Virgin Media Super Hub 3 - Appalling Wifi

DigitalRelish

DigitalRelish

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Has anybody else had to deal with really poor wifi performance from their Super Hub 3? I've only been back with VM for a few months, but it got to the point that I decided to buy and install a separate wifi router. Just got a relatively cheap Netgear AC1750, hooked it up to the Super Hub which is now relegated to modem mode and the difference is astounding! I'm quite surprised, given how long they've been in the ISP business, just how bad their kit is and it seems I'm not the only one as I've found many others experience the same.
 
Remember it's not actually them that make the kit.

For example my superhub 2ac is netgear.. To be fair that wasn't too bad, it just didn't quite cover the whole house.

Different routers will have different strengths and different antenna patterns etc etc. One will work better for some environments than others etc.
 
neil_g said:
Remember it's not actually them that make the kit.

For example my superhub 2ac is netgear.. To be fair that wasn't too bad, it just didn't quite cover the whole house.

Different routers will have different strengths and different antenna patterns etc etc. One will work better for some environments than others etc.
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But given they have to support the kit they supply you think they'd opt for better performing kit and stable connectivity ought to be a given at any rate.

gremlin16 said:
Mine is garbage. Needs resetting once a week. I have a plug in repeater too, but it can’t repeat a signal if there isn’t one there!

Wired is ok though.
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Same here. I have a wifi extender too, but I also had to resort to a powerline wifi extender because of the poor wifi from the Super Hub. The wifi extender works fine with the new Netgear router, though.
 
I was going to cancel Virgin while using the Hub 2 and then 2ac, they were terrible.

I’ve had good, consistent WiFi since getting the Hub 3. It was installed by a senior tech who also rewired from the road to the house after complaints to the CEOs office and I always get speeds higher than I pay for now. Been perfect for around 6-7 months now.
 
Basic question. Have you changed wi-fi channel on the router? Ive had a lot of trouble recently with sky and resetting th3 channel seems to have addressed. Assume some sort of overlap or interference on that specific channel
 
Dave1 said:
I was going to cancel Virgin while using the Hub 2 and then 2ac, they were terrible.

I’ve had good, consistent WiFi since getting the Hub 3. It was installed by a senior tech who also rewired from the road to the house after complaints to the CEOs office and I always get speeds higher than I pay for now. Been perfect for around 6-7 months now.
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I similar teething issues despite having previously been with VM a few years ago. Have had VM engineers out at least 3 times already; a couple of times were due to external faults and incorrect rewiring, once was an engineer to fit some kind of pass-through filter to the Super Hub.

Jim_Tod said:
Basic question. Have you changed wi-fi channel on the router? Ive had a lot of trouble recently with sky and resetting th3 channel seems to have addressed. Assume some sort of overlap or interference on that specific channel
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Yup. Tried various channels even channels free from neighbours' wifi signals.

It's a real shame VM customers can't just hop onto other VM Hubs like I could with BT.
 
Mine is also dire. I can't even get an ethernet signal now to the plug in thing that I've put downstairs for direct connection to the Playstation. I was also thinking of getting a seperate router.. .. ..
 
Siting is very important. As more & more neighbours started using WiFi my Virgin WiFi has got progressively worse. When there were only three others I could see in my house my WiFi went all over my three storey house, all over the garden, and about 50 yards up the street. Now that I can see 10-20 wifi signals in the house it struggles to get past one floor.

So I read the Virgin guide about best siting and managed to improve it a bit. Then I had to move a sofa and had to get the wires out of the way, so temporarily stuck the WiFi right up against a wall, a supposedly bad position. Now I get much better WiFi, reaching all three floors again!
 
I was with virgin 15 years. The first 12 fine but then I moved to my new address and it was awful. On the phone to them all the time. Engineers out every couple if months. I finally had enough of paying over £50 for broadband that never worked, TV I never watched and landline that I never used. In fact the only time the phone rang was virgin pestering me trying to sell something which was a weekly occurence.
 
With regard to the original post - it's widely known that the original Superhub and the 3dont have the best wifi coverage.

As the OP found out though its nothing that modem mode and a third party router can't usually sort out.

It's worth also downloading the app "WiFi analyser" as it can tell you if your channel sharing with neighbours. If so you can go into the hub settings and change the channel for an improvement in wifi signal.
 
Yep, I had the Superhub 2 and then 3, then the 2ac. Now use that in modem mode, and use a Linksys Velop mesh router setup - the increase in WiFi speed and range is astonishing compared to the Superhubs performance.
 
I have a 4G MiFi dongle from Three, plugged directly into my PC and I must admit the speed is quite impressive - up to 70Mb/sec download and 50Mb/sec upload - depending on the time of day.

So far though haven't found a website that downloads at anywhere near this speed.
.
 
One thing I didn't consider was having a mesh wifi set-up. Those who have them, what are your thoughts on them over using wifi and homeplug wifi extenders?
 
DigitalRelish said:
But given they have to support the kit they supply you think they'd opt for better performing kit and stable connectivity ought to be a given at any rate.
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Its always going to be a cost thing. To provide a service and the best performing router is going to ramp prices.

