swill453 wrote:GeoffF100 wrote:The exception is where your provider does not use the BT network (e.g. Virgin), but that is about to change.
What's about to change with Virgin? It's always going to be far more difficult to change providers to/from Virgin cable as it uses entirely different cabling to the house.
We don't even have BT-style sockets or cabling.
Scott.
I suppose it depends on your perspective, and maybe past experiences. I have in the past moved between ADSL (i.e. over landline) providers, from ADSL provider to Virgin, and am about to move from Virgin to an FTTP provider (TalkTalk over the OpenReach "Full Fibre" network). After having one ADSL to ADSL transfer go so catastrophically wrong that it was positively Kafkaesque(*) I find it far more reassuring knowing that, because I am swapping from one cabling system (Virgin) to another (FTTP), I can delay cancelling my previous service until I am sure my new service is working. Sure, that means I will probably have about 5 weeks when I am paying for 2 services but whether that extra £60 is worth the extra peace of mind depends I suppose on how important reliable broadband is to you and perhaps also, as mentioned, how badly stung you have been by any bad experiences in the past.
My experiences on getting a new cabling system installed have been good so far. I have done it twice now, initial TeleWest cable about 25 years ago and then Virgin more modern cable a couple of years ago, and a week tomorrow I will do it the third time to get fibre all the way into my flat. Yes they need to drill a cable into your home but I have found all the crews good and efficient and very helpful in terms of putting the internal connection box where I wanted it. Of course that does assume that the area one lives in has the necessary cabling running close to the property in the first place but if that is the case I personally would not be put off going to a system that did require a crew to come and run a new cable type into my property. I'm actually in a third floor flat and the fibre crew will be bringing some portable scaffolding to run the cable up the side of the building all at its own cost. (I assume it will be at OpenReach's cost but maybe it's TalkTalk that foots the bill, I'm not sure but in any event it is costing me nothing.)
- Julian
(*) I was without internet for about 6 weeks because the provider I was trying to move to kept having its activation request fail to execute correctly on the OpenReach network for reasons that OpenReach claimed were unknown and the only recommended course of action was to retry a few days later. That went on forever until eventually it turned out that OpenReach had known all along why the activation requests were failing but wasn't allowed to tell my new provider due to confidentiality issues. And once the line was finally connected it kept de-activating my service. That eventually turned out to be because there were "zombie robotic stop orders" in the system - yes really, apparently a "zombie robotic stop order" is a thing, or at least was at the time, and trust me you do not want to end up encountering those; they took about another week to defeat!