Navigating gigabit broadband deals

Dodging and navigating EE and Virgin broadband offers

Fun times…
As a reward for years of loyally, Virgin decided it was time take back the welcome mat and increase my monthly bill… by about 35% to £165 a month.

Two minutes later I switched to EE.

Normally I’d haggle with Virgin, but they are sods for not letting you downgrade – ever – and their usually tactic is to bundle more as a ‘deal’ to get you to stay. Usually I’m like fine, whatever, but a 35% hike on top of the annual rises? I don’t think so!

Ironically – but only after they got acknowledgement that I’d bailed – they send an email offering to keep the price the same (if I signed a new contract).

Maybe, Virgin, if you’d show more loyalty to customers like me instead of mega deals to entice new customers, I wouldn’t have run away!

Jan 12th:

Hello Paul,
Like many of our customers, you’ve been enjoying a promotional price of £121.67* a month for your services. When your contract comes to an end on 14 February 2026, this will change to £165.04* a month. Monthly price of Virgin Media main services will increase each April by £3.50.

---

Jan 13th (Virgin)
EE let us know that you’re thinking about switching your Broadband,Telephone over to them. Although we hope you change your mind, here’s everything you need to know about switching.

– followed by –

Jan 13th (EE)
Hi Paul,

Thanks for switching to us. We’ll move your services from your current provider and will be in touch to confirm the switchover date.

Incidentally, the EE offer was about £80 a month, offered faster broadband and included an EE mobile sim

---

Jan 17th (Virgin):

You’re saving £40.00 a month
You have 1 promotional discount
You’re receiving a discount that will end on 04 March 2027

!

If Virgin had extended my discount if I renewed – instead of rushing to jack the price up and hoping I just accept it – I’d have stayed, despite paying extra for TV packages I neither want nor need. Apart from the odd grumble when Internet goes down, I’ve been pretty satisfied with them. But that doesn’t mean I’m going to roll over for them and be milked.

So, here I am, living it up, with EE’s 1.6Gb/s full fibre!

…

Wheeee… EE… ewww!

I had chased their door-to-door sales guys off a few times for being a bit shady, so that should have been a warning sign.

Navigating their bundles (or lack thereof) was always a put-off for me too, but I was tempted by the 1.6Gb/s.

The eagerness of the EE telephone sales guy when I called should also have sent up warning flares, but I was angry with Virgin, so to hell with them! Sign me up.

They were round pretty smartish, wall drills at the ready. Okay, bit keen, but let’s do this.

And there it was, another red warning light, blinking away.

I have a very specific network setup. It was meticulously planned, with cat 6 bundles in the walls, a 4U cabinet, patch panel. It works. Has worked fine for years, from BT’s questionable and unreliable (last mile) ADSL through to Virgin Gigabit. Now and then a new router or switch gives you a headache, but you fiddle and it behaves.

So, fibre optic cable guy turns up and asks where I was it and I say, “Round the back”.
And he’s like, “Yes, no, we don’t do that. You can’t really bend it so we’d have to… and well, so… y’know. I’ll just put it in the front of your house”. In the worst possible place.
I was tempted to cancel there and then but I was still mad at Virgin and figured I could tinker around it.

Here’s the thing – and another red flag. When I asked about setting up the TV as well, well, “Yes, no, we don’t do that, just the hub. That’s it.”

I ordered the full package. I got a hub. With a cat 5e cable

SWEET JEBUS!

A 1.6Gb hub… with a 1Gb cat 5e cable, which isn’t really rated for the job and so not fit for purpose. I mean, it would work, but it’ll be a bottleneck, so why would you? It wanted a cat 6 or better, a cat 6a patch cable. You are not talking about £10 or £20 extra here, but pennies difference. In fact, quality cat6a can be cheaper! Yet BT/EE choose to use the cheap-ass cat 5e cable with their top of the range hub. WHY!?

Anyway, the installer – very much NOT a network engineer – set up the hub, made sure the wireless was working and legged it to his next job, leaving me to sort the network.

And that’s were the trouble started. Right there. The super duper, whistles and bells, ultimate Smart Hub 7 Pro does not appear to play nice with, well anything else. Hubs, switchs, even the paired wireless extenders are problematic.

Greatly simplifying things. My network look like this:

Broadband hub > patch panel | switch (patch panel) > various rj45 wall sockets connections to – stuff.

While annoying, moving the Smart Hub 7 Pro to the opposite side of the house should not have been a major headache because the cabling is in place.

WIFI, fine. Great. Running like a charm (in the one room). If I run a cable to a PC from the hub, fine. But you show that Smart hub a dumb hub, a switch, a router, anything, it will not play nice.

IF it sees or talk to anything else, you’ll get messages like, “Ethernet does not have a valid ip configuration.”

This can happen, it be can drivers or corruption, or whatever, but it’s rare and easily fixable (e.g. cmd > ipconfig /flushdns).

Anyway, if the broadband hub won’t talk to the switch, you have no network. I’m no CCNA, but I usually know what I’m doing but I ran into a brick wall and had to call EE support…

EE “support“

As I say, I’ve been in IT for decades, was setting up BNC Netware, Windows and Linux networks in the mid 90’s, ASDL networks by 1998, so I have learned a thing or two, so if I can’t fix it, I do not want to chat with some machine reading from crib sheets, I want third line support, please, because I get grumpty otherwise.

