Ugh, broadband woes

digitalscream

For the last few years, I've been with Upp - full fibre to the home, gigabit up and down. It's been great.

Then, this year, I got a notification that they'd been bought out by Virgin Media, and the messaging has been ludicrously confused, nobody seems to know whether the symmetric speeds will be kept as they are, or if we'll be migrated to the crappy 100Mbit/s upstream they put on their normal service. With that in mind, I managed to get another local symmetric fibre provider (there's only one other, lightspeed.co.uk) to install, which they did on Tuesday.

First problem, which I realised immediately, is that they actively block port forwarding - that causes me massive headaches, as I need it for work (and the forum, occasionally). They say they'll get back to me within a couple of days, and I heard nothing more.

Got up this morning to find that the whole connection was down. Call customer services - "We don't have any engineers working and we can't provide you with any alternative".

FFS. They wouldn't even attempt to diagnose the problem from their end. Fortunately, I had the foresight not to cancel my previous connection, and given the port forwarding issue I put off cancelling just in case. So...now I've got the old fibre cable coming in through the window, and I've told Lightspeed to come and collect their shitty Nokia router and remove the cable.

Unfortunately, this means my only remaining option is to switch to Virgin Media when they take over the connection. Bloody annoying.

There is no point to this thread, other than me ranting and complaining. Not a great start to the long weekend.

robgilmo

digitalscream said:

For the last few years, I've been with Upp - full fibre to the home, gigabit up and down. It's been great.

Then, this year, I got a notification that they'd been bought out by Virgin Media, and the messaging has been ludicrously confused, nobody seems to know whether the symmetric speeds will be kept as they are, or if we'll be migrated to the crappy 100Mbit/s upstream they put on their normal service. With that in mind, I managed to get another local symmetric fibre provider (there's only one other, lightspeed.co.uk) to install, which they did on Tuesday.

First problem, which I realised immediately, is that they actively block port forwarding - that causes me massive headaches, as I need it for work (and the forum, occasionally). They say they'll get back to me within a couple of days, and I heard nothing more.

Got up this morning to find that the whole connection was down. Call customer services - "We don't have any engineers working and we can't provide you with any alternative".

FFS. They wouldn't even attempt to diagnose the problem from their end. Fortunately, I had the foresight not to cancel my previous connection, and given the port forwarding issue I put off cancelling just in case. So...now I've got the old fibre cable coming in through the window, and I've told Lightspeed to come and collect their shitty Nokia router and remove the cable.

Unfortunately, this means my only remaining option is to switch to Virgin Media when they take over the connection. Bloody annoying.

There is no point to this thread, other than me ranting and complaining. Not a great start to the long weekend.

I feel your pain, at least you are still online though, that could have been a nightmare otherwise.

oaf

I use OPNsense as firewall/router. Get the ISP device to pass through as much as possible (for me that means "modem mode") and then deal with port forwarding yourself. OPNsense works fine as a VM. Slightly faffy but fairly straightforward.

digitalscream

oaf said:

I use OPNsense as firewall/router. Get the ISP device to pass through as much as possible (for me that means "modem mode") and then deal with port forwarding yourself. OPNsense works fine as a VM. Slightly faffy but fairly straightforward.

Yeah...it's not their router that's blocking it. They actively prevent incoming connections at a network level before it even gets to the router.

Near as I can tell, it's because they're proxying or NATing all the traffic - the router IPv4 address is completely different to the IP address external services see, although weirdly they're both public IP addresses. They say it's because there aren't enough IPv4 addresses, but then they still NAT all the IPv6 addresses anyway, so there isn't even a solution there.

EDIT: Looks like Virgin have XPS-PON built into their hub, rather than the separate ONT and router I've currently got with Upp. On the other hand, the hub does support a DMZ of sorts (basically just a host on the local network that has all its ports exposed), so I'll most likely set up an old NUC with OPNsense or similar and put it in their faux-DMZ, then run my network behind that. It does seem like their Hub 5x (the only one supporting full fibre) actually has a 10Gbe port, which is awesome - they appear to be the only ones who've realised that local wired networks might be more than gigabit (I've got 2.5Gbe throughout the house, with a couple of SFP+ ports for 10Gbe if I ever need it on every switch).

