Estimated reading time: 4 minutes
Do you live in the UK and have a problem with your Virgin Media fibre being a lot slower than it should be?
Well, if you are, then there could be a quick and easy fix to your problems.
We dealt with an issue this last week where the client was complaining that he was paying for 100mb fibre internet but when doing speed tests, he was actually only getting around 30mb at best.
So, we started the troubleshooting process, first checking all the obvious things like the cabling and the old fix of “have you tried turning it off and on again” (which all fellow IT pros will know does actually resolve around about 7 out of 10 issues, regardless of people mocking it).
But there didn’t seem to be any issues with the cabling and a reboot didn’t help so we connected directly to the Virgin Superhub via a network cable and we got around 85mb – which is probably about right for a 100mb fibre connection. So, we knew that the cabling to the router was fine and that the router itself was fine.
So then we moved onto the wireless…
It turns out that the client only used wireless and had nothing connected via network cable, so we started to diagnose the wireless. When we connected to it and ran a basic speed test, it was back down to around 30mb again. So, it is the wireless for sure that has the problem.
We ran through all the usual wireless tricks like changing the channel as to not conflict with the neighbours wireless connections, but although this helped with a bit of wireless interference, the speed issue still remained.
In the end, we had to resort to Googling the manual (which in case you want it is available for download here) and we noticed that these Virgin Media Superhubs actually come delivered with two SSID’s, one for 2.4GHz and one for 5Ghz. It just was not very clear on this issue as the 5G on this Superhub had a different name to the 2G one.
We went ahead and connected to the 5G SSID (which looks something like VM224567-5G) and used the same password as the 2G connection and it wirelessly connected fine. We went off to run a speedtest and there it was, around 75mb. Which, on wireless and given the amount of other devices using the connection was a great improvement on the 30mb they had previously.
A delighted client then went around and put all the laptops onto the 5G SSID!
However – be warned….
This all sounds great and you may want to go ahead and switch all your laptops, tablets and mobile phones from the 2G to the 5G connection – but be very careful….
5G has less range than the 2G so you may not even pick up the 5G connection if you are in different parts of the house/garden/office, so don’t be worried if you only see 2G, but not the 5G. The 2G signal will show up as it has the further wireless range.
The second thing to consider is what device you are using and the age of the device. Some lower spec or older laptops will not have the compatibility to use 5GHz wireless, so again, it will not show up in the list of available wireless networks. We went to connect a few Android tablets and not one of them could see the 5G SSID.
The best thing to do is a bit of trial and error, if you can see the 5G SSID, go ahead and try to use it, if it does not connect or you cannot see it, you will be stuck with the 2G which means you will get a slower internet connection (it’s actually to do with the wireless connection to our Superhub but I won’t bore you with the techy side of that!).
Feedback
If you have any questions in relation to this guide, or if you want to post us your feedback on whether it worked for you or not, please feel free to go ahead and leave us a message below in our comments section.
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