O2 & Virgin Media To Merge

Yes, I replaced the BT Homehub with a 30 quid TP router for my lad'd FTTP service. Incredibly stable, in fact it managed an 'up time' of over 750 days, and that record was only messed up because of a power cut

When I was with VM and the speed would constantly drop and the connection would drop as well. After fighting with them for months about my cabinet being oversubscribed as well, they initially denied it at first and said they couldn't see any issues at their side.

It was only when the same engineer came out on the 5th occasion that he put it to the Head of Delivery for Scotland West. Other VM engineers though are a law onto themselves.

I had to report a VM engineer to Police Scotland for breaking into the cupboard where the connection points are for my block of flats. I had an appointment on a Saturday for them to come out and do a 'repull', but the engineer decided upon himself to come out on the Friday instead. When I called VM about it, I got through to one of the outsourced call centres in Bellshill and firstly got called a liar and that it never happened.

Thankfully there was evidence of the cupboard door frame burst and the cupboard door wide open. Once the police were involved, VM admitted that the engineer did break into the cupboard.

When their services work, especially their broadband, its really good, but when the proverbial hits the fan...good luck!

I never had any problems with the BT or EE Homehubs when I had them, they were pretty rock solid for me; but yeah Virgin's present Superhub is totally rubbish (as was the first generation one, the second gen one was OK I found).


I've invested in a decent setup with a Synology standalone router (and also run CAT5e/CAT6 to all the areas of the house with connected devices which don't move), and that's much better. The VM service still dies on its arse fairly regularly though, even with the Superhub in modem mode. It seems to come back after 3 or 4 minutes so I wonder if it is just the device falling over and restarting itself.

The main advantage of having a standalone router for me is the decoupling aspect - I can restart the router without affecting the connection (which is important in a DLM situation) and similarly I can restart the modem without devices complaining about losing network connectivity. I can also change ISP (which I tend to do on a yearly basis, to maximise value) without having to change the rest of the network in any way. I can even set the router up to allow connections from 2 sources at once (useful for handover between an Openreach derived product and VM or vice-versa) and if the one connection I have most of the time goes away, I have the option of plugging in my Android phone and tethering the entire network from that.

All my Amazon Echo Dots etc. and quite a few other devices that were connected to the BT Homehub via its internal 802.11ac WiFi and used its DHCP router started very regularly falling off the internet, complaining they weren't connected. Power cycling them got them back up, but they'd fall off again (often within hours). Power cycling the router improved things for a couple of days - but it started happening again. I don't know whether it was a DHCP address space thing (I hadn't hit the limit of DHCP-delivered addresses) or lease length (I didn't have clashes that I could see) - but replacing the BT HomeHub with a separate Draytek modem and Ubiquiti router and Access Point has made the same Amazon devices work pretty much trouble-free ever since.

I'd already swapped out the BT HomeHub with a spare I had - and that behaved similarly.

I sometimes have to download very large files (~50GB+) which will max out my connection - and that was also really flaky via the HomeHub (via a cabled connection). Switching to the Draytek + Ubiquiti set-up has made that a thing of the past too.

I can vouch for the Ubiquity system, I've bought two AP Lite WiFi access points, and the cloud key server for our house.
Works brilliantly, and seamless transfer between the two APs. Not cheap, so don't tell Mrs Markymark what it cost, but it's cheered me up in the current situation 😬

I recently bought a TP link archer router (£60) and why i never did it years ago I've no idea. Same as noggin where my echo dots would fall off the internet and I'd have endless connectivity problems. I have 12-16 devices connected at any one time and the hub 3 just cannot handle that number of devices.

The hub 3 also takes an ice age to reboot whereas the TP link one in back in under 60 seconds.

On the whole, the Archer TP-Link routers are easy to set-up, in most cases it's simply down to signing in with your log-in details, while on TalkTalk, there's no sign in process for VDSL, while it's easy to get your details from TalkTalk for ADSL.

In the case of VM, it's normally a case of using the new router as a bridge with the hub, leaving the latter as a modem.

VM you set your router to "modem mode"

I can only get about 20Mbs on VDSL, so switching to cable was a bit of a no-brainer when a good deal came along. BT's retentions department tried keeping me with the line "they'll only give you half of the speed at peak times because the network's so congested" - I pointed out that it would still be significantly faster than the best they could provide me, so he had to move to the next excuse on his list.

It does seem to vary quite a lot by area: a friend a mile up the road found his VM connection to be unusably slow at times; I'm very glad I've got it now that I'm working at home.

This breaking news story gives a damn good clue as to which brand will survive ......

Virgin Media to disappear from UK high street https://t.co/oU0pJV8aWV

— Mark Sweney (@marksweney) May 28, 2020

I’m not sure that really has anything to do with the merger though, it’s something which in this climate could have happened anyway. (If it is happening because of the merger, it’s premature to do it before the deal closes - particularly as Liberty has very recent experience of getting burnt in this sort of situation, with the sale of UPC Switzerland having fallen through at the last minute).

I mentioned about the V6 box having lots of different names - apparently in Ireland it’s going to be “Virgin TV 360” when it launches.

I'm very surprised that they only had 53 stores in the first place. Obviously not a major part of their business. I suspect most of the mobile/TV/cable business is done online.