Rant Virgin Media

[kiliarien]

Well, I used to have Telewest Broadband/TV/Phone.

Then it got changed to Virgin as they took over the company. No problem as far as I was concerned, prices were the same, service seemed pretty good etc.

Then my internet went down yesterday. Before, I got a tech number to call, when I got through then there was a recorded message of what particular postcodes had problems and the estimated time before being back up was announced. It sucked it was down but at least I was informed.

Now however, I get through to Virgin call centre (after 6 sub-menus) and I get onto a far eastern chap who I can hardly hear (I'd guess Indian but I'm not an expert on accent). He tells me nothing. I tell him the problem, I go through how we could ipconfig it etc and he's not interested. I try to say 'hey, put me onto an engineer and we'll discuss it, if it isn't an area/exchange issue.' Still not interested. Books an engineer for Friday.

Not very happy, I call again. This time I get another far eastern accent on the same crappy volume, but at least this time she seems to understand what I'm saying. She says because I have an engineer booked she can't help me, as my area seems fine in terms of service.

15 minutes later I get a text that my technician is cancelled as service is down in my area.

Guess it's hard to know what's going on from Mumbai.....

 

[Ch3tan]

Virgin have turned to shit, along with their policy of cooperation with the music and film industries, their draconian email usage policy designed to stop you using newsgroups. their pricing is also flawed.

Had issues cancelling with them to move to sky. They outright lied to me over the phone, then another customer service advisor lied to me a further time to try and cover for the lies of the first person.

 

[Gray]

I'm looking to upgrade everything at the moment with Virgin, i'm only on 10mb internet but apparently because "im a loyal customer" i might be able to work up some good deal.

These deals are hell-a-confusing though. I was trying to look around at the packages offered by Sky, but jesus its like finding a needle in a haystack.

Service-wise everything has been good the past few months, had a few issues which were solved by an engineer though.

One thing that concerns me if i do leave Virgin for different pastures, is how the new company [BT/Sky] will put the wires into the house. Do they drill through the walls, follow the walls or? ;o

 

[Zenith.UK]

Sky will attach a 60cm oval dish to a south-facing exterior wall between 3m-5m high depending on the building. They usually follow the outside walls neatly and then drill through the wall to a point not far from where your TV lives.

BT will probably reprovision an old line if they used to serve the building and the cost is reasonable. If they need to lay a brand new line, it used to cost about £125 to fit and provision. They take care of all the actual laying of the cable and fitting of the master box. Make it clear to the engineer that you're going to have DSL on the line and tell them roughly where you'd like the master box to be fitted. There's no point having the box in the hallway if your PC and router are in the lounge.

 

[leviathane]

and if you dont ring from a landline the call service charges a bomb.

 

[Roo Stercogburn]

Virgin are big fans of the 'booking an engineer' trick. It means they get you off the phone and they book it for several days in advance so they have plenty of time to fiddle with whatever fuckup they are dealing with. I was originally with Telewest for several years (one outage in maybe four years) and had great service from them. When NTL under the Virgin banner took over it turned to rat-shit pretty fast.

Another trick Virgin are big fans of is bouncing you between departments if both broadband and TV go down. Each department will try to get rid of you when its obvious that its a line related problem (be it the exchange or some other part of the infrastructure) rather than something in your home. I've had Virgin outright tell me nothing is being done in my area when I was watching their engineers working on the local exchange that I could see from my window while I was on the phone

 

[Fafnir]

You should get BBB from Sweden

 

[Appollo]

Asian customer service ppl who just read pre-scripted text off a pc. Bit like Vodafone (except im happy with VF atm and the indian customer service dept.) but i did ring virgin customer services in asia on xmas day and they was open

I was with BT years ago, i never hit bb cap (distance from exhange etc) you have the dl cap. BT tried to get me to go back and say the service is better than virgin. All i know is with virgin i can dl stupid amounts (yes they have a peak time dl speed cap) but leave it on all day/night and the gb's just keep on flowing.

I even had vodafone try and tell me there bb package was better than virgin and that virgin had a fair usage policy... lol.

 

[Ch3tan]

The only thing Virgin have going for them is the speed of their network, however their capping and big brother like policies would indicate they will be the first ISP in the UK to help the music and film industries by hanging their own customers out to dry.

I've gone from 20mb on Virgin to 5mb on ADSL, now while with Virgin my speeds would fluctuate wildly between 4 mb and 20mb depending on time of day, the weather what day it was - or however their capping policy works, at least with ADSL I am always getting my 5mb.

