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 to 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 want it installed 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.

I spoke to another engineer over this who says there is no technical reason for this and they are supposed to put it where the customer requests (if possible) and that the guy “just didn’t want to do the extra work.”

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…

Here’s the thing: If you Google ‘Smart Hub 7 Pro not seeing switch‘ you get this:

My take:
The hub is being pushed – sold – on its fast wi-fi but it has an inherent flaw. It was not ready for release, but they released it anyway, figuring either they’d sort it, or it wouldn’t affect too many people (and they could fob them off). A firmware patch might well fix it, but it’s possible it’s a hardware issue and the hub isn’t fit for purpose. An update should sort it but for no, for wired networks, it’s not fit for purpose.

The way it works (and especially the extenders) is it’s a mesh wifi hub that has (questionable) ethernet support, when you really need a router with wifi. Moreso with the extenders. I’d want an access point you connect to the network, they offer a wifi connection with network ports. Arse backwards for me.

More worryingly, I think, if this is indeed a known issue, then they are lying to customers about there being a problem, possibly lying to their support staff too.

Shame on you EE!

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 we 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!

4th February: EE

So, it’s still a shit show! I finally got EE to cancel my contract after finding a sympathic (and northen English) support person to talk too.

I was also reliably informed that the engineer could have installed the full fibre were I asked but basically it would have mean an extra few minutes work – and he presumably didn’t want to bother. Maybe if he’d put the line where I asked everything would have gone a lot better, I’d maybe still be with EE for years to come. But he didn’t want to do the work… Just paid for the job, I guess, whatever quickest and easiest for him. #BadWorkEthnics

I’m also told that the likes of EE (and the rest) drag their heels on purpose to try to get to to change your mind and stay (or run over the 14 days and have to pay a huge fee to break the contract).

…

4th February: Virgin

Also still a shit show!

They didn’t actually tell me, I had to call to find this out, but they send an engineer up from Birmingham to sort my connection. Lovely bloke. Got a new, better hub out of it to. (I had asked for this when I was in contract and told to sod off by support :/ )

ANYWAY, Internet is great, BUT they totally messed up my phone transfer and instead of moving me back and keeping my number they issued me a new number. This is getting sorted, apparently. Also, they failed to send the SIM I ordered:

So, off I go again to Virgin, issuing a more offical complaint:

What happened?
You appear to have wholly failed to honour your side of the deal! And I’m NOT happy about this!

I was out of contract and in the process of moving to EE (unhappy with Virgin for various reasons), but in the end, on 24th January, I changed my mind and decided to renew and upgrade my package (mobile, phone, internet).

It was messy and needed several calls – not helped by struggling with Indian call centres (they are always polite, but not always listening/understanding fully).

Anyway, you connected me to the Internet instantly. Kudos for that.

You messed up the phone order, which should have been a simple transfer back to yourselves, and this issue is still ongoing.
I have a line – EVENTUALLY – but not our own number back (yet). This despite two or three calls to your “support”.
This is still ongoing: despite several messages confirming that I had requested to have my number transferred back, you still assigned me a new number anyway! Seriously, what the heck!?

MORE ANNOYING YET, I ordered a phone SIM. You didn’t send one. More calls to support. More confused waffle and excuses.

According to my order:

“This Contract Information will expire on 31st January 2026 at 23:59:59. If you wish to proceed, please continue and complete your order before it expires.”

So I called AGAIN on the 29th and spoke to a polite lady (Deeksha) was said:
“…the Sim will get delivered within next 3-5 working days from the date on which the deal was taken.”

I’m still waiting, and since it’s past the deadline, I can only assume that, due to miscommunication or incompetence, the order was cancelled. Cancelled despite my trying several times to complete.

---

What would you like Virgin Media to do to resolve your issues?
Send the SIM I ordered and train your staff better.

Please contactme via whichever method is most expedient!

I will be contacting support YET AGAIN in a minute over this.

More call centres in the UK would be good, but I imagine Rachel Reeves’s attack on businesses and the hike in employer National Insurance contributions have killed any chance of that happening.

I’ll give you my landline number below, but – as I say – you messed that up, so I don’t know what it will be when you call, but it SHOULD be as below (currently with EE) (I now have two lines at present and I am NOT happy about this.)

[sarcasm] It just keeps getting better and better! [/sarcasm]

No, I haven’t redacted the number, that’s what it is: ****

We’ve received your complaint

Your complaint reference : ****

Your complaint will be acknowledged within 48 hours of receipt and we aim to resolve all complaints within 28 days of receipts.

