Best broadband offer for 50mb out there at min in your opinions?

[truereddevil]

I have just got myself a beautiful mac lovely 27inch screen and basically i am wanting to run all my online businesses or at least watch over them from home so in your opinions what is the best broadband package to take, it is just broadband i am wanting nothing else

I have been looking at virgin media they offer a 50mb one off connection fee at £45 and £30 for the 1st 3 months then £35 per month after that

Does anybody use virgin media and do u actually get the 50mb speed they say

Or can anybody recommend anybody else?

Thanks for any help

 

[Hedgie]

I have used Virgin 50mb for the last couple of years and never had any issues. Speed wise it varies from 30-40 mb depending on time of day.

I dont think anyone else does 50mb? BT do 40 I think?

 

[FreelancelogoUK]

50mb is only available through Virgin, so i have seen! I would recommend cable over adsl, as if your far from an exchange you wont get anywhere near 50mb! Sky said i could have upto 20mb, but im 2 miles from an exchange and when they did a line test, the max i would receive was 4-5mb!!

 

[british steve]

We have a 20Mb Virgin line as a back up to our leased line - we are lucky if we get 2Mb, Virgin dont seen to give a S***, we dont even waste our time phoning them anymore!

 

[and180y]

Had Virgin 50meg, never got anywhere near that speed. Loads of hassles with constantly restarting their router etc. Got rid of 50meg and get better speeds and connection on their 20meg service.
Do Virgin not force you to hve a phone line from them to get BB?

 

[Antony Warnes]

Virgin are currently the only 50MB provider out there and all the other big companies are way behind.

There are smaller companies that do faster broadband but they are likely to be very expensive. Virgin Media are also rolling out 100MB broadband which if you google it they have a page set up which tells you if they have it in your area.

 

[thecyclingartist]

I have the Virgin 30Mb and consistently get from 25-30mb wirelessly on my MacBook. Noticed a big improvement over their 20Mb service when I got about 10-12Mb consistently. Remember that BT optical lines are often only for the street, not the whole connection - plus BT's service sucks. I hear so many horror stories I wouldn't touch them. have had excellent service from Virgin bar one time, but once in 4 years and they did sort it in the end and credited my account.

Tina.

 

[bencouch]

I'd say Virgin Media were the best, following all the recent investigations into internet speeds, they're the only company that came out looking good really. And there customer service is pretty reliable too.

 

[Antony Warnes]

I'd say Virgin Media were the best, following all the recent investigations into internet speeds, they're the only company that came out looking good really. And there customer service is pretty reliable too.

Just be warned though...they don't like Macs

 

[bencouch]

Just be warned though...they don't like Macs

Ha Ha true, the standard router they send doesn't like Macs, have a friend who works for apple and recommends virgin, just to buy a router that is especially made to work with Macs

 

[Antony Warnes]

Ha Ha true, the standard router they send doesn't like Macs, have a friend who works for apple and recommends virgin, just to buy a router that is especially made to work with Macs

They couldn't set up a wireless network using my mac and wanted to charge me £35 to sort it out. Had to ask to be put through to terminations to get it sorted without paying a penny

 

[Amelixuk]

Depending what exchange you are on we sell an amazing product for just £23 per month which has no data shaping, fair use policy and speeds are AMAZING! - It is only at a few exchanges - happy to do a check for you when in office tomorrow. DM me.

 

[smo]

In my experience Virgin speeds are excellent, at home we have 10mb Virgin and get 9.5-10mb ALL the time, its reliable and fast, personally i dont think much of virgin customer service but its no worse than other providers.

We have ADSL at the office as we cant get cable, we're on an 8mb service as thats all our exchange can handle and are luckly to see 2mb from it, it varies wildly and is flakey at best.

 

[Ant84]

I have Virgin Media 50mb broadband. I get about 45mb speeds all day long, so pretty good in that respect.

Have also had both an iMac and a windows PC running through the same router with absolutely no issues whatsoever.

 

[KieranDonnelly]

I have 50mb virgin media. Get between 48.5 to 50.4mb and have for over a year. Virgin media have highest what you buy is what you get percentages in uk, think its over 90%.

Meaning if they advertising 10mb, your average user gets roughly 9.5mb.

All ADSL2 providers are typically under 50mb%, think last I read 'up to 24mb' getting 6.6mb.

Customer service and up time is outstanding. Had 4 hour outage at boxing day and got in touch on the phone and engineer booked within 10 mins, not bad for a bank holiday. Was repaired that evening and called to cancel engineer. (local outage, not just me)

Shame they don't offer static ip addresses, but thats easy enough to get around.

Hope that helps.

 

[KieranDonnelly]

Also check-out samknows.co.uk. for local isp knowledge. Great for when moving home or business

 

[JohnW1]

I've found Virgin 50Mb to be very reliable and fast. Typically I can get between 47 and 53Mb, but here are a couple of pointers. If you use speedtest.net to check your speed, not all of the servers seem able to cope at 50M e.g Aberdeen which is my closest always shows a slower speed. Also, your AV software and pc can affect the performance quite extensively. I tried a number of different AV software packages after I found that my speed doubled after I 'snoozed' my AV.
And they don't insist that you take a phone line to take broadband although 6 months after I took the broadband they called and offered me a phone line and basic cable TV for £2.99 per month with 6 months free anytime calls. I took the deal!
On my BT business broadband I got 2.3Mb over the phone line . . . . . .