Virgin moving to 18 month contracts?

ISP Review is reporting that Virgin Media are planning two imminent changes. Firstly, the 516Mbps plan will no longer be “exclusive” to their TV bundles and can soon be purchased as a normal broadband package. Secondly, the 516Mbps Oomph TV bundle will at the same time be upgraded for free to offer 600Mbps (probably with the same upload as before) – you won’t be able to get this speed without TV (most likely to keep Oomph subscribers happy, given what they pay). Mind you, I'm on Oomph and I'm rarely seeing speeds even half of what I pay for

The changes are expected to be announced at some point around the end of June. At the same time ISP Review believes that Virgin Media will probably make a few other changes to their packages, such as possibly switching from 12 to 18 month contract terms and removing the install cost of a v6. 

All 4 app added to the V6

Here's some good news in these troublesome times; Virgin Media has added the full All 4 app to the V6 and it's available at no extra cost for us Virgin TV customers.

The addition of the All 4 app provides Virgin Media customers with the full All4 experience for the first time, enabling us to watch more programmes and on demand content than the limited seven-day catch up service we had before.

All4 has hundreds of box sets including iconic Channel 4 series as well as original and exclusive shows including US acquisitions Freaks and Geeks and Seinfeld; featured channels such as Adult Swim and the best global drama from Walter Presents; and catch up from all of Channel 4’s broadcast channels including a number of movies from Film4. Some promised series are missing though - notably Scrubs and ER - hopefully these will appear soon as both are available on the NowTV version of All 4.

What I'm not clear on is what resolution it broadcasts in. It's not advertised as High Definition but the picture quality is very good. Does anyone know?

Virgin Media broadband during lockdown

Normally I keep this blog to Virgin Media TV matters, but I guess everyone who reads my posts here is also a Virgin Media broadband customer, so let me ask this question:

Is it just me, or has VM's broadband service deteriorated into a slow and unreliable liability in recent weeks?

Actually, I know in my own neighbourhood in South East London I'm not alone in my frustrations with the service. TV and phone have been good but the broadband, when available (and it frequently isn't) has been unusable during the working day. For example, I've just tested my current connection and I'm seeing 45mbps download, 2.68 upload. Before lockdown I'd have daytime speeds of 200+ down and 35 up. I pay for 500mbps but don't get me started on that one. And I say 'when available' as, despite the VM app telling me that there are no problems in the area, my router is rebooting four or five times a day and struggling to reconnect. 

For home working, that's unusable. For watching any on demand TV service, that's unusable. And all of the Virgin customers I know in neighbouring streets have the same complaint.

BT, Sky etc are rock solid. Virgin say in the press that they have more that enough capacity to provide a full broadband service to meet the demands of lockdown families and workers, but our experience suggests otherwise.

I can't get through to customer services on the phone but I have managed to book an engineer for tomorrow evening via the website. I'm not hopeful. I suspect there are over-populated street cabinets to blame and Virgin don't appear to be in any great hurry to resolve that issue. They just take our money.

My contract is up for renewal in August. I've been with NTL/Virgin since the 90s. I've run this blog since 2007. We've come a long way since the old 'NTHell' days but this current issue is a deal breaker for me and my family. We're have to use our phones' personal hotspots instead of the broadband we pay for. 

So, is it just me or are you having issues, too? Please let me and this blog's readership know.

UPDATE: Just had a friend at Virgin confirm the following:

"you do have a signal fault. Poor SNR showing on some frequencies for both downstream and upstream. I checked a couple of your neighbours' modems and they don't show the same errors, so it does seem to be just your installation. Hopefully the tech will resolve it tomorrow.

Your area is also flagged for a capacity upgrade"