Best VPNs for Virgin Media

To make matters worse, the company’s latest Super Hub 3 seems to have difficulties connecting to any VPN, which was previously used by many users to counter most of the problems. Luckily, the Internet of All Things always comes up with something to eliminate this problem once and for all.

Throttling and blocking

The list of grievances committed by Virgin Media mentioned earlier is just the tip of the iceberg; in fact, the company committed some heinous crimes against its own clientele.

For starters, they utilize bandwidth throttling during peak hours, a method the company has perfected to such extent it would be brilliant hadn’t it been used against paying customers. Years ago the company ‘only’ set a threshold limit regarding both upstream and downstream for every customer. Then they removed the downstream throttling for packages above 30MB – an obvious marketing ploy – only to change their policy once again. At the time of writing Virgin Media claims that the maximum amount of throttling is 40%, even though customers experienced bandwidth restrictions above 50%.

The situation is not better when it comes to torrenting: like most ISPs, the company seems to have declared a vendetta against peer-to-peer services and those who use them. In 2008 several customers reported that they had received letters from Virgin Media, threatening them to be disconnected from the service unless sharing of copyrighted files is ceased. In 2012 the company also implemented a web filter that prevents users from accessing Pirate Bay, the world’s number one torrenting website.

But we’re still not at the bottom of the barrel: in 2008 it was rumored that Virgin Media partnered with a former spyware company for ‘data pimping’. In simpler words, Virgin wanted to get their hands on click-stream data and resell the acquired information to third parties for dubious purposes. After widespread protest, however, Virgin Media decided to drop the idea.

And last but not least we have something that is a downright practice used by totalitarian regimes: censorship and site blocking. The most famous case of that was when the company tried to censor customer access to a certain Wikipedia article because it featured controversial cover art of a rock album.

Using a VPN with virgin media

Boosting the protection of your privacy with a VPN seems to be a wise move, especially if you are a Virgin Media client. In fact, a VPN has nothing but advantages: not only such a service could defeat bandwidth throttling by rerouting the data stream through private servers, but it also masks IP addresses, effectively circumventing geo-restrictions and regional censorship.

It also goes without saying that encrypting internet connections prevents companies from gathering personal data about individual browsing sessions. Although this particular ISP denies interest in data pimping, one can be never cautious enough – especially seeing how Virgin tried applying this dubious method back in 2008.

But it seems Virgin Media cannot be fooled so easily: Super Hub 3, the most popular router used by the company, has trouble running a VPN. Several customers reported that Super Hub 3 is unable to connect properly to any VPN service, something the router’s predecessor was capable of without any problems. In fact, the issue seems to be so prevalent that VPN service providers had to jump in and offer temporary solutions. PureVPN, the company we included in the list of recommended VPN providers below, suggests the following: customers should go to the Websafe section in their Virgin Media account and turn off the ‘Virus safe’ option. Additionally, switching to PPTP, L2TP or the IPSec protocols in the router’s control panel and then restarting the device should also do the trick.

Despite these solutions, official forums are chock-full of unsatisfied users seeking remedy to their problems. However, some clients managed to trick the router by disabling the IPv4 firewall protection in the Firewall section or by enabling modem mode.

Recommended VPN services

Tinkering with your own equipment just to enable VPNs is only half the battle: you should choose a competent service with features that make the dangers and flaws imposed by Virgin Media things of the past.

PureVPN