[SOLVED] Virgin Wireless poor and no help from them

[TobinUK]

Not the greatest minded in tech but i find my way around things usually by forums or youtube vids. My wife and kids are getting very frustrated by the wifi signal we get from Virgin Media, Wifi downstairs is fine but soon as we go upstairs the signal drops 90% of the time. This has been frustrating with home school during these pandemic times as they are forced to work all in the same area and they like to go in the own rooms to do there work but its just not possible. My teenage son has to come downstairs as he burns through data. We contacted Virgin and they sent an engineer and he said he had turned something up to improve signal but doesnt seem to do much, then he suggested there was bluetooth options coming out soon and we would get them soon. We called Virgin to ask when they are available and to sum it up they didnt have any idea although they have the pods on the website.

Things we have tried are TP links which have worked for the desktop PC's x2 upstairs being wired, its just not solving the issues with smart phones, Nintendo switches etc. Virgin sent us through some wifi boosters which were terrible and we also went out and bought TP links that boost wifi and it only helps with one room and still very poor which watching things through Roku device it buffers a lot.

Someone mentioned the hubs are very poor and maybe upgrade the actual hub and do away with ISP but i wouldnt know where to start of whether this would solve our wifi problems. Our old house we had no issues and used pretty much same devices when we were with BT, we were kind of forced to go with Virgin with the speeds we wanted and not having option of fibre when we came to the new house.

Any help is appreciated.

 

[kanewolf]

Not the greatest minded in tech but i find my way around things usually by forums or youtube vids. My wife and kids are getting very frustrated by the wifi signal we get from Virgin Media, Wifi downstairs is fine but soon as we go upstairs the signal drops 90% of the time. This has been frustrating with home school during these pandemic times as they are forced to work all in the same area and they like to go in the own rooms to do there work but its just not possible. My teenage son has to come downstairs as he burns through data. We contacted Virgin and they sent an engineer and he said he had turned something up to improve signal but doesnt seem to do much, then he suggested there was bluetooth options coming out soon and we would get them soon. We called Virgin to ask when they are available and to sum it up they didnt have any idea although they have the pods on the website.

Things we have tried are TP links which have worked for the desktop PC's x2 upstairs being wired, its just not solving the issues with smart phones, Nintendo switches etc. Virgin sent us through some wifi boosters which were terrible and we also went out and bought TP links that boost wifi and it only helps with one room and still very poor which watching things through Roku device it buffers a lot.

Someone mentioned the hubs are very poor and maybe upgrade the actual hub and do away with ISP but i wouldnt know where to start of whether this would solve our wifi problems. Our old house we had no issues and used pretty much same devices when we were with BT, we were kind of forced to go with Virgin with the speeds we wanted and not having option of fibre when we came to the new house.

Any help is appreciated.

Please help us by providing model numbers for all the network hardware you are using or have tried.
What ISP speed do you pay for?
WIFI needs to be be close to the client device. Is there ethernet wiring in the house? What about coax? Could you install or pay to have cabling installed?

 

[TobinUK]

We are using the Virgin Hub 3. Currently using TP link Powerline Wif-fi Kit AV600 in one room for now upstairs which is poor signal. Also the no wifi adaptors are AV600 but none wifi and they are wired in for 2 desktop PC's upstairs.

We pay for m200 fibre which states 213mb on the website.

There is no ethernet wiring in the house apart from my gaming PC which is placed next to the hub itself. Dont understand what you mean about coax sorry At the old house i did used to run ethernet cable all the way from hub upstairs alone the wall and into what i called my gaming room at the time and used a gigabite switch, of which i still own but dont use here as gaming PC is near hub as i just mentioned

 

[kanewolf]

There is no ethernet wiring in the house apart from my gaming PC which is placed next to the hub itself. Dont understand what you mean about coax sorry

Coax cable -- like TV cable can be used for ethernet if you use adapters called MoCA. It is the best alternative to real ethernet cable.
AV600 standard powerline adapters are an old standard. The newer AV2000 units might improve your connectivity.
So you have no laptop that you can use to test wired connectivity through the powerline?