When the standard kit works fine for 90% of the customer base...

DigitalRelish said:
One thing I didn't consider was having a mesh wifi set-up. Those who have them, what are your thoughts on them over using wifi and homeplug wifi extenders?
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I got the tplink deco system on my vm. I had a couple of dead spots in my house which this fixed.

As a rule of thumb multiple nodes will in most cases be a better solution than one single strong node.
 
I'm sure Virgin reuse and reissue their routers. I dumped them quite a long time ago for BT and I will never go back to them. Far too unreliable.

The 150Mbps speed I was on (and superseded) was only ever good for P2P the rare time I actually used it for this and when it actually worked.

Virgin Business is more reliable but still has random downtimes.
 
I’ve had VM two years and it’s great! I work from home and online 14 hours a day and it’s only been down once for a bout an hour
 
I had so many apparent problems with my "Superhub" that Virgin replaced it.
I continued having similar problems (drop outs requiring a reset) with the replacement.
One thing that annoyed me about Virgin was that you could check the connection speed and it showed 50Mbps, then test it again ten minutes later and it was down to less than 15Mbps.

What brought things to a head was when my Virgin service failed and it took them 19 days to get it working again (that was the second time - the first time it failed it took 6 days to fix.)

I'm no longer with Virgin.
 
Heard many bad things about the Superhab 3, however I did upgrade and the first couple of weeks there were quite a few issues but a few tweaks here and there and no issues at al,l WiFi is pretty good covers the whole house and garden.

I did try swapping away form them a few years back due to trying to save money and althought other providers claim "Fibre" its only fibre to the exchange box then it uses the phone wires to the house, and our phone line can only get 4 or 5 mbs
 
Fatheadedlizard said:
I did try swapping away form them a few years back due to trying to save money and althought other providers claim "Fibre" its only fibre to the exchange box then it uses the phone wires to the house, and our phone line can only get 4 or 5 mbs
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That is correct, it is FTTC (fibre to the cabinet) then copper cable from the green BT box to your home.
FFTP (fibre to the premises) is available but the last time I looked at this BT were charging £500 to run fibre from the cabinet to the property.
 
hashcake said:
That is correct, it is FTTC (fibre to the cabinet) then copper cable from the green BT box to your home.
FFTP (fibre to the premises) is available but the last time I looked at this BT were charging £500 to run fibre from the cabinet to the property.
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Yeah thats why I stuck with Virgin, they came out when I was having issues and found the pipe the cable ran through had colapsed, so wanted to dig up the street just to re-lay may cable (at their expense) but we found a way of routing another cable.
 
Brian G said:
What brought things to a head was when my Virgin service failed and it took them 19 days to get it working again (that was the second time - the first time it failed it took 6 days to fix.)

I'm no longer with Virgin.
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We had months upon months of almost no internet and then we were told there would be a further 9 months of disruption whilst they upgraded their infrastructure. They had oversubscribed with new customers apparently and basically screwed over their current and loyal customers so I left.
 
gman said:
We had months upon months of almost no internet and then we were told there would be a further 9 months of disruption whilst they upgraded their infrastructure. They had oversubscribed with new customers apparently and basically screwed over their current and loyal customers so I left.
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To be fair, Virgin did credit me for the times I had less than dial-up speed, but that's not really the point.
It's quite surprising (to me anyway) how much you come to rely on an internet connection, especially if you are doing business.
My BT connection may only be 34Mbps but it's rock solid and always measures the same speed whenever I've measured it - no slowing down like Virgin.
As a bonus the BT upload speed is double the Virgin speed, which is nice when I'm uploading image files to send to the printing company.
 
Brian G said:
To be fair, Virgin did credit me for the times I had less than dial-up speed, but that's not really the point.
It's quite surprising (to me anyway) how much you come to rely on an internet connection, especially if you are doing business.
My BT connection may only be 34Mbps but it's rock solid and always measures the same speed whenever I've measured it - no slowing down like Virgin.
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Yet since getting the Superhub 3 my Virgin connection has been rock solid (and consistently faster than what I pay for).




D7_AAB4_E6-0541-4670-_B41_B-_F3_D4_C874_D085.jpg
 
Brian G said:
To be fair, Virgin did credit me for the times I had less than dial-up speed, but that's not really the point.
It's quite surprising (to me anyway) how much you come to rely on an internet connection, especially if you are doing business.
My BT connection may only be 34Mbps but it's rock solid and always measures the same speed whenever I've measured it - no slowing down like Virgin.
As a bonus the BT upload speed is double the Virgin speed, which is nice when I'm uploading image files to send to the printing company.
Click to expand...

Same here, they kept offering a rather insulting £10 credit for each month of problems but I agree it's not the point as having working internet is more valuable and important to me, even a full refund of my entire Virgin bill each month wouldn't have cut it to be honest, wasn't about the money.
 
I've gone for a TP-Link Deco M5 set-up and so far so good. There were 3 units in the set which I've distributed around the house and now I've got a single SSID providing 100Mbps/6Mbps throughout most of it. Hopefully, with a bit of playing around with the locations of the units, I can improve on the coverage.
 
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