ICBM

“Virgin are the reason we ask people wanting to work from home which provider they have” - a friend who works for our local council IT support.

Good luck.

I refused to give them permission to cross my land a year or two back because they won’t let other companies use their cable, so if you let them in first you’re stuffed for using anyone else. Unfortunately BT “have no current plans” to cable our area. Their fibre to the box/copper to the house works well enough, luckily.

Neilybob

We trialled Virgin full fibre for 10 days earlier this year but we only made 5 days until I ripped it out and sent it back cost free. It kept dropping out all over the place and the support team were crap! Try rebooting the router. Are the cables connected correctly! Yuk I install network infrastructure for a large corporation I think I know what I am doing! 

We stuck with TalkTalk who are ok but don’t offer full fibre. Cheap (£20 a month) and cheerful (it works). 

digitalscream

ICBM said:

“Virgin are the reason we ask people wanting to work from home which provider they have” - a friend who works for our local council IT support.

Good luck.

I refused to give them permission to cross my land a year or two back because they won’t let other companies use their cable, so if you let them in first you’re stuffed for using anyone else. Unfortunately BT “have no current plans” to cable our area. Their fibre to the box/copper to the house works well enough, luckily.

Yeah, that's with their old coax network - the new nexfibre network is all the same as the other FTTP providers - mainly telegraph poles. And they'll be using the same fibre cable that's currently running to the house (at least they should - they'd be absolute lunatics to replace it with an identical cable from the very same pole).

oaf

@digitalscream sounds like a weird CGNAT-ish thing (but why use what could be public IPs on your side...?) A mate has been using "rathole" as a workaround and seems happy with it
https://github.com/rapiz1/rathole
Obviously the answer is to avoid ISPs that do this sort of thing (which you had done until this change of circumstances was forced on you!)

digitalscream

Neilybob said:

We trialled Virgin full fibre for 10 days earlier this year but we only made 5 days until I ripped it out and sent it back cost free. It kept dropping out all over the place and the support team were crap! Try rebooting the router. Are the cables connected correctly! Yuk I install network infrastructure for a large corporation I think I know what I am doing! 

We stuck with TalkTalk who are ok but don’t offer full fibre. Cheap (£20 a month) and cheerful (it works). 

That's...not encouraging.

spark240

Well…..I’m on BT infinity…not cheap of course….but in fairness….fairly fault free for many years.

Snags

Virgin are like any other large provider, IME. I'm on them at home (old-style, legacy NTL contract, not new fangled thing). In the 23 years we've been at this address I've had probably less than 10 periods of downtime, and only two of those for any significant period - and one of those was in winter and weather-related.

So for me, the basic service has been fine (obviously with their router in modem mode and something better behind it).

Where they are absolute dog shit is the customer service if you ever have the misfortune to need to ring them, which is almost as bad as it was under NTL (wait on hold for 59 minutes until their system drops the call at 1 hour; rinse and repeat three times before you can talk to someone and try not to scream at them because it's not their fault). They're also Not Cheap.

We also have a client with a massive fat Virgin fibre feed into their building in central London, and it's "mostly pretty good".

Of course, plenty of other experiences differ, even in my location, and loads of people hate them. I wouldn't choose them if I was starting from scratch, but I don't hate them enough to go through the pain of migration, which is not as simple as it could be for me, for various reasons.

Personally I'd always look to get an FTTP or EFM service from a smaller provider if available. Zen for name recognition, Merula who are even smaller because I'm mates with the owner (no discounts, but also no bullshit).

digitalscream

Snags said:

Personally I'd always look to get an FTTP or EFM service from a smaller provider if available. Zen for name recognition, Merula who are even smaller because I'm mates with the owner (no discounts, but also no bullshit).

Yeah, that's my strategy too - the problem is that I need the symmetric connection, and nobody else does it in the area.

GoFish

I'm another long term NTL legacy customer. Virgin are ... okay. Every provider seems to have their horror stories. It does seem like Virgin have been treading water for the last few years. Their biggest drawbacks are :

1) Their routers - work around-able by getting your own.