 

[soze]

Sky's top package is the best i have ever had. On Christmas eve my software hard disk died a horrible death. I needed to DL everything again. In the next 2 days i got over 100gb off the msdn site at 1.7mb. So during a time when most people are off work it still flew i was very impressed. And something that i did not get from BT in the last 6 months before switching is cap on torrents i went from capping my line to about 100k maximum though BT but they dont traffic shape.

 

[Turamber]

I also was a Telewest customer - actually I was the first person in Birmingham to sign up to their broadband service, and received a bottle of champagne for my troubles

I'm not a big fan of Virgin however. I really don't like the way they do business and the different packages, and different rates for the packages, you can get. I don't like the market trading approach - I'd like there to be one price, no wheeling and dealing thank you very much.

Also the limited number of HD channels compared to Sky is a bit of a killer. Unfortunately when I tried to move to Sky I was told it was virtually impossible for me to get a signal due to my place being in a 'dip' on a road with tree cover in front of the property. Sucks to be me.

 

[Appollo]

I've gone from 20mb on Virgin to 5mb on ADSL, now while with Virgin my speeds would fluctuate wildly between 4 mb and 20mb depending on time of day, the weather what day it was - or however their capping policy works, at least with ADSL I am always getting my 5mb.

I dont mind the spd cap, its the dl usage BT wanted to charge that seemed unfair.

 

[Ch3tan]

I'm not with BT, have ADSL with sky - it's the good thing about adsl that you can switch provider to get the service you want. I have 20mb with no download limit, now I may not get the 20mb speed, but the lack of capping is nice. I'm sure they still do traffic shape, but no where near as much as virgin do.

 

[kiliarien]

Well I'm moving to darker parts of Wales soon (missionary to the hethens etc.) and cable isn't available - Sky ADSL will be my poison.

Just to add to the rant of Slumdog Millionaire inc. call centres from Vrigin. The account is in the name of my wife before we got married. Twice now we have sent a copy of the marriage certificate and it's still in ehr old name. I called them up about it and said, I love this quote: "Well we have no record of receiving a copy of your marriage certificate, anyway we need to see the actual certificate so if you could send that it would be great"

My obvious reply: "Mate, you've lost copies of the marriage certificate twice, you can fuck off if you think you're getting the original!"

 

[Appollo]

Same with Vodafone, her mobile is under her maiden name. They wont change it unless we send the original marriage cert. LOL......no.

 

[Appollo]

I'm not with BT, have ADSL with sky - it's the good thing about adsl that you can switch provider to get the service you want. I have 20mb with no download limit, now I may not get the 20mb speed, but the lack of capping is nice. I'm sure they still do traffic shape, but no where near as much as virgin do.

Tied in with Virgin atm and there virgin+ works out cheaper than sky+ but ofc you have to have the virgin land line :lol:

Ill stay with until they upset me, Mombay (sp) has been good to me.

 

[ileks]

Upgraded from BT so called 20mb broadband (more like 3mb) to virgin 50mb and it is so much better. I actually get a bit more than 50mb according to speedtest.net. The BT home hub thing is shit. It's supposed to have the best signal but it doesn't, plus it would conk out every few days and require a restart. The ping i got in most games was shit as well. Not to mention BT would gimp your connection to torrents etc in the evenings whereas virgin stays at 50mb.

We were also put through to India (or somewhere similar) when we had trouble with BT, I guess they all do it.

 

[GReaper]

Couldn't stand the way the service went.

Having to pay to phone up technical support to report a fault on your line! If it was a genuine fault then the Indian call centre could refund the costs on your bill - but why should a user be paying for the call in the first place?! I believe they changed this since we got rid of cable.

Far too many brand new customers only offers. When the price listed on the website bears no relation to what you're paying then you wonder why they haven't either altered your service or altered the bill.

Throttling was inexcusable. Paying £25 a month for a 10Mbit connection throttled down to 2.5Mbit if you dare to use it wasn't my idea of a quality connection. This was obviously a couple of years ago, however downgrading the effective speeds of connections with throttling is an absolutely stupid idea when people can switch to alternatives without it.

They'd have to come up with something impressive to move back. Only thing which would force me onto cable at the moment would be moving house and being too far from the phone exchange.

 

[Ch3tan]

None of that has changed GReaper.