[button]Track your complaint[/button]

=>

There’s nothing to see here

We’ve not got any ongoing issues connected with your account, so there’s nothing to see here.

FFS!

Virgin and O2 have no record on my order. This order, that they confirmed:

[Contract summary sheet number:100410799025]

We’ve got your order!
Hello Paul,

Thanks for choosing Virgin Media O2, here’s a summary of your order. Your self-install pack is on its way and your services will be up and running soon.

Your order summary
Order reference:

OT1001450704

Order date:

Saturday 24th January 2026

Package:
Volt Gig1 Fibre Broadband

10GB O2 Classic Plan SIM

Installation address:

…

Estimated delivery date:

Tuesday 27th January 2026

AND SO IT CONTINUES…

They (Virgin / O2) are claiming they have no record of me, my details, my order, and offered a “solution” of signing me up on a new contract – at twice the price I signed up for.

They have no record of me… as they email a copy of my last bill to confirm I was who I said I was… as I chat to them using the Virgin Media broadband they supplied. On the phone line they (half-arsed) connected yesterday (that will take another 9 days to sort because they messed that up too).

So, they needed my bank details (part of) to confirm I’m the account holder – of the account and order they “have no record of”.

I am LIVID!

Even contacting Virgin media is a nightmare. The online chat link – if you can even find it, rarely works, dialling 150 (if on their network) is autobot hell and any attempt to talk to a real person reroutes you to Indian call centres when they struggle with your accent (and vis-versa), there’s a language barrier and – polite as they are – they seem programmed to fob you off, it seems. But they are the cheapest option – for Virgin.

GET YOUR SHIT TOGETHER VIRGIN MEDIA!

VM O2 complaint number: C-0402262449

Still a sodding nightmare, you phone Virgin Media on 0345 454 1111. If you pick Option 1 for VM, Option 4 to change service and option 4 again to cancel this will get you through to customer relations a bit smarter. Funny how that works….

Not tried these numbers, but /reddit also offered these free phone numbers:
Sales: 0800 052 0422
Technical Support: 0800 052 0942

…

If EE’s hub – and their support – weren’t a pile a shit I’d swap over to them, but they are. Talk about a rock and a hard place.

Final solution, such as it is

6th February: No contact from Virgin or O2

Talking to an agent now – over a crankling and occasionally breaking line to an Indian call centre, with various other conversations in the background. The cohesion between Virgin Media and O2 is negligible at best. Really wishing EE’s hub had actually worked properly!

Virgin media support is utter shite. Whoever took the original order seems to have forget to put in a crucial order ref number. Polite as they are, I really hate dealing with overseas call centres. Whatever’s cheapest is best for corporates, screw their customers, we have them on contract now.

Sorry, Virgin, still in my 14 days. I have options, and I’m angrier with you and your incompetence and indifference now than I was when you hiked up the bill 35%!

They want to sort it by giving me a new SIM – and a new contract for 30% more. The difference is actually only £2 a month, but it’s the principal. They have screwed up every step of this order, ignored complaints, dropped complaints into a virtual dustbin, failed to call back when promised and, however politely, are arguing I have to pay a premium to fix their mistakes.

NO!

The level of incompetence and indifference I’m experiencing is shambolic. They messed up the order, failed to follow up on complaints and offered to “fix” the problem by issuing a new SIM and contract – at 30% more than agreed.

Talking to customer complaints now. They still won’t/can’t move on the price but have agreed to credit my account £48 to counter this.

In the end – after threatening to cancel phones, broadband and SIM, and politely but firmly expressing how really, REALLY annoyed I was with the lot of them (EE included) – they applied £70 to my account. I’d much rather they’d just got it right in the first place, but I’ll take their money; it can go to covering all the hours I spent on the phone to them!

It’s still FAR from ideal:
I didn’t go back to Virgin because they have the best offer – they don’t,
the best service and support – again, questionable,
the best mobile (nope, EE beat them hands down),
but because a) EE’s Hub didn’t work and b) EE may have lied about it, gaslit me, and in an exchange that beggars belief, told me “Not our problem, sort it yourself.”

Just don’t lie to your fecking customers, especially not if they are tech savvy. All EE had to do was say, “Look, there’s an issue with the Hub, we can try sending you another, or you can wait for a firmware patch. Our guys are working on it.”

But no, corporate mindset: never admit anything, always transfer the blame to the customer, never allow anything to reflect badly on us. Our reputation (and share value) must never be tarnished. So, they then shit on their customers and think it won’t reflect badly on them. Go figure!

