy for now, but there's more to it than that.

I'm on a 5G plan in an area with a lot of 5G so I'm happy with speed, until I start going into my home. There appears to be some big issues in the area which EE still have not fixed. Indoors calls will drop out, data will either be slow or not work at all and I'll randomly get a notification that EE has paused my data (system message from the phone)

This was constantly blamed on my property having thick walls despite other providers not having issues with it, late at night I decided to do a speedtest and managed to get 90mbps on 4G, thought great it's sorted, then in the morning I did the same test in the same spot and it wouldn't connect.

Obviously this is a very local issue and the remainder of the network works very well however it seems EE doesn't care to fix localised issues.

I left Three half a year ago so this is my review of my experience up until then.

When I first joined I had a 30GB contract SIM which was instantly bumped up to unlimited by staff when my wifi calling didn't work which was a nice upgrade.

The network was fine, it wasn't amazingly fast but for the price it did all it needed to and allowed me to stream video on the go. Any issues I had would end up getting fixed with credit applied.

Then it took a turn for the worst, more and more areas seemed to be under capacity. Started off with an area on the way to the city centre, then most of the route, then the train station. I complained about it and was given credit but nothing happened, then more and more areas became affected, I could no longer get signal in Birmingham New Street despite getting very good speeds before, the area on my way to work is now under capacity.

I decided it was enough and cancelled the contract, I had a bunch of empty promises of how it will be fixed soon and 5G will save us all but I had enough and left. This is a very situational issue but the way this was all handled should be known before joining.

I have since checked the areas in question on their issues checker, still reported as under capacity and will be fixed soon almost a year after being reported.

Their broadband product for the most part is good, I don't live in an overprovisioned area so I will easily reach 380-400 mbps on a 350 mbps connection, the problem lies with the rest of Virgin.

Their Hub 3 router is just awful, I've been complaining about it for years due to it's many issues. Notibly the Puma chipset causing high latency spikes and their plaster fix causing P2P to easily drain the speed out of your connection.

It's admin configuration page is not at all good, I've seen it forget my password or sometimes crash out and stop loading.

The best you can do is put the thing in modem mode and use your own equipment beyond it which doesn't fix the chipset issues.

When trying to get support Virgin is very useless, don't be suprised to have the person on the other end not understand you, give you wrong advice or hang up. Recently I've been having an issue where my router randomly restarts, which has been a lovely back and forth which required two engineer visits to be told it's a network-wide issue, according to the agents the issue was fixed after the first engineer visit despite no work being done, agents promising credit but then saying I can't have it, callbacks being promised but never delivering.

If you have a decent alternative I'd go with that, Virgin's network can be very fast but at the same time the rest of the company lets it down.