Especially the brand new customer offers. what pissed me off more was their constant price increases, which only affected existing customers.

 

[ford prefect]

When Virgin took over from NTL, they duplicated my father-in-laws account and started charging him twice. After several phone calls and three months, Virgin were still charging for two accounts. He asked the bank to stop paying one of them, and to cut a long story short it got as far as a debt collection agency. It put quite a big dent in his credit record.

Obviously he doesn't use them anymore. When he did cancel his account, they continued charging him for that one for three months too. Virgin never actually apologised to him when he was on the phone to them either.

 

[DocWolfe]

When Virgin took over from NTL, they duplicated my father-in-laws account and started charging him twice. After several phone calls and three months, Virgin were still charging for two accounts. He asked the bank to stop paying one of them, and to cut a long story short it got as far as a debt collection agency. It put quite a big dent in his credit record.

Obviously he doesn't use them anymore. When he did cancel his account, they continued charging him for that one for three months too. Virgin never actually apologised to him when he was on the phone to them either.

He should have called watch dog.

 

[PLightstar]

Haven't had too much trouble with Virgin. Just moved house with them and they were very fast at setting up an installation date, all I had to do was bring my equipment from the old house. Though it did annoy me that I had some Virgin sales rep on the phone telling me to start the moving process because the client of his was setting up Virgin in my house, but after half hour he couldn't understand that I couldn't start the process until the people I was moving into started theirs and that it was already being dealt with by the movers department. He kept trying to pass me off and I kept explaining that I was at work and that his company was already dealing with it and saying that I had to give 30 days even though he was phoning me up a week before the move and I wasn't told 30 days. In the end I put the phone down, but on the plus side I explained all this to the women from movers who phoned me back up to confirm the moving process she gave me 2 months free.

 

[leviathane]

None of that has changed GReaper.

Especially the brand new customer offers. what pissed me off more was their constant price increases, which only affected existing customers.

lol don't get me started on the brand new customer shit, they tried to charge us an extra £50 just for freeview cos we weren't brand new customers

 

[BloodOmen]

i've just swapped from adsl24 to talktalk after the many problems i've had with adsl24 and talktalk isnt as bad as people make out been active about a week or so now and getting 12400kb/s via speed test (roughly translates into 1.5-1.6mb/s dl speed which is more than double what I got from adsl24) it is a 24mb line but the distance I am from the exchange its obv alot lower ace so far not had any speed issues no disconnects or anything. Problems I had with adsl24 were shitty customer service (it was always some depressed **** that couldnt wait to put the phone down or someone with a really nasty pushy attitude) above all that sundays for adsl24 my speed went from 8000kb/s via speed test to a poxy 500-800 (like 50-60kb/s dl speed tops) on sundays now I get 1.5mb/s all day long its great.

 

[Appollo]

I just tried a quick price compare with Virgin/BT. BT came out about £10-15 more with there phone/bb/tv so Virgin comojng out on top for me.

 

[Ch3tan]

I just tried a quick price compare with Virgin/BT. BT came out about £10-15 more with there phone/bb/tv so Virgin comojng out on top for me.

Sky? You can always haggle, even as a new customer.

If you want sports, and HD sports sky is the only choice. BT are too expensive. Virgin are good for their on demand TV, much better than their competitors.

 

[Appollo]

I have a dish but last time i checked the cost for purchase/install of the sky+ box was rip off. Even though i bet its just plug and play, but they just wanna charge 4 it.

 

[Ch3tan]

You can haggle, and they have free box offers at the mo. They only provide the standard box or the HD box now, if you want sky+ you get the HD box.

 

[Appollo]

Ya your right, free sky+ and HD box and free HD channels, but £10 more per month. Maybe a few more hd channels like sky1 HD and so on. Im trying to find a reason/pay less to quit virgin but so far nothing really makes such a difference to make the switch worth it. I just worked out that for £51 per month i get virgin+ HD box, landline and the 10meg BB. Touch wood i have only been down once in 3-4 years (which is better than when i was with NTL at a diff address).

 

[Kagato]

Normally you can haggle as an existing customer too.

I phoned up Virgin a few weeks ago telling them that a Sky sales rep had been round offering me the exact same deal I'm on now with them for £10 cheaper and that I was considering leaving. (a lie, a rep had been round but I had no intention of leaving).

Quick as a flash I was offered their 'royalty package for £10.50 less a month for same deal.