Virgin media 50mb

I'm just posting here to warn you about the business practices of Virgin media. Theoretically they do provide amazing speeds and their network is often actually capable of providing them. However they are probably the most chaotic and deceptive company in the world. Support is provided via a crackly line to a call centre in India where the staff only know how to follow a script. If you want anything done at all you have to talk to UK based retentions who actually have the ability to call around and sort things out.

My experience of them is pretty bad. Although when the connection works it works at blazing speed it's rarely working as it should. It took over 10 engineer callouts, hours on hold and 10 months before someone thought to put something on my line to correct the clearly wrong power levels. That was 10 months of packet loss and random disconnects lasting up to several days.

My connection worked for a few months before suddenly I started getting insane ping and packet loss making the connection unusable at peak times and only usable for regular browsing offpeak. After 5 calls to Virgin media support they finally admitted that they had some broken equipment which was affecting the local area. They gave me a date by which it would be fixed which they pushed back twice. I'm currently hoping it will finally get fixed on the 11th but I'm not really expecting much.

[IMG]http://www.pingtest.net/result/36394453.png[/IMG]

That's my current pingtest and that is fairly representative of my peak service over the last few months. Offpeak ping drops to about 100-200 and packet loss is 2-5%

Basically what I'm trying to get across is that you would probably be much happier with one of the more reliable DSL providers than Virgin or with BT fibre if you can get it. It's really not worth dealing with the [censored] that VM flings at you for the extra speed.

Edited by deleted (Wed 09-Mar-11 00:05:48)

I can understand your frustrations and your experience of support with Virgin doesn't sound dissimilar to that provided by many other large companies - not that that helps you.

One question. Are you on virgin cable or virgin adsl? Would be interesting to know as often people say the cable is much more stable and better and also under control of virgin whereas the ADSL products are just BT wholesale and therefore have potentially more issues that cable and also rely on BT to fix problems.

He ought to be on VM's Cable because the current ADSL technology cannot exceed 24Mbps but the OP has mentioned 50Mbps instead!

OK, I've read it about 4 times now and must be going blind as I can see no mention of a line speed?

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In reply to a post by MrSaffron:

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OK, I would clearly like to apply for the government aid for people with blindness Could I also apply for the TBB idiots award?

In reply to a post by ian72:

Could I also apply for the TBB idiots award?

You're not even close

You are not alone in having problems with Virgin media's so called helplines. I finally got a helpful engineer visit after contacting their complaints department via snail mail - as they have done away with the ability to e-mail them! Both the engineer and the man who called me from their complaints department did not seem terribly surprised when I said their helpline was about as much use as a chocolate fireguard!

That said, the reason I moved to Virgin was because I was on first name terms with the staff at the BT chairman's office after similar experiences with BT's useless helplines. Most ISPs, and indeed most big companies, really don't give a damn about so called customer service - they just want your money and the harder they make it to complain, the less likely you are to do it and hence tolerate their abysmal service.

I am already on cable. The sad thing is that the lousy connection is not actually down to lack of a capable network like it often is for ADSL. Their DOCSIS 3.0 network for the 50mb package is more than capable of providing the promised speeds. It's just that Virgin can't be bothered to properly maintain their equipment. If you look on the Virgin support forums it's the same. The vast majority of complaints are due to local faults that take forever to fix.

I'm not sure of the details but I think that their 20mb and under cable services may be more reliable as they are based on the older DOCSIS 2.0 system. Basically it's the 50mb and 100mb services I suggest you avoid.


Update: Seems the problem hasn't been fixed and the date was just tech support lying to me again. Still getting significant packet loss and high ping at peak times

Edited by deleted (Sat 12-Mar-11 22:42:36)