Wifi as a domestic service? Thoughts on Virgin Media home wifi offerings

Networking & Firewalls
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I have been talking to a relative in the UK with a fairly big house which needs its wifi improving. Currently they have a single Ubiquiti Ap-ac-lr quite well placed and wired back to the ISP router. My immediate suggestion would be to get a second Ubiquiti AP - and try that in a few places until coverage is consistent - then get it wired in neatly.

They have mentioned that their ISP Virgin Media are offering a home wifi solution based on what they call Pods. This is a service for GBP 8 per month based on some own-branded Homeplug type devices. The devices are managed and if the householder still has dead spots they agree to install up to three Pods.

This may work. Tho it has two “enshittification” red flag features - this is rented not purchased outright, and has dependency on good stuff happening on the ISP servers.
Also prob not good value over (say) 2 to 3 years, and gives the ISP a non-trivial lock-in.

An ongoing cautionary tale is that of SONOS who did an “upgrade” of their app (and its back-end cloud servers) which has left a significant bunch of Sonos users with a bunch of expensive paper-weights.

R/sonos on Reddit is a painful read for users who paid good money for systems which sounded good, and required low tech knowledge (tho at a premium price).

So is Virgin Media offering a commoditized and affordable domestic version of professionally managed wifi - or a flaky offering looking to milk existing customers some more…?

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I personally wouldn’t get involved with that wifi solution. It sounds like a data collecting machine. I would get another unifi AP and call it a day.

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The Virgin pods are awful, stick with UniFi. A family member had no end of problems with Virgin, but since I migrated them to UniFi it’s all good.

If I recall, unless there has been an update the pods don’t support wired backhaul.

Not had probs with Sonos and their updates, seen the noise on Reddit, but zero issues myself. Got three Sonos setups and all ok.

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Thanks @xMAXIMUSx and @mikeys - you have reassured me that my original thoughts (= run away!!) are probably correct

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Add the fact that you also have to deal with awful Virgin customer service who kept adding the pods to the bill when we explicitly said no.

Then they said it’s because there are too many devices on the network. I asked for where in the contract they specified numbers etc. They couldn’t!

So modem mode and UniFi kit, worked perfectly since.

Virgin generally lie 90% of the time on the online chat and anything they try and upsell I turn down with a firm no.

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I’m in the UK on Virgin Media, the service is reliable however, they don’t have symmetric speeds, I’m on 150Mbps down and 20Mbps up, I wonder if that is the cause of the problems. I also had to do a bit of tweaking to address bufferbloat.

Though I wouldn’t waste any money on their kit especially if it is rented, haven’t heard of Pods from virgin but sounds like a waste of money.

Tell your relative that Community Fibre is a good option if they are in London, 1Gbps up and down, I’m paying £20 a month for 2 years, there is no better deal, FTTP, low latency no bufferbloat issues.

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Thanks. My relatives in Bristol. Fyi This is the info page for Virgin Media’s “home wifi - performance guaranteed” offering.

When it comes to value etc it can get complicated if a supplier is offering ISP, streaming TV, fixed line phone (kids - ask your parents) and mobile phone service. I can understand why people do sign up for such bundles.