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3 weeks to finally get a BT engineer to come out due to connection dropping 10 times an evening. When you do get online there website is down
Will the switch to Talk Talk be any better?

I would recommend Talk Talk,Fish.
I used to be with virgin media and was not happy with them.

Sorry to hear about Virgin Media.

I'm with Sky and when my broadband went down they had it fixed within 48hrs and refunded me the days for lost connection.

Also offered me Sky movies free for a month when my phone line went down on several occasions.

Good luck.

I have been with TalkTalk for over 10 years and not had a problem at all. Touch Wood.

Why would you have a BT engineer for Virgin Media coming out.
Virgin Media use there own lines for telephone the last time i checked ??

The Switch
If your on Virgin they use there cables to get you on the internet via the Cab at the bottom of your street in most cases.

BT
Typically use the telephone cables that go from your house to the pole in the street.

So if your on virgin and use there cable to the box switching to a Telephone line up the pole may give you better results.

Note : Reactivation of a BT line can be very expensive, do your home work before you say goodbye to virgin.

Left talk talk years ago
Wasting life trying to get a human on phone.
Plusnet no better even uk based doesnt mean nowt
Fluctuating line quality

I've found Virgin Media to be very good. I have had a problem recently with wi-fi. We have several devices using this which from time to time fail to communicate. Resetting the wi-fi connections on the items restored communications - for a while.

I rang virgin and they sent a chappie round a couple of days later. He established that the incoming signal was too high, and inserted a 10dB attenuator in the connector to the router, and replaced some filter components in the incoming wall unit. He left, leaving a card with his number on it, explaining that if I had any problem I could ring him direct - quicker than going through the company.

It seems to have solved the problem. I am on a 100MB connection and although sometimes at busy periods it drops to 80, it is quite often around 110MB or more. I have not found waiting to talk to someone being a problem.

It is worth, by the way, asking them to reduce the cost if you've been with them for some time. They have a 'loyalty' scheme which allows them to cut the cost significantly, but you have to ask for it. I found it worth haggling even when this is offered. I got a bit more off, and they upgraded my speed at no extra cost when I asked them for even more!

I've been with Virgin for many years, back when they were Telewest, and before that C&W.

Despite the occasional brief outage and unsuitable router for my home I've found the service to be great.

I joined them when they were NTL.

Yes, I too have had brief outages, but these have generally occurred when they are upgrading the network and you get some warning if you look at their 'Service status' page.

They are expensive I think, even with discounts. But they are fast and in my case anyway the customer support has been good. I guess you get what you pay for, to some extent anyway.

Cable hasn't arrived in Irby so its internet down the telephone wire. Didn't realise that virgin is split into Virgin Cable and Virgin National (or something like that) They are dumping the Virgin National side onto Talk Talk. Virgin eventually request a BT engineer to call out after you have done a load of tests and left the router in the BT test socket inside your BT box for 24 hours. BT have been and said it is a faulty router (which I told Virgin because the exact same thing happened 2 years ago and they sent out a new Netgear router and things were fine. Will have to see if BT are correct

I sympathise with you fish5133. It is too easy when you are dependent on two companies for them to blame each other, but I think it is the people you pay your money to who are ultimately responsible.

Have you asked for compensation for poor service?

I think it is disgraceful that companies who provide internet over phone lines are able to get away with the 'up to' scam.You pay for what is advertised as 'up to' 20MB, say, and find that due to line length you only get 2MB. You should really only be charged 10% of the full fee in my opinion, but they have the cheek to charge the full amount!

I was with talk talk and I found them to be really bad. The connection speeds were really bad. I couldn't even play online games on some days because of constant disconnects etc . I switched to virgin media and all my issues disappeared. Everyone I know who has been with talk talk has left them.

Cheers guys. From all the replies it seems a bit hit and miss as to the quality of the service irrespective of ISP. Did a speed check for the area a while back and there wasn't one above 6mb which suggests a local problem at that time.
Just checked my download speed --a miserly 0.61 mbs and upload 0.06 mbs

I've been with Virgin for years & the couple of times I've had a problem it has been sorted out quickly. On top of that no one can beat the 152 megs download speed.

I too have been with them for years (26) but can't come anywhere near those results. Over the last 6mths it has varied between 10.01mbps and 57.7mbps depending on time of day and wind direction! Although not majorly happy I can't find an alternative taking into account the costs of installing phone lines etc. So for me its a case of better the devil you know.