 

[TobinUK]

In that case we dont have coax cable. We do have a laptop and its not the best and rarely use it but for testing reasons i can get it out if your suggesting some testing to do?

 

[gggplaya]

So coax TV/Satellite outlets were never installed upstairs at all for the entire life of the house?? It was really popular to install back in the 80's and 90's with analog cable television. It does not need to be active service now, we're just talking about repurposing the cable coax for network usage.

Other than that, with the whole pandemic going on, it might be best to run your own ethernet upstairs, are there any connecting closests, attic or crawl spaces you could fish through? You might want to call around, I'm sure there's alot of demand for it right now. I can't imagine the labor and cat5e cable would cost that much. It would be worth it to place an access point upstair, centrally in between all the bedrooms.

Other than that, I would recommend a better powerline ethernet connector that utilizes the ground plug as well. AV2000 standard as mentioned above. You can get one for each computer. Make sure they are plugged directly onto the wall outlet and not on a surge protector strip. Try to plug them far away from other power bricks, lamps and other devices.

 

[Oasis Curator]

AV600 standard powerline adapters are an old standard. The newer AV2000 units might improve your connectivity.

What's the difference in real world terms?

I have 200MB connection but in order to get internet down the back of the house, I use an AV500 powerline. This nets me just 6Mb - 10MB. There is no real opportunity to have a network point put in and although I considered Mesh networking and then using wifi, I'm not entirely convinced it would be better, so powerlines it is.

 

[bill001g]

I almost decided to never buy tplink products again when they did the AV600 crap. These are actually av500 units that they just renamed av600. They even kept the part numbers the same and for a long time if you search by the part number you would get both av500 and av600 units for sale.
What they were doing was trying to cash in on a new standard called av2-600 and av2-1200. For whatever reason all vendors now call these av1000 and av2000.

In any case the older av500 units never even got close to 100mbps. Proof the vendors know this limitation is they all come with only 10/100 ports. Your numbers are a bit low but it is not uncommon to only get 30-50mbps. The newer units based on the AV2 standard for most people get at least 150mbps but it is not uncommon to get 300mbps in a house with good wires.

The only non ethernet technology that consistently runs very fast is MoCA which is why it has been recommended by others in this thread. The newer moca technology can easily get full gigabit speeds but it need coax cable between rooms to run on.

 

[gggplaya]

What's the difference in real world terms?

I have 200MB connection but in order to get internet down the back of the house, I use an AV500 powerline. This nets me just 6Mb - 10MB. There is no real opportunity to have a network point put in and although I considered Mesh networking and then using wifi, I'm not entirely convinced it would be better, so powerlines it is.

I have some actiontec AV500(no ground plug) that I ran to a separate detached garage about 25 yards away from my house and it gets consistent 20-30mbps. I replaced them with AV1200 tplink units that get about 40-60mbps on the same receptacles.

Make sure you aren't connecting through a surge protector. It should be on a wall outlet by itself.

 

[Oasis Curator]

Make sure you aren't connecting through a surge protector. It should be on a wall outlet by itself.

Yeah, they're directly in the wall.

To be fair though, the computer out the back is on a different ring main (and even behind it's own consumer unit) but I have a chimney, bathroom and concrete floor to go through so a direct cable is going to be a hell of a lot of work, especially as this isn't our forever home.
But I'll see. If I can get a cable cheaply to the next room, it may not be too much effort to get it round and in.

 

[gggplaya]

Wait how are you measuring your speed?

When you say 6-10MB/s, are you using a capital B(bytes) or a lowercase b(bits)?

1 Byte = 8 bits

So 10MB/s = 80 Mb/s.

80mbps is typical for powerline, but 6-10mbps is pretty low even for powerline.

For 200mbps internet, your max theoretical download speed is 25 MB/s.

 

[Oasis Curator]

Wait how are you measuring your speed?

When you say 6-10MB/s, are you using a capital B(bytes) or a lowercase b(bits)?

Erm, whatever the speed that speedtest.net shows
I know it's low as wireless in the living room gets 180.