Don’t get me wrong, most – most – of the staff I spoke to were very polite, very patient, but also, so very ignorant. One or two though…

If I need tech support, I need someone that can tell their arse from their elbow. So when I get a supposed network support helper that doesn’t seem to know what a network switch is…

Or one that says, basically, “Well, your hub looks to be working fine. The rest of the network is your problem, deal with it. Get the guy that put the network together to sort it.”
That would be me, you donkey, and it’s NOT working fine.

Another was a bit more knowledgeable and seemed incredulous that EE shoved cat5e cables with the hub – then he went and spoilt it by saying the network port did look slow – and that the solution was to use cat 8 cables, asking if I had any.

(If you don’t know, cat8 is a 40Gb/s cable used for high end data centres.
You can run good quality cat6 cable up to 100 meters at 10Gbps without needing amplification, with minimal signal attenuation (loss) within 30m. This should be no trouble to a router. Cat 8 however is only really good for 30m! Horses for courses)

The final solution of the day from them was a hard reset of the router from their end. Fair enough, I’ve needed that from providers before. Not a big deal…

Except I’d tinkered like a mad genius to get wifi into a second room (and from it wired Internet via a switch there) and bare bones wired Internet (85Mb/s) in another room – and the reset of the Smart hub killed the connection to the second smart hub and it’s been flashing orange since!
(I did get the wifi extender to reconnect eventually. It took nearly 7 hours of moving it to various places around the room, retrying, rebooting it and the main hub, and a lot of exasperation all around).

Meanwhile – after I’d got it connecting at all – my main PC dropped from 86Mb/s via wired to 6Mb/s via wifi from an on-board card (with no aerial) because the network can’t negotiate the IP allocation between the switch and a wired ethernet card.

For some reason, the EE hub would not connect directly to the switch at all, and even then, barely and with a lot of fiddling. In contrast, Virgin’s hub connected seemlessly with no tinkering required.

I might be unfair but, in my opinion, EE’s tech support seem ignorant and are just too stressful to deal with. Also, it seems to me, EE’s Smart Hub 7 Pro is a donkey’s arse. If all you want is wifi, in one room, damn, it’s nice. But if you have anything more complex, let alone an office network with a lot of ports, give it a miss, because their support teams seem worse than unhelpful and their hub (unless they sent a faulty unit) does not appear to be network friendly.

It may be a conflict between their hub and one of my switches, or perhaps it is a faulty unit, it doesn’t matter. I have a major issue and they either could not or would not help (sometimes brusquely so). Not just one, but three or four support staff, unwilling or unable to understand, to help in any meaning full way…

If this is how they treat new customers – customers that still have 14 days to cancel – I dread to imagine how they treat customers once they are locked into a two-year contract!.

Here’s the thing, and it’s got me wound up too. I made it clear to the last guy I spoke to: if your hub cannot properly connect to my switch and the rest of my network, I WILL cancel.

He proposed a short term solution, to send out another wifi extender – (so I now need at least 2 wifi extenders) – suggesting that I just give it a week or two to settle.

A week or two… by which time my right to cancel within 14-days will have expired. So my next call was to cancel.

Guess what…

“I’m sorry, Sir, we can’t cancel your account because you have an order for a wifi extender.”
Me: “Has it been sent?”
EE: “No, but it’s on the system”
Me: “Then cancel it.”
EE: “Can’t do that Sir. But I tell you what, I’ll pass this to business and they will be able to help you.”

Fun fact:
EE don’t offer business broadband, they did, once, apparently, but BT bought EE so now they don’t.
BT do offer “business broadband”, but only at up to 900Mb/s (not 1.6Gb/s) and only using the Wi-Fi Smart Hub 3, not the (seemingly not so) Smart Hub Pro with Wi-Fi 7.
So, either the person was ignorant – or they were lying.

<sarcasm>The fun never ends</sarcasm>

So, this is were are at the minute:

EE can’t – won’t – help with a network issue and are stalling as the 14 day window to cancel the order runs down. The last attempt I had resulted in them ‘losing the line’ and no attempt to reconnect the call. I will try again tomorrow.

Anyway, Virgin reconnected my router with them within minutes of asking and – lo and behold – allow the switches etc were working normally. Funny that, eh!

BUT, I left Virgin as I was out of contract (it being up for renewal, or a rolling month to month) and their system does not like that. It does not like that at all. They can and did reconnect my Internet, but any attempt to add to the package – like a landline, a mobile sim, a bundle – their systems blocks. It needs 30 days. A fault in the system, apparently.

So I have to call Virgin again tomorrow too!

To be continued!

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History lesson first:

Basically, incumbents like BT refused point blank to give up on expensive leased lines and had to be dragged kicking and screaming (in absolute denial) into the 21st century. I had (I think) a T3 line installed in one of my offices in the 90s and the installation charge – just for connecting the line – was £34,000. Fortunately, I was just enquiring (albeit seriously) and they took it as an order and rushed to install it and get me to sign up!

For clarity, at the time the rental on a T1 (1.5Mb/s) was around £1,200 a month, for a T3 (45Mb/s) ten times that – in the order of £15,000 a month!

Then Telewest said “We’ll do it for £35 a month” – and the industry lost their mind.

Around the same time, in Canada, Bell started to roll it out (at faster speeds) for $100 CAN a month and incumbents their lobbied the government to try to stop them, or to force their prices up.
(By that time I’d been looking into xDSL for a couple of years, since hearing about it at a trade show from a Norwegian company.)

My personal view is that aged senior staff at incumbents BT are still pissed at losing the lucrative ‘glory days’ of leased lines in the 90s and their corporate mentality still reflects this!

See also:

2015: To Infinity and beyond. The joys of changing Internet providers

2021: Virgin’ on the ridiculous