2) Variable customer service - sometimes okay, sometimes hellish. Seem to offer better service the longer its been between issues.

3)Upstream connection.  - Was poor when I used to check these things more. I'm sure it still is, and the worst re: symmetry.

4)Stealth price rises - This has been a particular problem in the last 5 years or so, several price hikes at £3.50 p/m with an accompanying letter treating it as a fait accomplit. I don't have a landline or TV subs so it feels like I get especially screwed. Maybe they have all been like this? 

Haych

BT have been promising to put full fibre in the ground for ages on our street.  I logged onto my account a few months ago and BT told me that full fibre was available to me as a no cost upgrade.

Great, I thought, I'll have that.  Went to check out and it wouldn't let me.  Phoned customer support and they were baffled and they wanted to know why I thought I could have full fibre.

Because your website is telling me I can, that's why.  They then told me it must be a mistake because full fibre isn't coming to our area for a while yet.  Just checked and ETA is December 2026!  FFS!

I find this wholly crap because I was here only a few months ago when a big BT Openreach van parked up at the end of our path with a massive coil on a trailer.  I popped out to ask what they were doing and I was pleased to learn they were putting fibre under the street.  We just happened to have a telecoms manhole just outside our gate.

Quite why it's going to take them another few years to connect it up and make it operational is beyond me.

So we're on a hybrid fibre thing, download speeds are ok most of the time at about 60+ Mpbs, but upload speeds are painfully slow, as I'm finding out trying to add a load of GoPro footage to the cloud!  I swear they've throttled it too, earlier in the week it wasn't so bad, but I added about 110GB of data last night and it's still uploading 16 hours later.

I have another 500GB or so to add once that's complete, could be here for weeks!

If NAS storage wasn't so expensive I'd probably ditch the cloud altogether!

digitalscream

Haych said:

If NAS storage wasn't so expensive I'd probably ditch the cloud altogether!

Well, it can be cheap, depending on what you're after and how DIY you're willing to go.

I mean, I've got 8 x 3TB SAS drives just sitting on a shelf that are never going to get used now that I've moved to SSDs. Grab a SAS card for £25, get some cables for another £20, and repurpose an old PC that's lying around (or get one for less than £100). Very little effort to turn that into a NAS.

Haych

digitalscream said:

Haych said:

If NAS storage wasn't so expensive I'd probably ditch the cloud altogether!

Well, it can be cheap, depending on what you're after and how DIY you're willing to go.

I mean, I've got 8 x 3TB SAS drives just sitting on a shelf that are never going to get used now that I've moved to SSDs. Grab a SAS card for £25, get some cables for another £20, and repurpose an old PC that's lying around (or get one for less than £100). Very little effort to turn that into a NAS.

Ah, but you obviously know what you're doing

digitalscream

Haych said:

digitalscream said:

Haych said:

If NAS storage wasn't so expensive I'd probably ditch the cloud altogether!

Well, it can be cheap, depending on what you're after and how DIY you're willing to go.

I mean, I've got 8 x 3TB SAS drives just sitting on a shelf that are never going to get used now that I've moved to SSDs. Grab a SAS card for £25, get some cables for another £20, and repurpose an old PC that's lying around (or get one for less than £100). Very little effort to turn that into a NAS.

Ah, but you obviously know what you're doing

You're asking the wrong question. The right question is...is it worth learning, because you might be able to get 24TB of drives for the price of a drive past the Midlands?

Haych

digitalscream said:

Haych said:

digitalscream said:

Haych said:

If NAS storage wasn't so expensive I'd probably ditch the cloud altogether!

Well, it can be cheap, depending on what you're after and how DIY you're willing to go.

I mean, I've got 8 x 3TB SAS drives just sitting on a shelf that are never going to get used now that I've moved to SSDs. Grab a SAS card for £25, get some cables for another £20, and repurpose an old PC that's lying around (or get one for less than £100). Very little effort to turn that into a NAS.

Ah, but you obviously know what you're doing

You're asking the wrong question. The right question is...is it worth learning, because you might be able to get 24TB of drives for the price of a drive past the Midlands?

Right, I'm tuning into your wavelength I think.  I'll PM you shortly.  Thank you!