If you live in a cardboard house with no wired ethernet, EE, all day long. If you rely on ethernet though, I feel EE cannot be trusted. I was really happy with the package and deal they offered. Would have probably stayed with them for years, but their installers were lazy, their tech support staff ignorant and, it seems, they (EE) covered up a critical, deal-breaking issue with their hub.

Neither EE or Virgin Media are good in my opinion, they both got too big, too detached.

My phones still aren’t right, I’ve a network router that can’t network (and is going back in disgrace) and, once more, my mobile SIM is promised “in 1-3 working days”.

I can order a wifi 7 router or 16 port switch from Amazon and get it in 2 hours, next day at the latest, but a SIM a quarter the size of a postage stamp that I could walk to town and pick up…

EE and Virgin Media should both hang their heads in shame! 💩#Shitshow💩

For the record, I did call EE’s support one more time, got to speak to a polite and knowledgeable lady (Indian call centre again…). She said they know of no issues with their Hub, while pointing out (fairly) that they can’t test for compatability with every switch out there.

That said, the main one I was using is from the top-selling, most accessible, network switch brand in the UK and is frequently cited as top choices for home and small office setups due to its reliability and plug-and-play functionality, so absolutely should have been included in any trials. Out of curiously, I ordered another, faster, better switch. No noticable difference to the network using Virgin’s latest hub. EE’s top of the range hub though? Still can’t see the switch or network.
But EE assume me that it’s working fine, or perhaps – as Activision-Blizzard like to say, “It’s working as intended.”

Not the same issue I’m seeing, but interesting given EE’s support know of no issues:
(Aug 2025): Router Connectivity Woes Strike Some of EE’s 1.6Gbps UK Broadband Users.

As an aside, a good wi-fi 7 router will set you can about £600 and still get about 10% of people saying, “Don’t touch this.” I like TP-link and Asus, but won’t touch Netgear ever again. Cisco are sweet, of course, but come at Cisco prices . Still, pity Cisco don’t make broadband wi-fi hubs, now that would be something worth paying extra for!

10th February, 2026

*bangs head against the wall*

Landline number is still a couple of days from being sorted, but at least I know were I’m up to with it.

O2…

Yesterday I arranged to transfer a number from EE to O2. All on the system correct. This morning they sent an email saying:

You’ll soon be with us

Hi Paul,

Phone Number: [redacted]

Just a heads up – we’ll be porting your number on 11/02/2026. On this date, your number will be disconnected from your previous provider and connected to O2.

 
Looks fine, doesn’t it – except the ‘redacted’ number given was my O2 number. Their email implied that instead of transferring another (EE) number to my O2 account they were transferring my O2 number to O2, which is stupid.

It should read something like: “Account number: [01234567890] (contact number: 0770 555 1234) re:…”
Or “Regarding transfer of [redacted] to your account:[01234567890] (contact number: 0770 555 1234)

Theirs is badly worded communication. I asked them to fix it to save confusing people.

They really are hard work sometimes!

And there’s more!!!

I went to watch something on NOW last night – and I’m unsubscribed. Looking, I’ve “updated” my payment details (I haven’t), so I dug deeper.

Turns out – despite me pointedly telling EE that I don’t need their Now offer as I already have it they contacted Now immediately and transfer control of my account from NOW to themselves.

I’ll repeat that: Without my permission or knowledge, and in fact again it, EE took over control of my NOW account.

But it gets worse:

NOW support :

“I see that you have requested to change your NOW account to BT/EE on 13-01-2026 14:37:31. Since then your account is managed by EE.

We have no access to unlink from them as the account has been changed from your side, since the account has linked to EE we will not be able to see any cancellation activation or billings on the account.”

…

“I mean you can manage the memberships and billings via EE but not NOW.”

[I point out I cancelled all my account with EE and that they (NOW) have lost control of their own product and system]

“Paul I will definitely add your point as a very serious feedback to our concerned team.
But as of now I can only be help you to redirect to EE. As every account which is partnered with EE cannot be controlled by NOW support.

Even I have tried unlinking but there is no option for me to do so.

So now I have to run up more phonebill to purge the parasitic-feeling hold of EE!

You might also be interested in these…

: Ookla: broadband connection speed test

: Cisco Realspeed ‘Sam Knows’ broadband and router speed test

A word on wi-fi:

Wi-Fi signal strength is heavily dictated by the materials it must pass through, as every barrier absorbs or reflects a portion of the radio waves:

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.)

‘Fun’ fact: Did you know the UK has the slowest and generally most expensive internet in Europe. In Portugal, for instance, you can get 10Gb/s for €49 (~£42) a month, e.g. MEO

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